I can't get past the session expired message and post this comment to DickDay's Al Franken thread. I was logged in. I tried to logout and was still staring at a message that said Hi Donal. I tried to pretend to Blog Now to get a login screen. My session was still expired. So here it is:

My favorite Franken comment was about his entertaining the troops on USO tours.

Q: You've been accused of all sorts of things by conservatives, chief among them that you're unpatriotic. How do you respond to that?

A: That's just sort of silly. I don't know why they would believe that. I've done six USO tours and entertained the troops in Germany, Italy, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq a few times. My wife doesn't like it when I go to Iraq. She says, "You don't see Bill O'Reilly going on a USO tour." I say, "Honey, that's not fair. He has no talent."

I usually watch a few minutes of NBC's Today Show after local news and before I dash out the door. This morning, Today was broadcast from Neverland. Off went the TV.

That's my new rule - MJ "news" comes on, I change the channel or turn the set off. I don't care whether Prince Michael II was fathered by aliens - I don't want to know.

I liked Michael Jackson as much as the next guy, but enough is enough.

A new book, After the Car, reviewed in the Guardian:

"Significantly, they (authors Dennis and Urry) talk about cars not as discrete objects, or tools for personal use, but as components of a system which has become more entrenched with every decision, or "disruptive innovation", and which has led to private transport almost totally displacing public transport, as is the case, for instance, between the two coasts of the US."

"... The car system gives the illusion of freedom while glueing users into a dependence on traffic management, oil, and money to pay for oil. Meanwhile, the local administrator of the system in question - your government, in other words - is forced to spend most of its own time and money maintaining good relations with suppliers of oil, in order to sustain that illusion in the name of economic growth. Although Dennis and Urry put it more elegantly than this, the car system is absolutely batty."

One does have freedom with a car, freedom of schedule mostly, but increasing responsibilities. And that freedom is of little use when you are in a long line of Fourth of July traffic. I enjoyed driving until the day I noticed there was always a car right in front of me and a car right on my tail.

From the Back Cover

It is difficult to imagine a world without the car, and yet that is exactly what Dennis and Urry set out to do in this provocative new book. They argue that the days of the car are numbered: powerful forces around the world are undermining the car system and will usher in a new transport system sometime in the next few decades. Specifically, the book examines how several major processes are shaping the future of how we travel, including:
• Global warming and its many global consequences
• Peaking of oil supplies
• Increased digitisation of many aspects of economic and social life
• Massive global population increases
The authors look at changes in technology, policy, economy and society, and make a convincing argument for a future where, by necessity, the present car system will be re-designed and re-engineered.

Yet the book also suggests that there are some hugely bleak dilemmas facing the twenty first century. The authors lay out what they consider to be possible 'post-car' future scenarios. These they describe as 'local sustainability', 'regional warlordism' and 'digital networks of control'.

After The Car will be of great interest to planners, policy makers, social scientists, futurologists, those working in industry, as well as general readers.

Some have described the 20th Century as the century of the car. Now that century has come to a close - and things are about to change.

A pair of WSJ articles imply that some McMansions were built fast but poorly during the housing boom.

Cracked Houses: What the Boom Built (subscription)

"... hundreds of thousands of people from California to Georgia say their almost-new homes need costly repairs because of construction defects. The furious pace of home building from the late 1990s through the first half of the 2000s contributed to a surge in defects, experts say. It caused shortages of both skilled construction workers and quality materials. Many municipalities also fell behind inspecting and certifying new homes."

Blue Oaks Estates, in Rancho Murieta

"... was built on clay soil that expands in the rainy season and contracts in the scorching summers, ... This is damaging the homes' foundations and subtly twisting the frames, causing homes to slowly pull apart--as evidenced by cracking floors, walls and ceilings, separating gutters, and jammed windows and doors."

The article notes that other Rancho Murieta homes, "built later with different types of foundations" are holding up better, but that spooked lenders are requiring a "$7,000 engineering study" before refinancing in that area. In my experience, geotechnical reports and structural engineering fees pay for themselves. Even if there is no clay, ground that seems pristine may have been a dumping area decades ago. If so, builders have to remove the loose fill and carefully replace it with controlled fill, or extend foundations deep into original soil, or both. Home builders don't always want to pay for such reports, but because they didn't build for clayey soil, the Blue Oaks builders repurchased 50 homes, installing drainage systems, and underpinning foundations before running out of money.

Chinese Drywall: Pinpointing the Problems (subscription)

"The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in recent months has received more than 550 reports from people in 19 states and the District of Columbia involving odors, health symptoms and corrosion problems they blame on imported Chinese drywall. The complaints involve "rotten egg" smells and corrosion of wiring and other metals in the homes."

...

"Homeowners who believe they have Chinese-made drywall have complained of itchy eyes and skin, runny noses, nosebleeds, headaches and asthma attacks, among other things."

There seems to be too much sulfur in the Chinese wallboard (drywall is a US brand name, that, like kleenex, has become generic in the building trades), which slipped into the market during the housing boom, but no one is sure why just yet. The EPA has even found high concentrations of strontium in the Chinese products.

Along with aging infrastructure, Americans will have to be wary of shoddy construction and suspect materials in the years to come.

The Independent:

Vauban is a southern suburb of Freiburg and home to 5,300 people. Its elegant, weather-boarded, four-storey homes are painted in subtle tones of blue, yellow and red or left as natural wood. They have wide balconies and large French windows that look out on to quiet, park-like gardens. The overall impression is of being stuck in a never-ending IKEA advertisement.

But if the district’s surface texture is eminently middle class, an eco-revolution is bubbling beneath the surface. The windows of all the homes are triple-glazed. An intricate ventilation system fitted with heat exchangers ensures that apartments are kept constantly topped-up with fresh air at room temperature, even when the windows are shut. Most homes are powered by solar panels and smart co-generator engines that run on wood chips which provide domestic heating and electricity for lighting and appliances. One of the consequences is that most of Vauban’s homes generate a surplus of electricity and sell what they don’t need to the power companies that run the national and regional electricity grids.

With their 35cm thick walls, the homes are so well insulated that the temperature inside is directly affected by the number of people in each apartment. “If it gets too cold in the winter, you have the choice of turning up the heating or inviting a couple of friends round to dinner,” Delleske says. He is immensely proud of the fact that his 90sqm, four-roomed “Passive house,” which is almost environmentally perfect, costs a mere €114 a year to heat. “Most people pay that kind of money for heating each month,” he says. The “Passive house” has even managed to dispense with drains for the toilets and showers. The waste is reduced to compost in special biological toilets and shower and washing-up water is filtered and used to water the garden.

and that’s not all:

“If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district,” says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, “but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here.” As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town’s car-sharing schemes.

Is there a downside to this eco-suburb? “… it is difficult to spot anyone who is non-European, old or poor.”

In a separate article, Michael McCarthy puts Vauban in perspective:

Does it prove we can live without the car? Yes and No. It shows it can be done in a tightly-knit, specifically urban community, where personal motor transport can be in effect “designed out”, especially if there is a solid constituency of citizens with a strong commitment to environmental values, as has always been the case in Germany.

On a wider scale, actually doing without motor vehicles is much more problematic, especially in the countryside. For most rural communities in Britain, for example, the car is an absolute essential, not least as so many of them are hard if not impossible to reach by public transport. It is arguable that no greater environmental damage was done to the fabric of life in this country after the War than by the slashing of the national railway network recommended by Richard Beeching, the portly, self-satisfied industrialist whose 1963 report led to the closure of thousands of rural stations and hundreds of branch lines, leaving myriad British villages and small towns ultimately car-dependent.

Various outlets quote this AP story: All-electric car-sharing debuts in Baltimore

"The nation's first all-electric car-sharing program debuted Tuesday at the city's Inner Harbor, with manufacturer Electrovaya hoping urban residents seeking to go green and curious tourists will take the concept for a spin."

I did just that. On my way to the City Sands competition at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, I joined a few other onlookers around the three tiny green Maya 300s parked in front of the Maryland Science Center. Oddly enough, AltCar's staff posted their display boards on an open cab GEM, a familiar low speed, neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) used by city staff and security around Inner Harbor, by the postal service elsewhere in the city and even as taxis in good weather.

Both Electrovaya and ExxonMobil logos were on display, but there was little to indicate that the body is imported from Changan Automobile Group of China, where it is sold with a gasoline engine as the BenBen. Electrovaya makes the electric drivetrain and assembles the car in Mississauga, Ontario while ExxonMobil manufactures the separator film between anode and cathode in the lithium-ion batteries. Green Car Congress is great for battery talk:

"The advanced performance separators exhibit enhanced permeability, higher meltdown temperature and melt integrity without compromising the shutdown temperature and mechanical strength. The higher meltdown temperature significantly increases the film's thermal safety margin."

AP continues:

"Electrovaya Inc. is offering its Maya 300 for rent at the Maryland Science Center. The car can go up to 120 miles on one charge of its lithium-ion battery system, and it gets its juice from a regular 110-volt outlet."

But, EV range claims always bear clarification. The Maya 300 can probably travel 120 miles at 30-40 mph under good road conditions. The staffer told us that driving at highway speeds would probably lower that range to 80 miles, and that ordinary recharging will take 6 hours. (He also mentioned they were still waiting for DOT approval to drive at higher speeds than NEVs.) Also, cold weather always reduces battery performance. There is also the issue of proper charging to maintain battery lifespan, which I suspect will cost early adopters a lot of money:

"The lifespan of a deep cycle battery will vary considerably with how it is used, how it is maintained and charged, temperature, and other factors. In extreme cases, it can vary to extremes - we have seen L-16's killed in less than a year by severe overcharging, ... We have seen gelled cells destroyed in one day when overcharged with a large automotive charger. We have seen golf cart batteries destroyed without ever being used in less than a year because they were left sitting in a hot garage without being charged."

Anyway, I signed a release and drove the Maya around the block. It was easy to start, the gearing was Forward - Neutral - Reverse, and it was very quiet - just a low whine on acceleration. But the very small tires made for bumpy handling over the ordinary manholes and irregularities of Key Highway. I'd be afraid to take the Maya across Pulaski Highway's terrible potholes, or at higher speeds on the beltway.

The interior was spartan, with controls centered to allow both left and right-hand steering wheel placement. The rear seats fold down to provide enough cargo space for moving a futon, perhaps, but probably not a futon frame.

AltCar Standard $0.00/mo $9.00/hr $72.00/day

AltCar Preferred $25.00/mo $7.50/hr $60.00/day (three free hours per month)

ZipCar Week $50.00/yr $8.00/hr $66.00/day

ZipCar Weekend $50.00/yr $9.00/hr $72.00/day

I could see renting the Maya 300 as a more commodious alternative to riding a bike or scooter, but their pricing structure is only competitive for car sharing. ZipCar is slightly less expensive but has only a handful of cars around Johns Hopkins, while Enterprise will rent an economy car for perhaps $45/day.

I recall when I first started buying tennis racquets mail order from Holabird, paying for shipping, but avoiding local taxes. I didn't think it would be long before states found a way to collect taxes, but that never seemed to happen. Until now.

I buy all sorts of things online and pay no sales taxes, but state governments are desperate for cash, and realize that collecting sales taxes is far less unpopular than raising income taxes. Affiliate marketers are up in arms because large online retailers like Amazon find it easier to drop them, as they recently did in New York, rather than comply with complicated provisions.

Amazon Threatens Cuts Over State Taxes

"Cash-strapped states trying to force retailers to collect taxes on online sales are spurring efforts by Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. to avoid being swept under the proposed laws."

"North Carolina is close to passing a law that would force online retailers to collect the state's 4.5% sales tax from marketing affiliates, people who get a sales commission from online customer referrals. Amazon, of Seattle, Wash., told its North Carolina marketing affiliates on Wednesday that it would stop doing business with them by July 1 if the law takes effect."

Affiliate marketers also claim the taxes are now unfair and will never be collected anyway.

A Stake in the Heart of 25,000 Small California Businesses

"An out of State merchant creates a banner ad with a tracking code. Internet publishers (like NewsBlaze or savings.com, ebates.com) place the ad with its tracking code on their website. A website visitor clicks on the ad and is sent to the merchant's website. Once there, they may or may not buy something. If they do, the merchant knows which site sent the visitor and compensates them at a pre-defined rate. The publisher doesn't know who the visitor was or even if a sale was made by the merchant, until much later, when they check stats at the merchant tracking site. The publisher has no part in the sale."

"The legislation says this loose relationship constitutes the presence of the merchant in California, the state of the publisher, which it obviously is not. If it became law, the merchant would have to collect California sales tax on the sale. The merchant has options. They can modify their system software, manage the myriad of California sales tax rates and pay California; or they can easily terminate their relationship with this now irritating California publisher. If they terminate the relationship, the publisher makes no income and the state collects no tax."

Opinion: Tax law change threatens small online businesses

"The reality is that small businesses like mine, which are paying income tax, will probably be put out of business."

Survivalist merchant Matt Savinar sees a darker agenda:

"Without getting too conspiratorial, I can't help but think putting independent sites out of business is the true intent of this law. Raising revenue is the rationale put forth to the public but putting independent websites out of business is the only thing it will actually accomplish. This is, "just coincidentally", coming at the same time that the MSM has declared a "war on the internet" and as the federal government has announced it will begin heavily monitoring and regulating blogs starting later this summer."

The Year of the Dollar

Analyst Tom Whipple reminds us:

"Much of the recent run up in (oil) prices was based on this spring's "green shoots rally," in which many professed to see signs that the recession would soon be over, and that increased demand would send oil prices ever higher. The rally, which had its origins in a change in accounting standards allowing insolvent banks to pretend they were doing well for a while longer, seems to be slowing and may be coming to a close."

and worries about the debt that sustains us:

"The underlying cause for the dollar's weakness is the massive deficit the U.S. government is running, and the continuing sale of billions of dollars worth of treasury securities. This in turn has left foreign investors worried that the value of their U.S. treasury holdings will one day be worth much less than they invested. For the foreseeable future, these investors have nowhere else to turn, for the minute they stop buying or try to sell significant quantities of U.S. obligations, they would immediately crash the dollar and their worst fears would be realized."

but we can always blame someone else for our problems:

"As we saw last summer, there will be calls to break the dollar's link to oil by restricting or even banning speculation. How well this will work in a globalized world is anybody's guess. Unless there is worldwide agreement, activities banned in the U.S. could continue in Europe, the Middle East or Asia."

"... we all have to prepare for life without much money, where imported goods are scarce, and where people have to provide for their own needs, and those of their immediate neighbours."

Dmitry Orlov gave a long, powerpoint-aided presentation in Dublin, Ireland on June 11th.I've been an Orlov watcher for several years now. He doesn't have all the answers, meaning I don't always agree with him, but he conveys an outsider's view of our culture that stimulates my curiosity. With doomers, the inconvenient subject of sustainable population always comes up, and Orlov has already observed a steep population decline:

"... shocking though this seems, it can be observed that most societies are able to absorb sudden increases in mortality without much fuss at all. There was a huge spike in mortality in Russia following the Soviet collapse, but it was not directly observable by anyone outside of the morgues and the crematoria. After a few years people would look at an old school photograph and realise that half the people are gone! When it comes to death, most people do in fact make it easy on themselves and come along quietly."

Russia is still losing population, and the usual explanations involve crime and heavy alcohol abuse. Both of those are ugly thoughts, but not as fearsome as all your neighbors killing you for your garden, or your government sending you off to camps.

However, Orlov himself notes that it is a mistake to assume that the future will resemble the past, so I don't just assume that Orlov knows the problems of the future because he's seen the Soviet system collapse.

Wind power has a few problems, but I tend to think of Solar Power as the Holy Grail of sustainable energy. But Robert Glennon tells us that some solar plants use a great deal of water, that is super-heated to run turbines - not unlike nuclear plants.

Is Solar Power Dead in the Water?

In contrast, most large solar power projects use a system called concentrating solar power, or CSP, that heats a fluid that boils water to turn a turbine. CSP, just like any thermal power plant, produces waste heat as a byproduct. In most cases, cooling towers release the heat to the atmosphere through evaporation, a process that uses gobs of water. In fact, CSP uses four times as much water as a natural gas plant and twice as much as a coal or nuclear plant.

Where are the easy choices?

Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance, co-author of A Nation of Farmers, subsistence farmer and mother of four looks at health care from the perspective of those growing our food:

Why National Health Care Is Necessary for a Viable Food System

Among younger small farmers getting started, I've watched many of them struggle with the insurance conundrum - they start out young and healthy, and often are willing to forgo health insurance because they truly and honestly want to do something good. But farming pays poorly, and the first serious injury can be a disaster - and working outside all day, you get hurt sometimes. Or perhaps they have a child - even those able to take on a homebirth find that the cost of having a child is a few thousand dollars or more - on a small household income. Those who must have a hospital birth or more interventions can find themselves rapidly indebted. Soon, finding a job with health care coverage starts to look awfully good - and there goes the farm, or it goes down to a part-time venture.

Farmers who experience a major injury or illness risk losing their land to bankruptcy - while losing your home is always traumatic, there's a big difference between losing the house you love but that mostly provides shelter and a good school district, and losing the land you use to make your living. Up to 10% of all agricultural bankruptcies are linked to illness and injuries - mostly among the uninsured. Once the land is lost, it is gone - most farmers once out of agriculture, are out for good.

Few of us think of the debate on health care in terms of food security and our agriculture - but we are on the cusp of a great shift in our food system, mostly driven by demographics. The average age of US farmers is approaching 60 years old, and there are not enough young farmers to follow them. If we do not make it possible to go into farming a profession - if we make it only the province of the young, the healthy, the childless, we risk facing a national food crisis far more acute that the one shadowing us due to other causes. The reality is that all of us have a real investment in our country's continuing to produce sufficient food, and the right kind of food - and that investment requires that it be possible to become a farmer without sacrificing your health.

That's all well and good, but what struck me from her article is something I've been mulling for quite a while.

Read more »

A troubling short film, called Chicken a la Carte. There are some other good shorts there as well.

Writing for ASPO, Tom Whipple reports:

Oil prices opened and closed the week around $68 a barrel. At one point they fell below $65 on news of a build in US crude stocks and later touched a high of over $70 on hopes that US unemployment was bottoming out. Oil's connection to the dollar, equity markets, and hopes for an economic recovery remains strong.

Demand for oil remains weak, with US consumption of petroleum products falling to 17.7 million b/d, the lowest since May 1999. While gasoline demand this year has been relatively strong, distillate consumption, which is largely used for industrial purposes in the summer months, is down by nearly nine percent. Distillate stocks continue to grow and are now 34 percent higher than last year. In the meantime, OPEC production continues to creep back up as exporters take advantage of higher prices to ease their recent financial problems.

An oversupply of distillates in the US can be reduced through exports, provided world demand holds up, or they can be stored provided there is enough space. In the last two months, oil stored on tankers has jumped by 71 percent. Some distillate is now being held aboard newly built tankers that have not yet been used for crude.

As the article notes, demand for oil is weak, while demand for gasoline is strong. So why doesn't strong demand for gasoline create just as strong a demand for oil?

Because in normal refining, a given ratio of several products must come out of a barrel of oil: gasoline and perhaps diesel, heating oil, kerosene, aviation fuel, lpg or even asphalt are produced. Gasoline is a blend of distillates and non-distillates, so oil guys tend to say "distillates" to mean heating oil and diesel. If demand for the distillates is low, then refiners must either refine less oil or find storage for heating oil and diesel they can't sell. Cutting back on refining will make gasoline scarcer, hence more expensive.

Update 1: Matt Savinar raised an interesting point on LATOC:

Also, many of your friends ... are probably asking "if the oil inventories are high then why are the prices soaring." Keep in mind there is a bottleneck in many of the refineries ... An increasing amount of the oil in "inventory" is heavy oil. Most of the currently operating refineries were built to handle the light sweet varieties and retrofitting them to handle the heavier varieties of oil is extremely capital intensive. With the credit markets locked up at a time when oil prices have plunged in the last year, companies can't get the loans needed to overhaul their refineries to handle the heavy stuff.

Hard to believe oil refiners can't get credit.

Update 2: Wall Street Journal June 10 2009

Although gasoline demand may be rising, refiners cut back on production of other fuels last week, operating at 85.9% of capacity, down 0.4 percentage point. Gasoline inventories fell by 1.6 million barrels, compared with a forecast for an 800,000-barrel increase. Distillate stocks, including heating oil and diesel, fell 300,000 barrels, where analysts had expected a 1.5-million-barrel gain.

Another pundit tells us what the future holds:

The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism By Parag Khanna

... as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries.

...

This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. ... Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, ... will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate "free zones" across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world.

Again, I think many things could happen, and this makes as much sense as a lot of other predictions. What seems clear to me is that there will be a growing exodus of those having steady work, reliable energy, healthy food, clean water and security into the class of those not always having those things. The haves, aided by the press, will dehumanize the have-nots, blaming them, as they do now, for their predicament. Who will end up among the haves is less clear, but I think a lot of folk who assume that they have reserved spots at the "haves" table will be disappointed.

Master Kung (Confucius) said, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." But another proverb says, "Give a man enough rope and he will hang himself." The lesson of End of the Line, a documentary to be released next week, may be, "Give humanity enough trawling nets and they will starve themselves."

Johann Hari of the Independent writes:

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

...

Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

Who's next? Charlie the Tuna:

The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone.

...

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction - and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby - who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics.

Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today - even if that means no quotas tomorrow.

Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long-term needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions - until they get angry and fight back.

Now here's where Hari's article gets interesting:

At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honourable people act together - by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid - they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behaviour, not just a benevolent 10 per cent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong.

Progressive attempts to save the world always run into Jevon's Paradox. We have two children while the Duggars have eighteen. We walk or bike to work and watch Hummers roll by. Hari's solution is ecoactivism, which will almost certainly be attacked as treehugging econazism, but may be the only alternative to watching the world collapse around us.