Staff

Spreading Manure over Astroturf: Why Ad Men Hate Brown

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Sharon Astyk is one of those “loony tunes” who shows her concern for the planet by depriving her children of central heat and baseball, or at least that’s how she’s portrayed in the New York Times article by writer Joanne Kaufman.
This article is part of a new media genre that takes the serious worries of almost two-thirds of Americans, and creates a special brand of pathology designed to stigmatize, pathologize, trivialize, and marginalize their concerns. In some articles, they call such activism “eco-anxiety” and seek out therapists who “treat” the “disorder.” In this article, she’s coined a new name for the ‘disease,’ calling it “carborexia,” and apparently it is a disease that is spreading.

The peak oil crisis: In the eye of the storm

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Let’s take a bad, if not the worst, imaginable scenario. Suppose the world economy really goes sour in the next year or two; unemployment soars into double digits; consumer sales, agriculture and industrial production drop markedly across the developed world and international trade melts. What happens to oil production, demand, and prices?