Why the U.S. Is Pumping More Oil Than Any Country in History - The Atlantic | If Not Vegan, or Vegetarian, How About Chickentarian? - The Atlantic | The English-Muffin Problem - The Atlantic

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Why the U.S. Is Pumping More Oil Than Any Country in History - The Atlantic

The politics of solving climate change may, paradoxically, require producing more fossil fuels for a while.

If all goes well, 2023 will be remembered as the year the clean-energy revolution took off in America. Hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related spending flowed into the U.S. economy. Nearly 300 clean-energy projects were announced across the country, and electric-vehicle sales hit a new record. “America is once again leading the world in the fight against climate change,” Joe Biden wrote, not unreasonably, in a presidential proclamation in October.

Here’s something else America is leading the world in: oil production. This year, the United States pumped out more oil than any other country in history, producing millions more barrels than Russia or Saudi Arabia ever have and accounting for almost a fifth of the world’s total oil production. And the Biden administration played a part in making it happen.

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If Not Vegan, or Vegetarian, How About Chickentarian? - The Atlantic

The same bit of wisdom gets repeated over and over and over again: If you want to reduce the carbon emissions of your diet, eat less meat. If you really care about climate change, cut out animal products, period.

It’s such simple guidance! And yet it has instigated so much hand-wringing and back-bending so that people can still eat what they like to eat—which, in most places with Western tastes, includes hefty quantities of animal products. Billions of dollars have been invested in start-ups engineering plant-based replications of the juice that drips from a hamburger, the creaminess of dairy, the crunch of shrimp. Some have argued for the ostensible ecological benefits of raising beef and lamb on grassland, where gains in soil health from fertilization could offset the carbon emissions produced by ruminant livestock. Many a vegetarian has rationalized their prodigious consumption of cheese because, well, vegetarianism is good for the climate, isn’t it?

Every piece of realistic climate advice—the kind that could actually be adopted by a critical mass of people—is a compromise between the very best thing we can do and what we already do. And because of the distance between those two poles, that compromise is bound to be frustrating in some way for pretty much everyone. Somehow, a climate-conscious diet must simultaneously recognize the need to greatly cut carbon emissions and limit deforestation and accept that the human appetite for animal protein cannot simply be ignored.

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The English-Muffin Problem - The Atlantic

The economy is hot, but the people are bothered. Americans think the country is in dreadful economic shape despite strong wage growth, low unemployment, and steadily declining inflation. We know this from survey after survey. What we don’t really know is how people formed those judgments. To find out, The Atlantic commissioned a new poll. When the results came in, one finding jumped off the screen: Americans are really, really unhappy about grocery prices.

Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was “The price of groceries for your home”: Twenty-nine percent of people picked it as their top choice, and 60 percent of people selected grocery prices among their top three. Other than “inflation” itself, nothing else came close—not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not the cost of major purchases. And when we asked what people had in mind when they reported that their personal finances were getting worse, 81 percent chose groceries.

Americans’ economic attitudes used to track official statistics, including the inflation rate, pretty closely. That changed in 2020. When the pandemic hit, both the indicators and sentiment plummeted. But then, even as the economy recovered, sentiment remained low. Something broke the relationship between metrics and perception during the pandemic, and housing struck me as the likely culprit: Home prices, which are not included in the consumer price index, have gone absolutely bananas since 2020, rising far more than overall inflation in that time period.

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Read This Before You Buy That Sweater - The Atlantic

We’re in the coldest season. We’re in the shopping season. We’re in the season of hygge. All the cues point to buying yourself a new cozy sweater. Don’t do it, until you hear what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear. For years I’ve wondered why my sweaters pilled so quickly, or why they suffocated me, or smelled like tires. And then I read Mull’s recent story titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.” It turns out that international trade agreements, greedy entrepreneurs, and my own lack of willpower have conspired to erode my satisfaction.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Mull, who writes about why so many consumer goods have declined in quality over the last two decades. As always, Mull illuminates the stories the fashion world works hard to obscure: about the quality of fabrics, the nature of working conditions, and how to subvert a system that wants you to keep buying more. “I have but one human body,” she says. “I can only wear so many sweaters.”

Hanna Rosin: When it started to get pretty cold, I opened up the drawer where I keep all my sweaters. I have so many sweaters in there. And you know what? I hate all of them. Even the ones that are supposed to be ugly.

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