Blue Olives

The last time we went out on a date was back in 1990--before $3.00 gallons of gasoline; before the Prius; before the iPod; before the World Wide Web; before frickin' Harry Potter. We saw Darkman , and Marion was so disgusted by the opening scene where the bad guy cuts off Darkman's finger with a cigar trimmer she walked out of the packed theater (I got her to come back and there were no more problems; it was a bad movie--very dark, but that's about it). Last Friday night, sixteen years later--one boy off in Maine, one in Florida, and the youngest at his friend Charlie's for an overnight--we decided it was time to rekindle our pre-child relationship. There was only one movie to see: An Inconvenient Truth. We're so happy we went, even if it cost $19.00 to get in, the popcorn line was insanely long (we went without), and we felt lost in the Big Box suburbs of Philadelphia. The movie is fascinating, disarming, and important for everyone in this great country of ours to...

First of all, there's hope for the world. The photo to the left is me with my oldest son Sam at his high school graduation earlier this summer. I believe in the future. I believe in Sam and his generation. I hope you do too. Now, to the business at hand: Gregg Easterbrook has a well argued commentary piece in the September Atlantic Monthly , entitled, "Some Convenient Truths" (you may need to register with The Atlantic to read his piece) which asks why global warming has such a negative aura surrounding it. At one point in the piece he writes: "Yet a paralyzing negativism dominates global-warming politics. Environmentalists depict climate change as nearly unstoppable; skeptics speak of the problem as either imaginary (the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated,” in the words of Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate’s environment committee) or ruinously expensive to address." Easterbrook points out that there is ample evidence that numerous environmental me...