On that latest bit of ugliness to rear its head at a Republican Presidential candidate debate, a James Fallows reader writes: I think the booing encapsulates what the Republican party we could once vote for now represents to moderate independents like myself: – A few people loudly proclaim repugnant (or in other cases nonsensical) things….Continue Reading…
Here’s the publisher promo for James Lawrence Powell’s new book, The Inquisition of Climate Science: Modern science is under the greatest and most successful attack in recent history. An industry of denial, abetted by news media and “info-tainment” broadcasters more interested in selling controversy than presenting facts, has duped half the American public into rejecting…Continue Reading…
Here’s the charge, from Chris Mooney: Political conservatives in the U.S. today have overwhelming problems with science. They reject, in large numbers, mainstream and accepted knowledge on fundamental things about humans and the planet”“evolution, global warming, to name a few. I also recently posted about how systematically conservatives undermine science with respect to reproductive health. And this is…Continue Reading…
There’s a lot of teeth gnashing in green circles over the Solyndra fallout. Even if it wasn’t an election year, Republicans would be cynically milking the story for all it’s worth, and that spigot shows no sign of going dry anytime soon. Are they being hypocritical? Sure. You bet they are. But let’s at least be honest and…Continue Reading…
This is the suggestion from a Columbia University researcher, whose work I discuss in a post at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. If you have a nuanced response, give it to me over there.
That’s my translation of Monbiot’s position on the huge gas reserves recently discovered in the UK. Today, in a follow-up post, he writes that any shale gas finds raise our exploitable reserves of fossil fuels, just as we should be reducing them. The world’s minerals companies have already found far greater reserves than we can afford to…Continue Reading…
I’m not sure what climate change debate Alexis Madrigal has been paying attention to the last few years, but he sounds like Rip Van Winkle here: I’ve been kicking around an idea recently that crystallized in the form of a short “Room for Debate” op-ed on green jobs that I wrote for The New York Times…Continue Reading…
This should be interesting to watch play out: The shakeup over shale gas — a newly available fuel that has overturned assumptions about energy, climate-change and geopolitics — has now stretched across the Atlantic to England. A drilling company backed by John Browne, the former CEO of BP, says it has discovered the gas equivalent of…Continue Reading…
Two years ago, we saw many headlines like this and this, warning that the future of humanity hinged on the outcome of the Copenhagen climate talks. Now that we are in the run-up to the annual climate equivalent of Groundhog Day, I suspect we’ll start to see more headlines like this one: Failure is not an option for…Continue Reading…
I predict that by the second half of this century nine billion human beings will be living mostly prosperous lives, eating chickens and pigs and cattle while coexisting with about as much nature as was there before we even came on the scene. We will be steadily decreasing the footprint of each human life by…Continue Reading…