It’ll be interesting to see if this new solutions-oriented documentary finds an audience. The trailer is definitely pretty cool. (I’ll go see any movie that includes a former CIA director and a one-armed Texas hillbilly.) A guy who looks like Mr. Clean in a business suit utters my favorite soundbite: This is no longer the…Continue Reading…
Anybody who remembers their wise-ass high school days will recall playing the dozens–a verbal contest of put-downs between two people (usually guys) that degenerates into an x-rated volley of insults about family members. It’s not for the meek. I’ve noticed that the raunchy tradition is alive and well on some climate blogs and presumably carried…Continue Reading…
This story in the Guardian, which reports that UK energy companies have been carrying out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists is sure to make U.S. climate activists paranoid. Of course, corporate espionage, be it employed against competitors or perceived opponents, is nothing new. If I was the head of a major climate advocacy group,…Continue Reading…
A Republican over at Frum’s site has some advice for the GOP that will undoubtedly be ignored: if Republicans in Congress want to build on their 2010 gains, going on the warpath against environmental protections might be a flawed strategy. Recent polling and focus group work indicates that roughly three-fourths of Americans ““ including 61…Continue Reading…
A climate blogger goes down the yellow brick road: The Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, has resigned, finally relenting to weeks of massive protests. Is he the latest casualty of climate change? I think I see an upside that everyone else is missing. If more oppressed populaces, inspired by the Egyptians (who were inspired by the…Continue Reading…
Living in a marginal (but stunning) landscape with obvious constraints has its drawbacks when too many people move there and the natural resources become depleted. In the American Southwest, those drawbacks are not really being felt by the hordes who live there now. Yet. But based on my own knowledge of the drought history of…Continue Reading…
A few days ago, House Republicans held their first hearing on climate science. Actually, as John Broder reported in the NYT, the ostensible purpose of the hearing was to review the economic impact of pending limits on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. But much of the discussion focused instead on whether climate science supports…Continue Reading…
Can anyone give me the ten-second elevator speech about this latest climate controversy–the one involving Eric Steig and Ryan O’Donnell? That would be the speech going up. Then on the way down, can anyone give me another primer on why this dust-up matters? I’m serious. When even this guy calls it an “incredibly complicated story”…Continue Reading…
I see that Michael Tobis held another unusual climate therapy session with the inscrutable Chauncey Gardiner of the climate blogosphere. Michael also posted a few farewell music videos. Given that his blog often had a despairing theme, I thought he forgot to include this one.
It’s amazing to me that someone can lay out the complexity of the climate problem so well and then follow that with a simplistic, facile call to action. Here’s the set-up by David Roberts at Grist in a post that otherwise compares the differing vantage points of climate scientists and economists: Humanity has never had…Continue Reading…