Part One:
We chat with Jeffrey York, professor at the University of Colorado, about his research on environmental entrepreneurship, the simultaneous production of goods that have both ecological and economic benefits. He describes how the entrepreneurial mindset – with its thoughtful experimentation and creative invention – can help generate the kinds of products that will slow down global warming and save our planet while at the same time earning a living for the businesspeople.
What factors might encourage more of this kind of behavior? Is it possible that the coronavirus, despite its damaging effects on a lot of people, can also serve as the stimulus for advances in ecological sciences and in other areas?
Part Two:
Derek Willis, reporter at ProPublica, talks about Pres. Trump’s claims that mail-in voting would lead to voter fraud. A research report that Trump relies on (by a conservative think tank, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF) contains significant factual errors: it doubled the actual number of absentee ballots which states had sent out but which voters failed to return.
The PILF report’s analysis is also flawed. There are many reasons why a voter might not return the ballot sent by election officials – including that, like many voters in in-person voting states, the majority of the population just doesn’t get out and vote. Also, someone who registers to vote in one state and then, many years later, moves to a different state, might register and vote in her new state without ever notifying her former state that she’s moved. (Such notification is not legally required.) There is no reason to conclude that any fraud was involved in these facts. And thus no reason to restrict people’s ability to vote – by mail or otherwise.
