Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

As many of you already know, I’m one of the founding editors of a group feminist blog that launched earlier this month, Gender Across Borders. Here’s a quick list of my posts over there:

• Book Review: The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh
• It’s About Respect (on the “fight club” at a Corpus Christi State School)
• Dubai’s Open Secrets are the World’s Dirty Secrets
• In Memoriam: Sitara Achakzai
• Book Review: The Commoner
• Changing China’s Gender Gap
• Women and Global Warming
• Suffragist Poetry

So it’s official: Saint Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize and, frankly, I’m disgusted. When I was an undergraduate (yes, at Evergreen), most of us regarded him as the Clinton administration’s special brand of greenwash. When he came to town, we protested. This article on Counterpunch details some of the damage done to the environment during that administration. (It was the investments in Occidental Petroleum that particularly irked us.) Has anything really changed since then?

Oh sure, An Inconvenient Truth does a fine job of raising awareness about the dangers of global warming. But then, in the end, you get reassuring messages on the screen that taking small actions, being good little eco-consumers will save us. We’re only frightened in order to see Al Gore and his brand of conservation, which does nothing to challenge the industries that have been polluting our ecosystems, as the thing that will save us. As George Monbiot, author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning writes,

We wish our governments to pretend to act. We get the moral satisfaction of saying what we know to be right, without the discomfort of doing it. My fear is that the political parties in most rich nations have already recognized this. They know that we want tough targets, but that we also want those targets to be missed. They know that we will grumble about their failure to curb climate change, but that we will not take to the streets. They know that nobody ever rioted for austerity.

Last I checked, Nobel Peace Prizes weren’t supposed to be awarded for comforting the comfortable. So perhaps this is about Live Earth? The concert that allowed people to join a giant party and imagine that, by doing so they were somehow taking action against global warming? OK, so I guess we don’t even need to get into the acts’ private jets or the less-than-stellar environmental records of sponsors (like Pepsi) to debunk that one.

Now, this isn’t to say that the Nobel committee should feel bad about their decision. Afterall, it appears that The Sierra Club was fooled too.

The Japanese environment ministry’s website was brought down on Wednesday by an onslaught of visitors giving pledges to reduce their carbon footprint in exchange for a discount on Big Macs. That’s right: in exchange for a promise to take some small action to reduce global warming, people can get a coupon that enables them to buy, at a wallet-friendly price, a product that comes from an industry that is itself one of the worst offenders in terms of greenhouse emissions. And this attracted such a swarm of interest that the servers were unprepared to deal with the traffic. Somehow, I suspect that this sort of program is likely to have a net negative impact on the climate– even before you add in the way that the positive publicity is likely to impact McDonald’s sales long after the coupons have all been redeemed.

And people wonder why I like to run around squawking about how we’re all doomed. (OK, so I made that part up.)