Sure, a large scale aviation operation like FedEx is going to have a big carbon footprint. But a commerce system centered more on Amazon/eBay/UPS/FedEx/USPS has massive carbon savings over a system predicated on haphazardly driving to this brick and mortar store, and then driving to that big box retailer. The cost increases that FedEx (and its customers, duh) will deal with under a cap and trade system, or my preference which is a carbon tax, are therefore less than the ones that brick and mortar retailers will face because FedEx, despite its size, has a competitive advantage in carbon consumption. And so what might be a glancing blow to them under a carbon regulatory framework is a mortal wound to its less efficient competitors. Which is the entire point of any such system, and an effect which no voluntary measures will ever reproduce.

I don't care that the companies are local, it is brand fetishism run amok. My beer needs neither a scrappy backstory nor essence of dragonfruit. Not that I'm about to defend the powerhouse stalwart of American rice beer, you can sell it to the moon for all I drink of Bud. So, where oh where does the best beer come from?

Mexico! Tecate. Dos Equis. Sol. Negro Modelo. THOSE are real beers. As you can plainly see, rather than selling Anheuser-Busch to some Brazilian equivalent, we should just allow it to be taken over by a horde of undocumented workers. Then everything will get better.

When I was 18, I opened my bank account with WAMU because I liked the signature blue they use on everything. Should this whole system finally collapse, I'll just paint my shoebox that same blue, and nothing will have changed for my broke ass.

Bipartisanship is no exit strategy from the grotesque rancor that billows out of Washington. What I'd like to see is a respectful, genial, castrated partisanship. Where's the Society for Cutting Up Men when you need them?

The police weren't stupid; Mr. Gates was stupid. The police were robotic, dutifully following their programming. If a crime is suspected, and the suspect is angry and hysterical, tend to assume the worst, find something to haul his ass in on, and let the prosecutor sort it out. This is how it works; we do not pay policemen to think for themselves.

Anyone dealing with police needs to understand this, because it explains why it is so critically important for a person to not lose their cool when being suspected of a crime by a policeman. Jeffrey Dahmer kept his cool, and that's why he was able to get that drugged kid back into his house and eat him.

Your ivy league theory is interesting, but I wonder if his specific field of black studies has more to do with it. I frankly doubt that a hypothetical black Harvard professor of bioinformatics would have reacted the same way. Your line about Ving Rhames was hilarious.

When you use the words 'panjandrum' and 'hoi polloi' in the same sentence, you are not hoi polloi.

Andrew,

Your DMCA thesis is silly. Clearly the global warming chapter is the most controversial part of the book; no one's going to buy the cow if they can get the milk for free! The torrent of criticism is likely to mean GREATER sales to libertarians who have hit their boiling point with the command and control Malthusian luddites.

Hey, I've got my bachelors in Ecology, and I'm a Portland bike commuter, but I try to keep an open mind about things, and I am finding myself agreeing with the perspective that there is a coordinated effort to smear and demonize anyone who doesn't hew to the strict Romm/McKibben narrative vis a vis climate change. The most visible manifestations of this process, which libertarians are (rightfully, I think) calling McCarthyism, is that nobody is allowed to debate the merits of geoengineering. And that anyone who doesn't accept, in *lockstep*, everything that Romm says, is made into a climate change denialist (strongly associated with holocaust deniers). I don't doubt anthropogenic climate change, I don't believe in geoengineering, and if the authors of superfreakonomics hold some great confidence in it that they do not similarly hold in climate modeling, then that is unfortunate, but it is not as unfortunate as the reality that we are not *allowed* to debate these things because of the agenda that has been set by Romm et al..

Ron Bailey at Reason, with whom I agree less often than I agree with you, but whose voice I respect equally, is reporting that Joe Romm tried to solicit a specific quote from a reporter to buttress his takedown of the Superfreakonomics chapter. If true, that is absolutely damming of his character. It is a frothing mouth, ends-justify-all-means attitude more appropriate to a gristmill Rant in No Key Whatsoever than to someone who is critically defining the orthodox perspective on climate change. Where he works with Bill McKibben, whose entire environmental ethic seems to come out of a theological perspective that technology is a sin by which we cheat our way out of the hard work that God consigned us to after we were banished from Eden. I find this outlook utterly repellent.

It's really rather depressing, when I see how these are the environmental voices getting all the mindshare, to the exclusion of the voices I find infinitely more palatable, like James Lovelock and Stewart Brand. I think if more reasonable, creative, bridge-building intellects like theirs were the prominent ones, we would not be seeing knee-jerk reactions by the "other side" such as this unfortunate chapter from superfreakonomics.