ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, june 13, 2010 INSIDE Why we’ll miss
Helen Thomas Plus, a brief history of career-changing gaffes. B4
BOOK WORLD, B6-8 Power suits her How did Nancy Pelosi rise to the top? Thank Newt Gingrich. B6 Closing time A new history of Prohibition suggests that its repeal made it harder to get a good, stiff drink. B7 Pop goes the world How Leo Castelli networked his way to the top of America’s art scene. B7
5 MICHAEL STEELE/GETTY IMAGES HASSAN AMMAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS O B K DC MD VA B
myths
about gun control. B2
Big Oil can’t get beyond petroleum
by Deborah Gordon and Daniel Sperling
n Jan. 10, 1901, at the Spindletop oilfield near Beaumont, Tex., a deafening blast rocketed a col- umn of oil hundreds of feet into
the air, wrecking a derrick. This gusher pumped out nearly 100,000 barrels a day at first, more than the combined produc- tion of every other well on Earth. Spindle- top tripled U.S. oil production overnight, and America’s dependence on oil was born.
On April 20, 2010, as history will forever record, another oil fountain erupted — this one a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. To hear President Obama tell it, the old
FRANK AUGSTEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS All eyes are on the World Cup in South Africa, where players, fans, rivalries and passions will collide in the month-long tournament.
plants have promoted it. Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and David Beckham have headlined it. Brandi Chastain tore off her jersey and made the cover of Sports Illustrated after scoring the winning goal for Team USA in the 1999Women’s World Cup final, one of the most dra- matic championship games ever played
Our kind of game S
by David J. Rothkopf
occer is the cereal that Mi- key just won’t eat. Since the dawn of the
World Cup, fans of the game have tried to sell soccer in the United States. European and Latin American trans-
David J. Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.” soccer continued on B5
But while almost twice as many U.S. kids today play soccer as play baseball, according to some estimates, the World Cup just underway in South Africa will almost certainly not capture the imagi- nations of American sports fans the way it mesmerizes the rest of the planet — not even with a U.S. team that battled England to a 1-1 draw Saturday in the Cup’s opening round and with more Americans in the stands than there are ticket-holders from any visiting nation. Why does soccer remain a global best- seller that America — so addicted to consumerism that our economy is near- ly dying of it — finds utterly resistible? Maybe the sales pitch is wrong. Pele
spoke of loving the ball, of caressing it with his feet. Nike and others emphasize the joga bonito, the beautiful game. But perhaps the best hook for Americans is not the beauty of soccer, but the fact that the game is also, in truth, pretty ugly. Soccer has all the chaos, violence, scandal, corruption and controversy that have made other popular American pastimes so big and so irresistible. Pro- moters shouldn’t hide all that behind a veneer of bringing the world together with elegant players and swooping scis- sor kicks. For better or worse, Amer- icans have come to expect beer and crashes at NASCAR races, showboating and rap sheets from football stars, and pro basketball players with mega-man-
BOOK REVIEW
A high-tech tool kit to fight global warming
by Bill Gifford
in July without risk of heat stroke. You could sit outside without your shirt plas- tering itself to your armpits. It was, by the city’s swampy standards, a wonderful time. The summer of 1992 was the Summer
E
of Pinatubo, after the huge volcano that had erupted in the Philippines the previ- ous fall, spewing millions of tons of ash into the stratosphere. There the ash dis- persed into a thin layer that not only im- proved sunsets from Martha’s Vineyard to Malibu, but also reflected some of the
ighteen years ago, Washington enjoyed that rarest of seasons: a pleasant summer. I still remem- ber it fondly. You could go jogging
HOW TO COOL THE PLANET Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate By Jeff Goodell Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 262 pp. $26
HACK THE PLANET Science’s Best Hope — or Worst Nightmare — for Averting Climate Catastrophe By Eli Kintisch Wiley. 279 pp. $25.95
sun’s rays out into space, lowering global temperatures by about half a degree Cel- sius, on average — apparently enough to make a D.C. summer bearable. The Pinatubo Effect was so dramatic that it kick-started the science of “ge-
KRISTIN LENZ ROBERT GRIFFITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
20th century economy, fueled by more than 1 trillion barrels of easily accessible and relatively cheap oil, will be bookended by these two gushers. “The next genera- tion will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century,” Obama de- clared in a speech at Carnegie Mellon Uni- versity this month. “. . . But the only way the transition to clean energy will ulti- mately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed.” Which entrepreneurs would those be? And what capital?
Oil companies, of course, have invested
The world loves soccer’s scandal, celebrity and violence. What’s more American than that? in any sport.
heavily in marketing campaigns designed to show that they are busy thinking up ways to supply tomorrow’s cleaner energy. In addition to BP’s “Beyond petroleum” slogan, there’s Chevron’s “Finding newer, cleaner ways to power the world,” Shell’s “Let’s pass energy on to the next genera- tion” and ExxonMobil’s “Taking on the world’s toughest energy challenges.” But no matter how much these compa-
sions and sex scandals. Soccer — and the World Cup — have all that and more. The first step to help America connect with soccer’s dark side is to tear down some of the sport’s carefully cultivated image and understand the true nature of the World Cup. Start with the fact that the World Cup is a bit of a fraud as global phenomena go. While sports writers extol its univer- sal appeal, the quadrennial tournament is actually a pretty exclusive affair. Since the first cup in 1930, only a tiny club of four western European and three Latin American countries have won it all. In
nies say they want to find more environ- mentally sensitive, renewable sources of energy, their basic strategy is still to make as much money as possible by sticking more holes in the ground in search of more fossil fuel. Yes, conventional oil supplies are peak-
ing, and Big Oil needs to replace dwin- dling resources to survive. But faced with a choice between oil — even oil that is ever dirtier and more dangerous to extract — and alternative fuels, the industry is still betting on the devil it knows. And so Big
oil continued on B3
Deborah Gordon, a former chemical engineer with Chevron, is a transportation policy consultant. Daniel Sperling is director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis. They are the authors of “Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability.”
oengineering,” which basically means manipulating the Earth’s climate. We’re already doing that unintentionally, but the idea here is to somehow undo, or at least mitigate, man-made climate change. As the prospect of drastic warm- ing evolves from worst-case scenario to virtual certainty, the notion of some kind of technological quick fix is more and more appealing. It’s still in the spec- ulative stages, but it has already pro- duced two highly unsettling books. Among the ideas that have been broached is dumping various odd sub- stances into the sea, such as iron filings (to promote growth of CO2
-consuming
plankton) and — no kidding — Special K cereal, which would supposedly increase the sea’s reflectivity, thus keeping it cool-
climate continued on B5
Bill Gifford is an editor at large of Men’s Journal.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158