If the libertarians and conservatives had been right, BP should have gone the way of Enron. On March 11 chief executive John Browne of the oil giant BP announced that the company had met its self-imposed target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over seven years ahead of schedule and at no net cost to the company. BP’s emissions are now 10 percent below 1990 levels, an achievement that naysayers have insisted would ruin the American economy if it were tried. According to the account by Seth Dunn at tompaine.com, “the company cut pollution by improving efficiency, by plugging natural gas pipeline leaks, by cutting back on gas flaring at refineries, and by adopting cleaner products, such as low-sulfur transport fuels and natural gas. Through a company-wide emissions trading program, it ensured the goal could be attained at the lowest cost….Savings from improved energy efficiency outweighed expenditures.”
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Dennis Hastert, meet Danny Davis. University of Chicago political scientist Lloyd Gruber, quoted in the Chronicle (February 7): “In cosmopolitan cities, people from different ethnic groups all live together and those cities are not typically cauldrons of political violence. The problems tend to come when the inequality has a spatial element, the rich in enclaves in the suburbs and the poor clustered in the inner cities. With situations like that, political representatives of these groups are much less interested in finding common ground. Instead, their focus is on speaking to their own, homogeneous constituencies.”
