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Is Earth Day the New Christmas?
Natalie Zmuda, Advertising Age
As More Marketers Pile On, Consumerism May Eclipse Spirit of Event
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It’s nearly Earth Day: Time to consume more to save the planet.
Newsweek subscribers can actually fashion the cover of the April 14 issue into an envelope to send plastic bags to Target in return for a reusable tote bag.
As April 22 approaches, marketers of all stripes are bombarding consumers with green promotions and products designed to get them to buy more products — some eco-friendly, some not so much. And while that message seems to contrast with the event’s intent, the oxymoron seems to have been lost on marketers jumping on the Earth Day bandwagon in record numbers. This year it seems that just about everyone has found a way to attach themselves to what is fast becoming a marketing holiday that barely resembles the grass-roots event founded in 1970.
(14 April 2008)
Chile Power Crunch May Cut Copper Output, Spur Record
Heather Walsh, Bloomberg
An energy shortage in Chile may do for copper what cuts in electricity supplies did for platinum in South Africa — spark a record-setting rally in prices.
Reduced natural-gas imports from Argentina and a drought that cut hydropower output may force Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer, to ration electricity to mines owned by Codelco, Anglo American Plc and Antofagasta Plc. In South Africa, platinum production plunged and prices jumped as much as 51 percent this year after utilities limited power in January.
(9 April 2008)
Cement – A Dirty Business (audio)
Lauren Sommer , KQED (San Francisco public radio station)
Thought California has consigned coal-burning to the scrap bin? Think again! California has 11 coal-fired power plants, all used to heat limestone into cement — making us one of the biggest cement-producing states in the country. In addition to cement, these kilns produce 95% of the state’s airborne mercury pollution and 2% of its greenhouse gas emissions. Mostly, they’ve slipped under the radar of regulators, but that is changing fast.
(4 April 2008)
Cement production hasn’t received much attention, but its impact is huge. -BA
What Emancipation Didn’t Stop After All
Janet Maslin, New York Times
In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.
He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.
All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy, gambling, changing employers without permission, false pretense, “selling cotton after sunset”: these were all grounds for arrest in rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. Blackmon explains in describing incident after incident, an arrest could mean a steep fine. If the accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.
Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased convicts to private businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest rates and the labor needs of local businesses could conveniently be made to dovetail.
For the coal, lumber, turpentine, brick, steel and other interests described here, a steady stream of workers amounted to a cheap source of fuel.
(10 April 2008)
People often wonder what could take the place of cheap fossil fuels. Could slavery make a comeback? The book reviewed here suggests that in fact a form of slavery persisted until modern times, though the mechanism of trumped up prison sentences. The gulag system in the Soviet Union under Stalin supplied massive amounts of manpower to state projects. It is not encouraging that the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. -BA
