UO E-Clips is a daily report prepared by the Office of Communications (http://comm.uoregon.edu) summarizing current news coverage of the University of Oregon.
Media mentions for July 6
Why Climate Change, Our Biggest Moral Challenge, Doesn't Act Like One
ThinkProgress: Al Gore tried to invoke the moral imperative for climate action. “It’s not about right and left;” he said, “it’s about right and wrong.” Climate deniers cynically pounced on Gore’s leadership as an opportunity to assert the exact opposite. Really, it’s about both, but we’ll get to that later. See footnote if you can’t wait. Why don’t Americans accept the climate challenge as a moral imperative? University of Oregon researchers Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff tackle the question in Nature Climate Change. Markowitz blogs their conclusions here. Their analysis draws insights from broader research on “the moral judgement system – the set of cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational mechanisms responsible for producing our perceptions of right and wrong.” They describe why our moral discriminators have a hard time grokking climate disruption, and offer potential strategies for activating moral intuition. It’s interesting stuff, worth a look. Their blog post is a good summary; I’ll just poke at couple of themes that seem to need poking.
Six Cost-Effective Steps to Become More Sustainable
Sustainable Planet (Guest post by Bob Doppelt, UO adjunct professor in PPPM Dept.): Our manufacturing technologies and the chemistry they employ were developed in a very different era. When our industrial production and consumption systems were developed, global population was more than a third less than today, environmental problems were small and localized, not global and potentially catastrophic as climate disruption and ocean acidification are now, and the level of toxicity and waste were minimal.
June Jobs: Five Things You Need to Know
Bloomberg Businessweek: Another summer, another jobs bummer. Payrolls roseby only 80,000 in June, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday morning. The national unemployment rate held at 8.2 percent. It was the second straight disappointing month for employment growth (economists surveyed by Bloomberghad been expecting a gain of 100,000). More worrying is that it’s the second year in a row that a spring spurt has jumped the rails… (Update:Mark Thoma, economics professor at the University of Oregon, says the Fed will stay in “wait and see mode”unless data point to further weakening ahead of the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting on July 31-Aug. 1).
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Late media mentions for July 5
Eugene Daily News: In 2003, angered by reports of fraud and corruption in the initiative process, a group of Oregon advocates decided to strike back.Taking to the streets, they ripped petition sheets from canvassers’ hands and loudly denounced the workers for alleged crimes against the Oregon electorate…According to Daniel HoSang, Professor at the University of Oregon, this complexity can drive people away from participation in politics.
Is housing about to become the U.S. economic driver?
Globe and Mail (blog): One of the bullish thoughts now circulating is that the U.S. housing market will take up where the manufacturing sector has left off – that is, as a new source of growth for the economy. Manufacturing was one of the bright spots within the economy during the recent recovery, driving growth even as housing remained depressed… Tim Duy (via Abnormal Returns), an economics professor at the University of Oregon, agrees that even with a rebound in home construction overall economic growth is likely to be subdued.