ericr’s Recent Comments

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  Carbon offsets in energy production are further complicated in that they are purchases of "renewable energy credits", or "green tags", that is, someone else has already bought the actual energy and you're just buying the "renewable" label. You're only taking credit for the kind of energy that's already sold. It would be like McDonald's selling the contents of a Happy Meal separately from the packaging. The green tag is just the packaging. Umbra is right to suggest that the "credits" be called only a contribution to renewable energy companies. You're offsetting your guilt, not your emissions.On Ask Umbra on buying carbon offsets posted 1 month ago 11 Responses

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  Pollan has indeed been -- and continues to be -- an important voice in our thinking about food. But he is often quite idiotic, as in his twisted self-rationalizing argument for the moral superiority of corpse-eating over vegetarianism (in the "omnivore"s dilemma). And so again here, the problem is his making nonsensical arguments to preserve the profits of health insurance companies so that they might do what they don't do now with the same supposed incentives.

  On Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 11 Responses

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  According to Russell Mokhiber (http://www.counterpunch.org/mokhiber09092009.html), on June 4, 2009, Pollan was part of a panel at the annual convention of the health insurance industry lobby America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), "Changing American Attitudes Towards Personal Responsibility and Health" (http://www.ahip.org/links/institute2009/glance.htm). The event is not listed among Pollan's recent appearances (http://www.michaelpollan.com/speak.htm). He was no doubt paid for his participation. One wonders if he is still being paid by AHIP.

  On Pollan says health-care reform will fail unless we change the way we eat posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago 11 Responses

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  It is simply a question of costs vs. benefits. The benefits of wind energy have proven to be quite negligible. And its costs and impacts are far from negligible.

   

  On Attack on industrial wind puffed with false peer review claims posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago 37 Responses

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  Only Pierpont raised the comparison to tobacco (and it's telling that you ignore the parallel of which side has the financial interest and which side has the physicians working for them), and only some (not all, as there are many "regular" people who recognize the threats to birds etc.) opposition to Cape Wind fits this weird model of yours. Just like your effort to dismiss all noise concerns because of one exaggerated claim of peer review, it all seems not just strained but rather desperate.

  Garret Keizer wrote in Harper's Magazine a couple years ago, describing the more typical situation:

  'Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial “wind farm,” ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance. So far only one of the towns affected has “volunteered” — in much the same way and for most of the same reasons as our children volunteer for service in Iraq — to be the site of what might be described as a vast environmentalist grotto of 400-foot-high spinning “crosses” before which the state’s green progressives will be able to genuflect and receive absolution before zooming back to their prodigiously wired lives.'

  Furthermore, you posit a false choice, that rejection of wind is an endorsement of coal, when in fact, the evidence from Europe is that coal continues as ever despite massive amounts of wind power. If your concern is really for poor asthmatics, then the solution is to limit coal emissions much as was done to limit acid rain. Building wind turbines is a non sequitur.

  On Attack on industrial wind puffed with false peer review claims posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago 37 Responses