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…
By now it has become clear, as British environmental writer Mark Lynas said in a speech this week at Cornell University, that controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and…Continue Reading…
Guest post by Ramez Naam. Keith Kloor has graciously given me the opportunity to guest post here again. So let me cut to the chase: I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And…Continue Reading…
Anti-biotech activists, like their fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine movement, are masters at pseudoscience. As I’ve previously discussed, the really clever GMO opponents put a veneer of science on their propaganda. One recent example that an anti-GMO website approvingly pointed to was so obviously absurd that I was sure it would be ignored by media.
Being a city boy (for all my adult life), my exposure to agriculture is woefully limited. I’ve parachuted onto actual farms in the Midwest during reporting trips for stories and every year around Halloween my wife and I take our kids to a farm in the outskirts to pick pumpkins, get lost in a corn…Continue Reading…
In the Fall, I walked with my son’s Kindergarten class and other parents to our local farmers market in Brooklyn. The kids had their list of items they had to find and identify (fruits, vegetables, flowers), I scored some delicious apple cider donuts, and a grand time was had by all on a blustery, sunny…Continue Reading…