Tag Archives: Mark Clipsham

Addressing the housing crunch

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Last week, I cleaned our chicken coop. It was a dirty, dry, dusty deal. An intelligent person would have worn a mask. Me, I chose to land a sinus infection.

Why am I telling you this? I barely had enough voice to manage two segments of this week’s program. Thus, the other two segments are reruns: conversations about walking across the Mojave Desert, and why America needs another coast-to-coast march to address the twin perils of climate change and nuclear war.

I was glad to have architect Mark Clipsham as my guest during the first segment of this week’s program. One reason: It’s easy to get Mark to do most of the talking. That gave my voice a bit of a break.  Continue Reading →

A better way to get around

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Architect Mark Clipsham joins me for the first half of the program. Among other angles of sustainability, Mark discusses transportation options to the present car- and plane-dominated system.I’ve posted a set of images Mark shared with me on the Fallon Forum Facebook Page. I  hope you’ll check those out, along with this week’s program.

Thanks for reading, listening, and taking action! Thanks for reading, listening, and taking action! And many thanks to the local small businesses, non-profits, and individual donors who help make this program possible. If you’d like to pitch in, contact me at ed@fallonforum.com. Continue Reading →

Water and the Endless Growth Economy

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As reported in Axios Des Moines this week, Microsoft’s West Des Moines data centers consume 11.5 million gallons of water for cooling each month! Globally, Microsoft’s water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 to nearly 1.7 billion gallons.

Sidebar: For all you lovers of the “free” market, Microsoft has received $219,785,484 in taxpayer handouts for seven Iowa projects, according to Subsidy Tracker. Corporate socialism is alive and well in the US heartland!

What’s not alive and well is intelligent planning, which Mark Clipsham (pictured above) and I discuss this week. Running out of water may be what finally shakes the most staunch US capitalist (and the most hard-line Chinese communist) out of their stupor, compelling them to admit that the limits of growth have been surpassed.

We need to say it over and over again: the Endless Growth Economy is a failure. The “grow or “die” mentality is a lie. Billionaires must be abolished. Comfortable citizens of affluent nations must learn to live with less — and perhaps even discover they’re happier. Global population must plateau and eventually decline. We need to replace GNP with something like HDI (Human Development Index) — a tool developed by the UN to measure a nation’s well being beyond just economic growth. Continue Reading →

Beyond Woke

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Peter Lumsdaine with Physicians for Social Responsibility recently visited Ukraine. His first-hand perspective from that trip is well worth listening to. One thing I learned from our conversation is that there is a Ukrainian peace movement.

Regarding “woke,” the claim to wokeness is a form of virtue signaling, i.e., “I understand what’s going on, you don’t, so I’ll use my superior status to bludgeon you. Oh, and while we’re at it, you’re canceled.”

That’s pretty counterproductive. And it ignores the reality that some of us have been aware of (and working to fix) such problems for decades. Furthermore, visionary women and men of past generations were “woke” to injustice and fought against it in a far more hostile environment.

Of course, the Right’s intentional misrepresentation of “woke” is even more problematic — and also used as a bludgeon. Just listen to Ron DeSantis talk for five minutes about any subject, and if he doesn’t mention “woke,” it’ll be a rare occurrence.

My two-part solution? Part One: Push back against the radical-right by cutting to the chase. … Continue Reading →

Trump’s arrest could backfire on Democrats

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Like Trump’s followers who compare him to Jesus, Mark and I couldn’t help but notice the irony of Trump being arrested during Holy Week.

Yes, as offensive as it is, the frequency of Trump-Jesus references is astounding. There’s this tweet by attorney Joseph McBride: “President Trump will be arrested during Lent—a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ. As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will Trump.”

My view on Trump? He’s an unstable, power-hungry narcissist with an unprecedented disdain for civility and honesty. Do I agree he should be prosecuted for his crimes? Absolutely.

Yet legal action against Trump may have unfortunate consequences. Last year, I stated that bringing Trump to trial would help solidify his support among Republican primary voters. That’s happening, and the way things are going, Trump is almost certain to win the nomination.

That makes Democratic strategists giddy. They think another Trump-Biden showdown assures Biden of a second term. Yet that analysis is deeply flawed.
Continue Reading →

Canceling Gandhi

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This week marks the 75th anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, who in recent years has joined the legions of leaders lesser minds love to cancel. 

Yes, move over George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln. Make room for the Indian who toppled the British Empire. Make sure you ignore the big picture and only focus on what you consider his shortcomings.

To be clear, there are politicians and celebrities who do dumb, hurtful, or even illegal things. They absolutely need to be called-out and held accountable.

But cancelling the dead because they don’t stand up to modern standards? Continue Reading →

Why Biden and the DNC killed the Caucuses

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Democrats across the US are celebrating the demise of the Iowa Caucuses. That’s unfortunate, because the passing of the Iowa Caucuses is a huge loss to democracy. And President Biden and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are to blame.

Iowa has never gone well for Biden. In 1988, Biden polled poorly even before dropping out after he got caught plagiarizing Neil Kinnock. In 2008, Biden finished fifth in Iowa. In 2020, fourth. Ouch.

It’s no surprise that Biden would love to never have to campaign in Iowa again. He made that clear at a 2019 forum when he said to me and others in attendance, “All you guys in Iowa are pains in the neck, you know that?”

Continue Reading →

Marijuana: Legalize it!

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During my 38 years as a politician and activist, I’ve frequently been out of step with mainstream opinion on controversial issues. One of those is cannabis. After meeting Carl Olsen in 1992 during my first legislative campaign, I agreed to help push legislation to legalize marijuana.

Carl’s my guest on the first segment of this week’s program — and a veritable encyclopedia of weed wisdom. Carl has spent his adult life pushing to decriminalize marijuana. He understands the ins and outs of federal and state drug policy better than anyone I know.

With Carl’s guidance, in 1993 I was one of ten House members — nine Democrats and one Republican — who introduced HF 404. That bill would have authorized the lawful possession of marijuana for therapeutic purposes. Not surprisingly, in the Republican-controlled Iowa House, it went nowhere. Continue Reading →

Carbon sequestration done right

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My guest is June Sekera. She’s a public policy scholar and researcher whose most recent work focuses on carbon sequestration, including the discovery that subsidies for “mechanical” carbon removal emit more CO2 than they remove.

If you follow my blog, talk show, and podcast, you’re no doubt aware that CO2 pipelines are in the “wrong” category of carbon sequestration. As June points out, “such projects claim they will reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent when in reality they capture as little as seven percent. In many cases, they actually increase CO2 emissions because of the extra energy required to power the machinery that captures and compresses the CO2. In addition, most of the CO2 currently captured is used for enhanced oil recovery, thereby defeating the purpose.”

The truth is there’s not a high-tech carbon-capture scheme that works, including the “Orca” direct-air carbon-capture plant in Iceland. That costly initiative — much heralded by businesses and governments — is prohibitively expensive, could take decades to operate at scale, and ironically was delayed due to poor weather conditions.

Oh, and the world would need eight million “Orcas” to accomplish the necessary CO2 removal! Continue Reading →

Learn to love and protect plankton

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Given the prominence this week of news stories about heat and wildfire, you might have missed another critical story: last week’s stunning discovery about the decline of plankton in the Atlantic Ocean. (I missed it until John Davis alerted me. Thanks, John.)

How big a decline? At the current rate of loss, 90% of plankton will be gone by 2045! That’s huge, imminent, and frightening.

Why frightening? Because plankton is the foundation of the oceans’ food chain. If 90% of it dies off, the majority of salt-water aquatic life won’t be far behind. And even those of us living in the middle of a continent can’t survive without viable oceans. Continue Reading →