So it’s been interesting to read Matthew Nisbet’s Powershift report alongside the Spring issue of Sociological Quarterly, which contains a series of themed essays in a special section called, “Symposium on the Politics of Climate Change.” I’ll be discussing one of the pieces at length in a post that will go up tomorrow at the…Continue Reading…
It must infuriate Joe Romm when people don’t take his word as gospel. Here’s how he opens his latest effort to slime a respected scholar and shape the climate narrative to his liking. We’re starting to see pieces of counterfactual history on the climate bill in The New Republic and elsewhere based in part on discredited scholarship….Continue Reading…
Over at Climate Central, I lament the shallowness of popular environmentalism (as it exists today), and wonder if their are lessons to be drawn from a recent climate skeptic’s conversion.
Can we all agree on this statement from Penn State geologist Richard Alley? I think it’s important to say that the interaction between radiation and gases in the air is not red or blue. It’s not Republican or Democrat, or libertarian or anything else. It’s physics. That’s from an interview that Alley does with the…Continue Reading…
An editorial in Nature says that Matthew Nisbet’s Climate shift report “dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases.” I guess they didn’t get the memo from the climate capo or the reprint over at the watchdog site. The Nature…Continue Reading…
Over at Climate Central, I ask if the controversial Cornell study will undermine a tenuous alliance built on disparate interests.
I don’t know about you, but I’m still getting whiplash from the write-ups of the splashy Cornell University study that concluded shale gas is probably every bit as potent a greenhouse gas as coal and oil. (I first wrote about the study here.) Let’s retrace the course of the media coverage this past week. Hang…Continue Reading…
I’m poaching this comment from yesterday’s Dot Earth post on Randy Olson. What’s striking to me is that it comes from a graduate student enrolled in a sustainability program at a top university: I love the ‘woe is me’ and ‘shame on you’ summation. It perfectly characterizes the scope of most environmental communication. The hysterical…Continue Reading…
I never got around to writing about this recent essay from recovering scientist-turned filmmaker Randy Olson, so I’m glad that Andy Revkin has taken it up at Dot Earth. Do watch the 10-minute Skype video interview that Revkin also posts, where Olson says: The problem in the environmental and science worlds as far as I can…Continue Reading…
The Guardian is hosting the Helen & George show this week. It’s reminiscent of this classic episode from the Seinfeld annals. On a related note: in the department of nuclear mea culpas, here’s Mark Lynas in The Economist: I entirely understand the arguments espoused by anti-nuclear campaigners, especially because I used to make them myself…Continue Reading…