The New Republic

On July 13, the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters posted what they called “Memo One” on their site under the newly minted hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? / On Sept 17th flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.” Shockingly, just over two months later, this is nearly exactly what happened. READ MORE >>

The battle over new coal terminals in the Pacific Northwest hasn’t really focused on the amount of coal already moving down the Columbia River basin by train from Wyoming and then up the coast to British Columbia (via Seattle) for export to China. This post from the excellent Sightline Daily puts it into perspective. READ MORE >>

Don't look now, but cap-and-trade is coming to the United States—and there's nothing the Senate can do about it. Earlier today, California, New Mexico, and three Canadian provinces—Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia—unveiled a plan to set up a carbon-trading system for greenhouse gases by January 2012. READ MORE >>

Many economists will tell you that the simplest way to address climate change is just to put a levy on carbon emissions at the source (i.e., coal at the mine, gas at the wellhead, etc.) and use the money to cut taxes elsewhere. The price signal will nudge people away from dirtier energy and toward conservation and cleaner types of power. And now there's even a real-life model to examine. Back in 2008, the Canadian province of British Columbia passed a carbon tax that rises by $5/ton per year. READ MORE >>

Allan Sloan, in a column criticizing the proposed tax on expensive health insurance plans, says that most of the revenue from this tax wouldn't come from the high-cost plans: READ MORE >>

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Be sure to check out Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, on NPR's Fresh Air today. He'll be discussing a piece he recently wrote for TNR, "Aquacalypse Now: The End of Fish," about the global fishing industry's threat to the fish population. READ MORE >>

One of the quirks of global warming is that average temperatures in the polar regions are rising a lot faster than they are in the rest of the world. READ MORE >>

The pun in the title of Israel Is Real, the new book by Rich Cohen, is silly but not meaningless. The problem of reality, and how to distinguish it from fantasy, fear, and hope, has been with the Zionist project since the very beginning. The slogan "If you will it, it is not a dream," coined by Theodor Herzl in his novel Altneuland, was a way of acknowledging the sheer fantasy of the Zionist idea--to recreate a Jewish state that had not existed for 2,000 years. READ MORE >>