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Articles by Gar Lipow
Control Failure
This is part II of a three-part series. [Part I]. In conventional representative democracy, lack of accountability between elections leads to broken promises; voters often suffer lesser-evil dilemmas – as described in Part I of this series, [“Failure to Represent.”] Disillusionment with electoral politics leads many to favor participatory democracy instead. Participatory democracy combines direct democracy at the local level with elected recallable delegates for wider decision making.
Failure to Represent
This is Part I of a three-part series. Why does representative democracy seem so broken that it is tempting to translate “Vox populi, vox dei,” (“Voice of the people, voice of god”) as “My god, how did we get into this mess?” One answer: most nominally democratic governments defy the will of their electorate.
Whitmer’s Data Center Push Isn’t Just Bad for Michigan — It’s Bad for the World
“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Governor Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan — currently the largest data center project in the country. Governor Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle.
Progressive Tax Cuts Aren’t
A good rule of thumb: centrist and center-left acceptance of reactionary framing produces terrible policy, especially on taxes. Recent example include Senator Richard Blumenthal and Mark Kelly’s Gas Prices Relief Act, Congress member Don Beyer and Senator Chris Van Hollen’s revenue neutral Working Americans’ Tax Cut, and Senator Corey Booker’s Keep Your Pay Act.
A Permanent Floating Police Riot
ICE’s servile savagery differs from conventional policing in degree, but not in kind. The same structural reasons that lead to brutality in local police departments applied to a greater degree to ICE even before it became Trump’s personal Gestapo. None of ICE’s action lack precedent among law enforcement agencies. Take the example of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7th 2026.
Gar W. Lipow
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Old Antisemitic Wine in New “Antiracist” Bottles Original
The movement for Palestinian rights has long been one of the least antisemitic spaces in US politics. It is highly conscious of the dangers of antisemitism, because of its vile similarity to racism against Palestinians, because of the large Jewish presence among anti-genocide forces, and because of awareness that pro-genocide forces constantly smear anyone supporting Palestinian rights as antisemitic.
Jews Don’t Do That Original
My mom’s brief career as an eight-year-old international jewel smuggler in 1929 began a journey that led her to reject Zionism in 1979. She had an eventful life, one that included moments of very bitter trauma. But I will tell this story as she told it to me, which always emphasized what she learned rather than what she suffered. She rejected any attempt to offer sympathy. Maybe this was a form of distancing, but if so, it was an effective one.
Participatory Democracy Minus Endless Meetings
A mostly ignored tool could improve democracy within legislative bodies and political organizations. Failures of democracy contribute to the current reactionary moment, and play a part in the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. Many, but not all, of the policies that helped create the current conjuncture are deeply unpopular.
Gar Lipow Archives - New Politics
GAR W. LIPOW is a lifelong socialist and activist. His book Solving the Climate Crisis through Social Change (Praeger, 2012) tied climate chaos to class, gender, race, and national inequality. He has written for Red Pepper, Z Magazine, Znetwork, Review of Radical Political Economics, and Grist. Email: glipow@gmail.com SubStack: Chili Pepper Revolution. Gar Lipow proposes use of revocable proxies in representative democracy and neighborhood assemblies based on participatory democracy.
It's the society, stupid
Published Mar 31, 2007 Andrew Dobson posted a thoughtful and useful piece in yesterday’s issue of OpenDemocracy.org: … the rhetoric of “consumer sovereignty” and “hands-off” governance is inaccurate and unhelpful. … [C]onsumption decisions take place within a cultural and institutional context which constitute the rules of the game, and which part determine the consumer decisions that people make.
So to speak
Published Apr 03, 2007 No, as far as I know, no baby-food maker ever used rat poison as an ingredient. The point is that we don’t have to worry about it; if you have an infant switching off milk, you can shop the baby food counter confident that none of the choices will contain rat poison. However, as a consumer, buying “green” is not quite so easy. Hastening the end of our civilization is a routine ingredient in most of the things we buy.
Pennies for Wendy's
Tomato workers in Florida face low wages, harsh working conditions, and – on occasion – rape and even slavery. Major tomato buyers including four of the five largest fast food giants have agreed to pay an extra penny a pound on condition growers treat workers with minimal decency. Wendy's is holding out. So we collected pennies as charitable donations to Wendy's so the multi-billion dollar company can afford to do the right thing. ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Green lifestyle choices won’t solve the climate problem
Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan, aka the Greenie Pig, is feeling guilty about her plane trip to a friend’s wedding and decided to try to make up for it by rolling her own carbon offsets — that is, skimping on car travel and other energy use to make up for all that jet fuel she helped burn. While I appreciate her avoiding offset schemes, I think rolling her own misses the point, and it makes her life harder than it needs to be. Elisabeth doesn’t have much to feel guilty about, really.
A Personal Meditation on Technology, Sustainabity, and Social Context
I have cancer, but thanks to modern medicine, in terms of health it may be no big deal. The surgeon will use a scalpel to remove a thin layer of tissue from the floor of the mouth along with a tiny bit of the connection to the tongue. Then a laser will cauterize it, minimizing bleeding, killing microorganisms that stray from my mouth into the wound, and sealing off nerve endings, reducing soreness. The surgeon has asked me several times not refer to this as a "slice & sear".
Attack on industrial wind puffed with false peer review claims
Nina Pierpont is a long-time, self-published advocate of the view that living within a kilometer or two of industrial scale wind farms can cause migraines, sleep deprivation, and other serious symptoms and long term damage. Now she’s gained mainstream attention by claiming that her new (self-published) book Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Natural Experiment is peer-reviewed.
Big is beautiful if it breaks our dead-dinosaur addiction
I’ve heard arguments lately for local photovoltaic solar power (PV) from rooftops, roadways, and parking lots as a primary source of electric energy, mostly accompanied by arguments against long distance high-voltage transmission lines (HVDC). I keep picturing a revised Treasure of the Sierra Madre with bandits telling Humphrey Bogart: “Transmission lines?
We need to cut emissions faster than 80 percent by 2050, but how fast?
For a long time, the climate science consensus suggested that to avoid increased average surface temperatures beyond those to which our civilization could adapt, we need to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. (No one suggested we stop there, but that goal was advocated as a way to avoid tipping points.) There were voices from the beginning arguing that this was too slow a phase-out.
Coal and bottled water — better together!
Unnatural carbonation. A message from Your support keeps our climate news free. Grist is the only award-winning newsroom focused on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. It’s vital reporting made entirely possible by loyal readers like you. At Grist, we don’t believe in paywalls. Instead, we rely on our readers to pitch in what they can so that we can continue bringing you our solution-based climate news. Donate today to keep our site free. All donations TRIPLED for a limited time.
A review of Peter Barnes’ Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
Peter Barnes’ Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (also available as a free PDF at Barnes’ site) suggests that flaws in capitalism lie at the root of the environmental and social problems we face today; his solution, as a retired corporate CEO, is not to discard capitalism, but fix those flaws. As he puts it: Eventually, after retiring from Working Assets in 1995, I began reflecting on the profit-making world I’d emerged from.
Let’s go all the way
When David pointed out that plug-in electric hybrids (PHEVs) can reduce carbon emissions in all possible futures, two main arguments were raised in opposition — practicality, and the possibility that they will provide too low a reduction, while blocking the path to something better. The way commercial plug-ins look to be implemented within the next five years is that normal hybrids will be built with large batteries and the ability to plug into a socket in your dedicated parking space.
On smart grids
My last post made the points that: Long-distance transmission lines tying different climate zones together reduce storage needs to a few hours capacity, by ensuring that most of the time when one machine is not producing, another is.
If renewables are to work, we need good storage
David’s recent post on pumped storage attracted enough angry responses that I guess it is time for a more detailed post on energy storage and renewable sources. Solar and wind energy are variable sources. If we want them to provide more than 20%-40% of our power, we will need some storage method. Fortunately, long-distance transmission lines can reduce this need.
Built to scale
Small and medium size wind generators of about 100 KW each are playing an important role in the power supplied by the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) — a non-profit customer-owned electric co-op serving 52 villages throughout interior and western Alaska. Wind power on this scale, and in these conditions, is not cheap. Unlike megawatt scale wind turbines which cost around $1,600 per KW of installed capacity, these smaller generators run around $10,000 per installed KW.
Neat
World wide wind potential (using only conventional wind technology) exceeds our current energy needs by many times. However, that is merely the potential of wind near the ground, at 80 to 100 meters. Most wind energy is in the jet stream, miles over our heads. No one is going to build a tower that high to support a wind turbine; cost alone would prohibit that. But we can use flying energy generators — turbines supported by kites or balloons or what amounts to stationary helicopters.
Renewable Energy Journal takes a moment
Via Renewable Energy Journal. A message from Your support keeps our climate news free. Grist is the only award-winning newsroom focused on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. It’s vital reporting made entirely possible by loyal readers like you. At Grist, we don’t believe in paywalls. Instead, we rely on our readers to pitch in what they can so that we can continue bringing you our solution-based climate news. Donate today to keep our site free. All donations TRIPLED for a limited time.
Putting iron in the ocean
The risky idea of dumping iron into the ocean to promote plankton growth has been around for a long time. The reasoning: more algae blooms, more CO2 absorbed. But many scientists think that by the time the algae dies, rots, and release methane and nitrous oxide, it will worsen the greenhouse effect. Even most supporters think it should be studied before being tried. The IPCC is expected to dismiss this particular idea as speculative and probably counterproductive.
Feeding the world sustainably
(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.) If heaven was a pie it would be cherry Cool and sweet and heavy on your tongue And just one bite would satisfy your hunger And there’d always be enough for everyone — Gretchen Peters, “If Heaven” Agriculture for food and fiber represents another significant category of environmental impact. Before we worry about how to farm, we should consider how much agriculture we need.
We don’t need to keep burning coal, oil , and gas for electricity
In “A simple choice,” David points out the absurdity of framing the greenhouse debate as “we have no alternatives.” He points out how foolish it is to assume that reducing emissions has no value, that paying even slightly more for electricity is out of the question, that increasing efficiency even slightly is out of the question. Even under those assumptions, we have alternatives. Suppose we stupidly decided we are not going to replace one incandescent light bulb with compact fluorescent lamps.
It’s not a moral health club
One of the subtlest and most dangerous flaws haunting environmental analysis is the tendency to view the world as some sort of moral health club. The world is not a series of tests; it is an imperfect place we do our imperfect best to make better. Bjørn Lomborg, for example, loves to point out you can save more lives per dollar by funding clean water or mosquito netting than by fighting global warming. Economists and statisticians deal with the hard choices — for other people anyway.
It's good
Originally (paid link) published in Z Magazine, February, 2007 Volume 20 #2. Reposted with permission. Review: Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning Doubleday Canada, 2006, 304 pp. Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist.
One research org says so
I’ve posted before about Stirling Energy Systems, which sells solar electricity from concentrating mirrors and heat engines for around 11 cents per kWh. But at least one technical advocacy group — Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) — suggests that mass production could bring prices down to 5 cents per kWh or less (PDF), even without technical breakthroughs. The PDF linked is a summary, so I don’t know how good the case is.
A review of Joe Romm’s new book
Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water may be the most depressing book on global warming I’ve ever read. He writes of a “Planetary Purgatory” [UPDATE – by the 22nd Century], where sea level rises 20 feet, many coastal cities are subject to such frequent hurricanes they are abandoned, and most of the Greenland ice mass melts. What are today considered heat waves become normal summers, with more and more forest and agricultural land lost to fire and drought.
Read and be dazzled by the techno-futurism
David asked contributors for end-of-year lists. Since I normally focus on conservative assumptions, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to look at future breakthroughs and cost improvements. I was going to weasel by calling these "possibilities," but instead I decided to use the time-tested technique of public psychics: I’ll call them predictions, crow over any that come true, and pretend the rest never happened. 1. Power storage that will make electric cars cheaper than gasoline cars.
Is hydropower really low-carbon? Time will tell
Back in early November, I noted information suggesting hydropower may not be as carbon neutral as we thought. The word “may” was deliberately chosen. At the time, I received an angry email from a leading hydropower supporter, which included links to some studies suggesting the data for high emissions was cherry-picked, or didn’t take net emissions into account adequately. I soon found other studies dealing with these objections and suggesting significant net emissions from hydropower.
It’s cheaper than photovoltaic
The Guardian had a story yesterday on concentrating solar collectors. They have caught on to something I’ve been saying for a while: concentrating mirrors and heat engines can produce solar electricity less expensively than photovoltaic cells. Currently, we are able to store heat less expensively than electricity.
Efficiency is the key
I previously noted that efficiency is essential to eliminating fossil fuel use, because non-fossil sources have an overall market price cost higher than coal, natural gas, and even oil. This is not as obvious as it seems. Up to a point, renewable energy is competitive with fossil fuels; the problem is, that point is never a majority of consumption. Take electricity. You can produce unsubsidized wind power at 4 cents per kWh — cheaper than natural gas, cheaper even than “clean” coal.
Rail freight is more efficient than truck freight
So far the efficiency examples we’ve discussed have been glamorous new technology — electric cars, next-gen light rail. But what may be the oldest mass industrial technology in the U.S. also has huge potential for saving energy: freight trains. Freight overwhelmingly travels on the ground by two means: truck or train. Trains carry freight with nearly ten times the energy efficiency of trucks per ton/mile (XLS spreadsheet). Hybrid diesel-electric motors power freight trains.
Dams squeeze methane out of river water
There is a major controversy brewing on how carbon neutral large scale hydroelectricity really is. It has been known for a long time that dams emit both methane and CO2. The question has always been, how much of those emission are net? According to the International Rivers Network (PDF), studies by ecologist Philip Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA) have shown that net methane emissions from hydropower are slightly higher than those from burning natural gas.
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