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POPSHoly Cows: The great carbon offset con The Carbon Offset high priests have made it really easy for us to salve our consciences. We don’t have to go to confession, say Hail Marys, or do any other that old-fashioned embarrassing stuff. All we have to do is pay an offset fee when we buy our airline tickets and they’ll toddle off and plant some trees on our behalf. These trees are supposed to offset the carbon you just dumped into the atmosphere by absorbing it. It’s that simple. Or is it?
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POPSThe New Deadly Sins
4. Authenticity. Please do your best to be someone better than who you truly are. Deep down inside we're ravening beasts. This is the meaning of original sin. Everyone's authentic self is horrid. God's message to man has always been, "You can't really be good, but you can fake it. Really." 5. Caring. This takes so much time and effort that it necessarily results in the opposite of doing something. And notice that when someone says, "I care about the war in Iraq," he almost always means, "I want to lose it." Also there's a bullying logic among those who care. I care more about diddledydum than you do. Therefore I'm a better person than you are. Because I'm a better person than you are, I have the right to order you around. And vote for Hillary on November 4th. 6. Opinion. It's the reverse of fact. Listen to NPR or AM Talk Radio if you don't believe me, or, better yet, read the opinion page of the New York Times. (I'm talking about you, Paul Krugman.) Some people have facts, the
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POPSSeven Signs of Non-Competitive States As written by Ralph Peters, a retired Lieutenant Colonel formerly with U.S. Army Intelligence. Some of the poorest nations and most repressive autocracies suffer all of these traits.
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POPSEco-Sin Tax? Chicago Fights the 7 Sins of Bottled Water Chicago's 5-cent tax on bottled water took effect on Jan. 2, 2008. The tax is expected to bring an extra $10.5 million annually into the city's coffers while encouraging people to drink tap water and eschew the environmentally suspect bottles. Illinois residents consumed 270 million gallons of bottled water in 2005, making the state the seventh-biggest bottled water consumer in the United States. The Earth Policy Institute estimates manufacturers use more than 17 million barrels of oil in making polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles. Only 23 percent of those bottles are is recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The rest are tossed into landfills.
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POPSSeven Sins Not even Brad Pitt could make the Seven Deadly Sins look this good!
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POPSEnvironmental Sin: a New Morality for the Church In the UK, the flagging Conservative and Liberal parties are also using environmentalism as a selling point. My own worry is that such a blatant marketing strategy will associate genuine environmental concerns with dishonesty and empty rhetoric.