Who Says Disaster is Inevitable?

K.C. GOLDEN – Having aligned myself against a battalion of seemingly irresistible forces over the years, I’ve become a student of “inevitability.” How do environmentally destructive choices become inevitable? Near as I can tell, it starts when the people who will benefit from these choices simply begin to assert their inevitability. We’re especially receptive to inevitability right now.

We Can’t Afford to Lose Another Decade

ROBERT C. KOEHLER -“We cannot afford to lose another decade.” My God. There’s more darkness in this quote than the New York Times intended. I winced when I read these words of Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the committee that wrote the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC report, which the Times quoted in a recent editorial headlined “Running Out of Time.”

Egyptian Youth Protest Against Anti-Protest Law a Month Before Elections

JUAN COLE – Hundreds of leftist and secular youth demonstrated on Saturday [April26] against Egypt’s Draconian law forbidding demonstrations, demanding the release of revolutionary activists jailed under it. They marched from Serai al-Qubba to the presidential palace. Activists said that they did not believe the presidential elections scheduled for late May would be on the up and up if the protest law remains in place.

From Outside or Inside, the Deck Looks Stacked

GRETCHEN MORGENSON – “The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes.” That’s Elizabeth Warren talking, the former consumer advocate and law school professor and now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. I interviewed her about her new memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” in which she discusses one of America’s biggest challenges: how to level the playing field so that Main Street doesn’t always come second to Wall Street.