Matthew Yglesias » Why Does Alabama Need an Election for Agriculture Commissioner

Matthew Yglesias » Why Does Alabama Need an Election for Agriculture Commissioner
Democracy should be about accountability, not holding lots of elections. Too many independently elected officials makes lines of responsibility murky and makes it impossible for citizens to monitor their agents.

Our Lucky Ozone Escape | Mother Jones

Our Lucky Ozone Escape | Mother Jones

You all know the story of Stanislav Petrov, right? He's the Soviet lieutenant colonel who was on duty in 1983 when an early warning system reported that an American ICBM was heading toward the Soviet Union. Luckily (and correctly), he decided it was just a computer error and decided not to start World War III. Whew!

That's about how I felt when I read Brad Plumer's piece on possible planetary disasters in the last issue of the New Republic. I'd never heard this story before, but it turns out that back in the middle years of the 20th century Planet Earth dodged a serious ozone layer bullet thanks to nothing more than a chance decision by Dupont about how to manufacture chlorofluorocarbons:

As luck would have it, DuPont had been using chlorine instead of bromine to produce CFCs. As far as anyone could tell, the two elements were interchangeable. But, as another prescient ozone researcher, Paul Crutzen, later noted, bromine is 45 times as effective at destroying ozone as chlorine. Had DuPont chosen to use bromine, the ozone hole could well have spanned the globe by the 1970s instead of being largely confined to Antarctica — long before anyone had a glimmering of the problem.

It’s not hard to see what massive worldwide ozone depletion would’ve meant. Punta Arenas, the southernmost town of Chile, sits under the Antarctic ozone hole, and skin cancer rates there have soared by 66 percent since 1994. If humans had destroyed stratospheric ozone across the globe, we would likely be unable to set foot outdoors without layers of sunscreen and dark shades to prevent eye damage. Worse, the excess UV rays could have killed off many of the single-celled organisms that form the basis for the ocean’s food chain and disrupted global agriculture (studies show that bean and pea crop yields decline about 1 percent for every percent increase in UV exposure).

Matthew Yglesias » Filibuster and Accountability

Matthew Yglesias » Filibuster and Accountability

accountability is maximized when it’s relatively simple for ordinary people to deploy the means at their disposal (voting, or not) to effectuate their ends (throwing the bastards out, or not). When you combine majoritarian legislative procedures with strong party discipline, then all a voter needs to do is (a) remember which party is in charge, and then (b) decide if he likes what’s going on. But thanks to the filibuster, if you don’t approve of policy outcomes you’re likely to blame the majority party even if the outcomes are actually being determined by a minority.