Last year, in an interview with New York Times reporter Justin Gillis, CJR’s Curtis Brainard asked: There’s been a lot of debate about the extent to which media coverage does or does not influence public opinion about climate change and society’s willingness to address the problem. Do journalists matter in this regard? Gillis answered exactly…Continue Reading…
The Guardian reports that Prince Charles is standing up for climate science and criticizing the forces of climate change denial. If you know about the Prince’s GMO fear-mongering and falsehoods about GM crops and his dangerous promotion of alternative medicine (such as homeopathy), then you know he is not the best emissary for science. Indeed, one well-respected scientist…Continue Reading…
Sometimes you have to sit back and marvel when the Wall Street Journal and the loony internet fringe are indistinguishable. Last month, Mike Adams, whose special brand of crazy can be found at Natural News, wrote an article that was sufficiently whacked for it to be reproduced by Alex Jones’ Infowars.com. It starts off: If you…Continue Reading…
In a Slate piece several months ago, I explored the pro-nuke argument from an environmental perspective. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan made the case succinctly: If your concern is climate change, and you believe that slowing or preventing it is your fundamental priority, then nuclear power should be high up on the list for energy-production. He was responding to…Continue Reading…
Kangaroo Scrotums are the New Victims of Global Warming While reading this new piece from Vice magazine, I thought it was an Onion-like gag. I mean, really? Climate change is a huge concern for many, many reasons: the ice caps are melting, droughts are sweeping the world, and mega-hurricanes are striking cities that have never before had…Continue Reading…
A long time ago, in the pre-blog era, I watched a TV debate on CNN between a newly minted U.S. Vice President and a quirky Texas businessman who, at one point during his extended 15 minutes of fame, was considered a serious presidential candidate. In the span of 90 minutes, Al Gore sold wavering Americans on the…Continue Reading…
As it becomes increasingly evident that a switch from coal to natural gas is reducing energy-related carbon emissions in the United States–which is a net plus if you care about climate change– opponents of fracking find themselves being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils. That is a debate in of itself worth…Continue Reading…
Jeremy Grantham is a fascinating dude. He is a highly successful capitalist who blames capitalism for killing the planet. If you’re familiar with this “connoisseur of [market] bubbles,” as the New York Times referred to him in a profile, it’s probably due to his increasingly Malthusian outlook. In 2011, he warned that “accelerated demand” from developing countries was depleting the…Continue Reading…
Adapted from the new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet by Ramez Naam What if there was a way to farm that spared the rainforests, cut down on toxins in our soil and waters, and provided healthier, more nutritious food? Sounds like organic farming, right? But actually, it’s GMOs….Continue Reading…
There’s an old saying, If you don’t like the weather in [insert your state] ____, just wait five minutes. Something similar could be said for climate change media coverage. For example, maybe you didn’t think much of a Telegraph story from a month ago, which warned that global warming was going to be catastrophic for the UK. Not…Continue Reading…