Solutions (not an April’s Fools joke)

First the good news. Then the bad news. Then the good, then the bad, and so on and so on and so on. I’m not the only who is feeling this way – on Saturday this was the lead-in to a front page NY Times story:

“More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this [...]

Counter intuitive counter-incentives

Why don’t governments and philanthropists support programs that work?
This is the underlying question in a January New Yorker profile on Amory Lovins and a paragraph in the March issue of The Atlantic on the study, “The Economic Lives of the Poor.” The study on poverty was produced by economists at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. An [...]

What do you do after you change the lightbulb?

That is the question to which Bill McKibben proposes this answer, “Hit the streets and tell the U.S. government to take action against global warming.”
McKibben is organizing (and writing about) a day of mass protests to get the federal government to take action about global warming. It is scheduled for April 14 2007 – [...]

The past as prologue for philanthropic planning

Looking Back:Climate change is gonna get us. Again. Apparently it may have already done in the Tang Dynasty (China) and the Mayans (Central America) back in about 900 A.D.
Looking Ahead:According to the the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, California will be flooded when my son is mid-career and bone-dry by the time he’s ready to collect [...]