iHeureka

Here was the “purity” message—which also contained a hefty infusion of “tradition” by invoking Benjamin Franklin: Carbon pollution is fouling our air and our water, and harming our health. We should take steps to maintain the purity of our air and water. As Benjamin Franklin said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Which best describes your feelings about this? After reading this conservative argument, 64 percent of respondents agreed that the US should take action on climate change. Within that group, 25 percent said the US “absolutely” should do something, and 39 percent said it “probably” should. And then there was the free marketeer frame: Our free-enterprise economy only works properly when individuals and companies are held accountable for harm that their actions cause to unconsenting people or the country as a whole. Companies that release heat-trapping pollution into the air should be accountable for those costs. Which best describes your feelings about this? After reading this argument, 60 percent of the respondents supported climate action—22 percent saying steps should “absolutely” be taken, and 38 percent saying something “probably” ought to be done.

It took the people of Nabi Saleh more than a year to get themselves organized. In December 2009 they held their first march, protesting not just the loss of the spring but also the entire complex system of control — of permits, checkpoints, walls, prisons — through which Israel maintains its hold on the region. Nabi Saleh quickly became the most spirited of the dozen or so West Bank villages that hold weekly demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. Since the demonstrations began, more than 100 people in the village have been jailed. Nariman told me that by her count, as of February, clashes with the army have caused 432 injuries, more than half to minors. The momentum has been hard to maintain — the weeks go by, and nothing changes for the better — but still, despite the arrests, the injuries and the deaths, every Friday after the midday prayer, the villagers, joined at times by equal numbers of journalists and Israeli and foreign activists, try to march from the center of town to the spring, a distance of perhaps half a mile. And every Friday, Israeli soldiers stop them with some combination of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, water-cannon blasts of a noxious liquid known as “skunk” and occasionally live fire.

Today, the essential conditions for a peace process remain. Majorities of Israelis and Palestinians continue to support a two-state solution. It remains possible to draw a border that would give the Palestinians the territorial equivalent of the entire West Bank, while allowing Israel to incorporate the vast majority of its settlers. So far, the number of settlers living in communities that would need to be evacuated has not passed the point of irreversibility. Jerusalem is still dividable. Hamas is confined to its Gaza fortress. And Abbas, a Palestinian leader like no other before and perhaps no other to come, remains in office. By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, however, every one of these circumstances could vanish—and if that happens, the two-state solution will vanish along with them.

By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

Is it possible that having a child is neither rational nor irrational, but outside the scope of rational decision making altogether? In a surprising development, Belkin may have found an advocate from within the halls of academe: philosopher L.A. Paul. In a controversial new paper forthcoming in the journal Res Philosophica, Paul argues that having a child is an “epistemically-transformative experience,” and therefore one for which rational decision-making procedures, such as maximizing your “expected utility,” simply don’t apply.

Food production accounts for 80% of the country’s fresh water consumption, but the waste of food means 25% of the fresh water is actually wasted. And wasted food rotting in landfills accounts for 25% of U.S. methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere as long as 15 years and is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Clean source water is critical to breaking this cycle. The EPA has found that every dollar spent to protect source water reduced water treatment costs by an average of $27 dollars. “We must do a better job of keeping farm runoff, sewage and other pollutants from getting into our drinking water in the first place,” said Sharp. “By failing to do so, Congress, the EPA and polluters leave no choice for water utilities but to treat dirty water with chemical disinfectants. Americans are left to drink dangerous residual chemicals generated by the treatment process.”

“People in the food industry know how much food they waste, and they don’t like it at all,” says Roger Gordon, co-founder of one such new platform, Food Cowboy. He found this out from his brother, Richard, a truck driver who often hauls produce and wanted to do something with the loads of rejected, or “kicked,” fruits and veggies he ends up with about once a week. “When it’s kicked for cosmetic reasons — the eggplant has the wrong barcode, the eggplant’s not straight enough — and he’s told to throw it away, he’s called me,” Gordon says. He’d work the phone and the web to find a food bank near Richard’s route that could accept the unwanted produce, sparing it from being tossed.