The problem with good news in the real world is that it’s messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope. By […]
If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Electrification is a big project, but it’s not an insurmountable […]
It’s a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in […]
Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s […]
Funeral homes were once dominated by local, family owned businesses. Today, odds are, your neighborhood funeral home is owned by Service Corporation International, which has bought hundreds of funeral homes (keeping the proprietor’s name over the door), jacking up prices and reaping vast profits. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Funeral homes are now one of America’s […]
One million US homes are built on floodplains. It would cost $200B to relocate the people who live in them. If we do that, we will save $1T. Those homes are doomed. When (not if) people leave them (either before or after floods come), they merely be arriving at a conclusion that is inevitable today. […]
There’s a school of economics that likens the economy to a computer, one that we all power. Every time we buy something – or walk away from an offer – we feed data to the computer, which transmits this price- and demand-information from consumers to producers to financiers, so that demand can be met with […]
Even crypto’s biggest boosters admit that the industry has a scam problem. This is especially hard to deny now that hundred of billions of (real) dollars’ worth of (fake) “stablecoins” have gone up in smoke. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Crypto apologists will tell you that there are scams everywhere, and they’re not wrong. The productive […]
Sometimes, a tiny change in the political process comes along that makes you realize just how far things have come – a change that’s both substantive and symbolic. Something like this terse, six-paragraph memo from the FTC, a deceptively anodyne wrapper for an explosive moment. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Here’s the crux: “The FTC and DOJ […]
“Puffery” is a funny word! It’s the word that lawyers use when their clients are accused of unlawful speech acts, such as fraud or libel. In that context, “puffery” (or, even better, “mere puffery”) is a synonym for bullshit. Recycling is puffery. Which is to say, recyling is bullshit. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Plastics recycling has […]
Obama’s Stanford University speech this Thursday (correctly) raised the alarm about conspiratorial thinking, and (correctly) identified that Big Tech was at the center of that rise – and then (wildly incorrectly) blamed “the algorithm” for it. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Obama was committing the sin of criti-hype, Lee Vinsel’s incredibly useful term for criticism that […]
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “What Is Peak Indifference?” in which I try to unpack my 2016 theory of change about the role that “self-radicalization” plays in addressing thorny problems. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic Think of smoking: the link between a lungful of smoke and a lung-tumor is separated by so […]
For years, investors have been buying up Russian government bonds, lured in by the high interest rates paid in dollars, euros and pounds. These investors are now whining because they’re pretending they only just noticed the fine-print on these bonds, especially the clause that lets Russia pay the coupon in rubles if hard currency isn’t […]
Does your lifestyle involve consuming energy? If so, you may have noticed a tingly little sticker shock, especially at the gas pumps (but also everywhere else, from electric cars to home heating and beyond). Inflation, amirite? By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic To hear corporate Democrats and snake-eyed Republican sociopaths tell it, the problem is that we […]
The idea of selling indulgences – the right to sin, for a price – has been controversial for the past 500+ years, since Jan Hus’s condemnation of the practice. And yet here we are, in the age of carbon offsets, where forgiveneess for torching the planet is for sale. By Cory Doctorow Pluralistic The fundamental […]