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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>August 15, 2021</b></font></i></p>
<font size="+1">[a great headline]</font><b><br>
</b><b>Media Makes Climate Change Seem Hopeless — but They're Hiding
Solutions</b><br>
<font size="+1">The media frames the climate crisis as hopeless --
but that's because they're hiding the solutions.</font><br>
<font size="+1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/media-frames-climate-change-hopeless-hiding-the-solutions-2021-8">https://www.businessinsider.com/media-frames-climate-change-hopeless-hiding-the-solutions-2021-8</a></font><br>
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</p>
[thinking - from AXIOS]<br>
<b>How climate change kills the future</b><br>
Bryan Walsh, author of Future<br>
One of the hardest facts to grasp about climate change is this: No
matter what we do now, it's almost certain to get worse in the
future.<br>
<br>
<b>Why it matters:</b> The time lag effect of climate change means
that actions taken to reduce carbon emissions will only begin to
noticeably bend the curve decades from now.<br>
<br>
That gives us the power to avert the worst-case scenario for
warming, but we have to come to grips with a future that will feel
as if it gets worse by the year.<br>
<b>The big picture: </b>Even under the most optimistic scenario for
carbon emission reductions — one far more ambitious than anything
the world is currently on a path for — global average temperatures
are projected to keep rising until the 2050s and, while they begin
to dip, still end the century higher than they are now.<br>
<br>
As one meme circulating on social media goes, this year isn't the
hottest summer of your life, but the coldest summer of the rest of
your life.<br>
<b>Between the lines: </b>Barring the invention of some kind of
technology that could economically pull carbon out of the atmosphere
— and we're not close to that — there is no full solution to climate
change. Instead, it's a problem to be managed — whether well or
badly — for the foreseeable future.<br>
<br>
But that makes it very different than most of the other major
challenges the world faces.<br>
As terrible as the COVID-19 pandemic has been and remains, it will
end one day, and both individuals and governments can take immediate
actions to get immediate results. But there's no "flattening the
curve" on climate change — at least not in any near-term time frame.<br>
<b>Context:</b> Given all that, it shouldn't be surprising that the
reaction to climate change tends to fall into three broad camps:
outright denial, obliviousness, or despair.<br>
<br>
According to a December survey, 40% of Americans feel helpless about
climate change and 29% feel hopeless, while a separate 2020 poll by
the American Psychiatric Association found that more than half of
Americans are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of
climate change on their mental health.<br>
The younger the respondent, the more likely they reported higher
levels of climate anxiety.<br>
Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note to investors last month
that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate
change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any
preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."<br>
<b>Driving the news:</b> The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) report released on Monday contained a few silver
linings amid a slew of generally bad news about the science of
global warming.<br>
<br>
Improved science about climate sensitivity — how much we can expect
the planet to warm given a doubling of preindustrial atmospheric
carbon concentration — enabled the IPCC to dial back the likelihood
of the most extreme warming scenarios.<br>
<b>Yes, but:</b> That same science also reduced the likelihood that
we would experience the lowest levels of warming given that
scenario.<br>
<br>
The upshot is that we have more confidence about where climate
change is poised to take us and more certainty about our ability to
influence that future through actions on greenhouse gas emissions.<br>
<b>Thought bubble: </b>One of my 4-year-old son's favorite books is
"The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats, about a young boy's adventures
out in — as the title suggests — a very snowy day.<br>
<br>
Reading it to him, I can't escape the fact that growing up in an
ever-warmer New York City, he will be much less likely than I was to
get to enjoy his own snowy days.<br>
It's a minuscule thing against the expected damage that is and will
be caused by climate change — a disproportionate amount of which
will be borne by people far less lucky than he is — but it
personalizes for me the depressing sense that our future will be
lesser.<br>
<b>The bottom line:</b> Many of us have been fortunate enough to
grow up in a world that in most ways — whether we appreciate it or
not — has generally been getting better year by year.<br>
<br>
Much of that progress will likely continue, barring the most extreme
worst-case warming scenarios, but maintaining a sense of optimism
about the future in the face of gradually worsening climate change
and all that will come with it will be the challenge of the century.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.axios.com/climate-change-pessimism-future-ipcc-dbd9fd35-8474-45f1-bf12-69a8095f4272.html">https://www.axios.com/climate-change-pessimism-future-ipcc-dbd9fd35-8474-45f1-bf12-69a8095f4272.html</a><br>
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<p><font size="+1">[weather attribution video]<br>
</font><font size="+1"><b>Climate Thinkers: Friederike Otto</b><br>
Jul 14, 2021<br>
Svenska Dagbladet SvD<br>
Our emissions make the weather worse – today<br>
For a long time, climate change was described as a distant
threat. But as new research shows, this is not the case. Meet
climatologist Friederike Otto, who has proved that human
emissions are already raising the risk of extreme weather.</font><br>
<font size="+1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gNkSjx3spE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gNkSjx3spE</a></font></p>
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[Nick Breeze Interview CCAG]<br>
<b>Sir David King | Arctic Report | Climate Crisis Advisory Group</b><br>
Nick Breeze - -Jul 30, 2021<br>
In this episode of Shaping The Future, I am speaking with former UK
Government Chief Science Advisor, Sir David King. Sir David has
recently set up the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG) to respond
with agility to the real-time climate crisis.<br>
<br>
The first report is linked in the notes and focuses on the Arctic as
a key regulator of global climate stability and more recently,
chaotic disruption.<br>
Key points:<br>
<blockquote>Jet Stream Omega Event Johanne Rockstrum: Arctic tipping
point has passed. <br>
Are accelerating impacts at risk of outpacing action? <br>
Scientists have mismanaged the modelling of climate change events.
<br>
Greenland ice sheet is sitting in warm air and losing ice rapidly.
<br>
We are not prepared for what we are currently seeing! <br>
We need a UN Security Council For Climate Change. <br>
Our future as a civilisation depends on a rapid response to the
situation. <br>
UK Policy on China: Timing-wise it could not be worse! The EU,
China and US are all talking together. <br>
Greenhouse Gas Removal: Build up oceans to what they used to be
and we could absorb 30-40 billion tonnes per annum. <br>
Refreezing the Arctic: If we don’t manage this we are cooked! <br>
The CCAG Report is for Governments, Businesses and Financial
operations. <br>
The time for action is now!<br>
</blockquote>
Sir David discusses the mantra they are trying to get into the
mainstream consciousness of climate action: Reduce, Remove and
Repair. The message is clear that climate is now the main issue
threatening our civilisation across the globe.<br>
<br>
We are now crossing tipping points and the time rapid scaled up
action is now.<br>
<br>
Sir David also suggests the creation of a UN Security Council for
Climate Change to deal specifically with the international efforts
of nations and regions to tackle arising issues. This connects to my
interview next week with NATO and US Government Security Advisor on
Climate Change, Chad Briggs.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANQwhMFcCU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANQwhMFcCU</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
[Here is the CCAG Climate Crisis Advisory Group]<br>
<b>CCAG monthly reports</b><br>
July 2021 - Extreme Weather Events in the Arctic and Beyond: A
Global State of Emergency (PDF)<br>
June 2021 - The Global Climate Crisis and the Action Required (PDF)<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ccag.earth/reports">https://www.ccag.earth/reports</a><br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
[The Kim Stanley Robinson book]<br>
<b>The Ministry for the Future</b><br>
ISBN 9780316300131<br>
<blockquote>The Ministry for the Future is a novel by American
science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set
in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body,
established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to
advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if
their rights are as valid as the present generation's. While they
pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change
are determined to be the most consequential. The plot primarily
follows Mary Murphy, the head of the titular Ministry for the
Future, and Frank May, an American aid worker traumatized by
experiencing a deadly heat wave in India. Many chapters are
devoted to other (mostly anonymous) characters' accounts of future
events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other
subjects.<br>
<br>
With its emphasis on scientific accuracy and non-fiction
descriptions of history and social science, the novel is
classified as hard science fiction. It is also a part of the
growing body of climate fiction. Robinson had previously written
other climate fiction novels, such as 2312 and New York 2140. The
novel also includes elements of utopian fiction as it portrays
society addressing a problem and elements of horror fiction as
climate change threatens characters.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future</a>
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[daily dose of hubris and optimism - text and audio]<br>
<b>Computer Models Of Civilization Offer Routes To Ending Global
Warming</b><br>
Dan Charles -- August 14, 2021<br>
<br>
As the world's top climate scientists released a report full of
warnings this week, they kept insisting that the world still has a
chance to avoid the worst effects of climate change.<br>
<br>
"It is still possible to forestall most of the dire impacts, but it
really requires unprecedented, transformational change," said Ko
Barrett, vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. "The idea that there still is a pathway forward, I think, is
a point that should give us some hope."<br>
<br>
<br>
That hopeful pathway, in which dangerous changes to the world's
climate eventually stop, is the product of giant computer
simulations of the world economy. They're called integrated
assessment models. There are half a dozen major versions of them:
four developed in Europe, one in Japan, and one in the U.S., at
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.<br>
<br>
"What we mostly are doing, is trying to explore what is needed to
meet the Paris goals." says Detlef van Vuuren, at the Netherlands
Environmental Assessment Agency, which developed one of the models.<br>
<br>
How to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero in 40 years<br>
World leaders agreed in Paris to limit global warming to less than 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The planet has already
warmed about 1 degree Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.<br>
<br>
Meeting that goal will mean cutting net greenhouse gas emissions to
zero within about 40 years. It would require profound changes; so
profound, it's not immediately clear that it's even possible.<br>
<br>
That's why van Vuuren and his colleagues turned to their computer
models for help. "How is it possible to go to zero emissions?" he
says. "That's for transport, that's for housing, that's for
electricity."<br>
Each of these models starts with data about current sources of
greenhouse emissions. They include cars and buses, auto rickshaws,
airplanes, power plants, home furnaces and rice paddies. The models
also include assumptions about international trade, prices, and the
costs of new technologies.<br>
<br>
Then the scientists force their virtual worlds to change course, by
introducing limits on greenhouse emissions. The models then try to
satisfy that requirement in the most cost-effective way, as long as
it's technologically feasible and doesn't run up against limits like
the supply of land or other natural resources.<br>
<br>
The good news is that the models found a way to meet that target, at
least in scenarios where world governments were inclined to
cooperate in meeting their Paris commitments. In fact, according to
Keywan Riahi, at the International Institute for Applied Systems, in
Austria, they found multiple paths to zero carbon.<br>
<br>
"The models tell us that there are, first of all, alternative
pathways possible; that there are choices available to the
decision-maker," he says.<br>
<br>
Different models, using different assumptions, arrive at contrasting
visions of the future world. But they're all dramatically different
from the situation today.<br>
<br>
Some models show people responding to higher energy prices or
government regulations by changing their lifestyle. They move to
more energy-saving houses, and give up their cars in favor of a new
and better kind of public transit. In addition to traditional bus
lines, autonomous vehicles respond like Uber — taking people where
they need to go.<br>
<br>
Riahi likes this version best. "I'm convinced that a fundamental
demand-side restructuring would also lead to a better quality of
life," he says.<br>
<br>
Other scenarios show people still using plenty of energy, which in
turn requires a huge boost in production of clean electricity. It
would mean 10 or 20 times more land covered with solar and wind
farms, compared to now, plus more power plants burning wood or other
biofuels, outfitted with equipment to capture and store the carbon
dioxide that's released.<br>
<br>
Politics and individuals' preferences could foil the models<br>
Riahi is quick to point out that what happens in the models may not
be feasible in real life. They don't account for political
obstruction, for instance, or human preferences. People may just
want to drive an expensive car, rather than take public transit,
even when the models says that choice isn't economically rational.<br>
But the models also can be far too pessimistic, in particular about
technological innovation. Ten years ago, van Vuuren says, they never
anticipated the rise of cheap solar power. "We have been in the
extremely fortunate situation that the cost of renewables has
declined rapidly in the past decade." This has made the task of
reducing carbon emissions much easier.<br>
<br>
For all their shortcomings, though, these models remain the primary
way that scientists and policymakers figure out options for the
future. They quantify tradeoffs and consequences that may not be
clearly apparent. If countries want to turn trees or crops into
fuel, for instance, it means less land for growing food or for
natural forests. Also, the models make it clear that international
cooperation is essential, with rich countries helping poorer
countries to cut their emissions.<br>
<br>
The results of the computer modeling are like fuzzy maps, pointing
out routes that could help the world avoid disaster.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027370891/climate-change-solutions-global-warming-computer-models-paris">https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027370891/climate-change-solutions-global-warming-computer-models-paris</a><br>
<br>
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</p>
[Financial Times $]<br>
<b>Learning to live with climate change: lessons from Los Angeles</b><br>
With a 1.5C rise in temperatures now seeming inevitable, California
is becoming a laboratory for solutions<br>
AUGUST 13 2021<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.ft.com/content/149a7cfb-46a7-43f8-8b38-141448d67745">https://www.ft.com/content/149a7cfb-46a7-43f8-8b38-141448d67745</a><br>
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<p><br>
</p>
[failure to pick on someone their own size]<br>
<b>When the Far Right Picks Fights With a Teen</b><br>
How Greta Thunberg became the target of a barrage of disinformation
and conspiracies.<br>
By Yasmeen Serhan<br>
<br>
The next front in the culture wars is climate change, and the battle
lines have already been drawn. On one side are the climate
skeptics—those who see global warming as nothing more than unusual
weather, and argue that government interventions and regulations to
curb greenhouse-gas emissions are alarmist or “eco-fascist.”<br>
<br>
On the other side is Greta Thunberg.<br>
<br>
This, at least, is what the populist right’s next political
battleground looks like online. There you can find a barrage of
disinformation and conspiracies about the Swedish climate activist,
including depictions of her as a spoiled child, a leftist pawn, and
even a Nazi. While much of this ridicule comes from internet trolls,
a group of far-right activists, media pundits, politicians, and even
heads of state have joined, and at times driven, the pile-on.<br>
<br>
That a teenager could cause such a stir around the world is a
testament to Thunberg’s influence. This Friday marks three years
since she began her weekly protest against climate inaction outside
the Swedish Parliament, a demonstration that has since ballooned
into a global movement involving millions of students across more
than 150 countries, with Thunberg as its Joan of Arc. Through her
protests and speeches, she has galvanized the world about the
climate crisis in ways few have before her. She has met world
leaders, addressed the United Nations, and been nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize—thrice.<br>
<br>
These accolades have helped give Thunberg an enormous platform, but
they have also invited a torrent of abuse, disinformation, and
conspiracy theories of the kind typically reserved for older and
more powerful figures such as George Soros and Bill Gates. That
neither Thunberg’s youth nor her status has prevented her from
becoming the far right’s latest villain reveals the extent to which
she is seen as a threat. That she hasn’t been deterred by the
attacks suggests that they aren’t working.<br>
<br>
Although Thunberg first rose to international prominence in the
summer of 2018 after starting her “school strike for climate,” it
wasn’t until a year later, once she embarked on a two-week (and,
crucially, carbon-neutral) boat trip across the Atlantic to deliver
a speech at the UN climate summit, that she became the focus of the
global right’s ire. Pundits suggested that she was a “schoolgirl
puppet” being “exploited” by sinister forces including her
ostensibly fame-hungry parents, energy giants, and the international
left. Populist politicians as far afield as Canada, Germany, and
Brazil took potshots at her, calling her a “brat,” an icon of the
“climate church,” and “mentally unstable.” Perhaps her loudest
critic was former President Donald Trump, who accused her of having
an “anger management problem.”<br>
<br>
Some of the worst attacks, however, have come in the form of memes.
While many have been used to spread conspiracy theories (among them
that she is tied to Soros, the billionaire financier and the right’s
favorite bogeyman), others have gone further. “The stuff on the
internet about her—the violence and vilification, the pure hatred—is
really quite scary,” Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst who
tracks dissent against climate policy in Europe, told me. Her latest
study reproduced some of most popular memes, including one
portraying Thunberg as akin to a member of the Hitler Youth.
“There’s literally millions of those images going around the world,”
she said.<br>
<br>
Inherent in the attacks against Thunberg is a desire not only to
undermine her credibility and her activism, but also to use her as a
proxy for other left-wing movements. According to a 2020 study by
the German Marshall Fund, which looked at the proliferation of
online disinformation about Thunberg from 2018 to 2019, the most
common narratives have focused on her mental fitness (Thunberg has
Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, which she calls her
“superpower”), as well as her purported affiliations with Soros and
“antifa,” a loose group of radical anti-fascist and anti-racist
activists. The common thread in all of these narratives is a desire
to make Thunberg appear untrustworthy and to be seen as less a
person than a pawn—of her parents, of nefarious movements, and of
the global elite.<br>
<br>
“Part of her power is that she doesn’t seem to represent any other
interest but the interests of the climate and young people,” Karen
Kornbluh, the director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy
Initiative at the German Marshall Fund, told me. “Casting aspersions
on that and trying to tie her to some other interest tries to take
away some of her power.”<br>
<br>
Such tactics have been tried and tested against other bogeymen of
the far right. In the case of Soros, that has meant pervasive
conspiracies about him bankrolling every movement reviled by the
right—not only antifa but Black Lives Matter—with the ultimate goal
of destroying the United States. With Gates, it’s the claim that he
has invested billions of dollars into the development and
distribution of COVID-19 vaccines (which is true) with the intent of
using them to control people via microchip (which is false). Unlike
both men, however, Thunberg is not a billionaire. She isn’t a patron
of left-wing causes (though she has donated prize money to climate
groups in the past). She doesn’t claim to be the climate-movement
figurehead that many have made her out to be.<br>
<br>
That the far right has had to resort to often misogynist and ableist
attacks against Thunberg is in itself a testament to how difficult
she is to discredit. Part of that challenge is due to the fact that
her activism is rooted in science rather than politics (she leaves
policy making to the policy makers). But it also has to do with the
fact that she’s genuine. Unlike other high-profile climate
activists, she can’t easily be accused of even occasional hypocrisy:
In addition to being vegan, she abstains from plane travel and mass
consumerism. “The last time I bought something new was three years
ago and it was second-hand,” Thunberg told Vogue Scandinavia in a
recent interview. “I just borrow things from people I know.”<br>
<br>
Katrin Uba, an associate professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University
who has been studying Thunberg’s impact on climate activism, told me
that her rise to global prominence wouldn’t have been possible
without social media—the same tool that her detractors are trying,
and by all accounts failing, to use against her. Thunberg has
already had a demonstrated impact on how her generation views the
climate crisis, with one recent survey showing that nearly 70
percent of people under the age of 18 believe that climate change is
a global emergency compared with 58 percent of people over the age
of 60. Her influence, on the general public as well as on
politicians and corporations, has been termed by Uba and others as
“the Greta effect.”<br>
<br>
Thunberg isn’t daunted by her status. The way she sees it, the
demonization is a diversion from climate science, to which skeptics
have few answers. It is proof that she and her fellow activists are
having an effect. Those who attack her “are not evil,” she said in
her interview with Vogue Scandinavia, extending a level of empathy
that few of her detractors are ever likely to return. “They just
don’t know better. At least that’s what I am trying to think.”<br>
<br>
Yasmeen Serhan is a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/08/greta-thunberg-far-right-climate/619748/">https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/08/greta-thunberg-far-right-climate/619748/</a><br>
- -<br>
[another article]<br>
<b>Franklin Foer: Greta Thunberg is right to panic</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/greta-thunbergs-despair-is-entirely-warranted/598492/">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/greta-thunbergs-despair-is-entirely-warranted/598492/</a><br>
<br>
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[The news archive - looking back]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming
August 15, 2004</b></font><br>
August 15, 2004: In the New York Times, Al Gore reviews Ross
Gelbspan's "Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal,
Journalists, and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and
What We Can Do to Avert Disaster," the follow-up to his seminal 1997
book "The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the
Prescription."<br>
<blockquote><b>Hot Enough for Us?</b><br>
By Al Gore<br>
Aug. 15, 2004<br>
<br>
BOILING POINT<br>
How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Are
Fueling<br>
the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster.<br>
<br>
By Ross Gelbspan.<br>
254 pp. Basic Books. $22.<br>
<br>
THE blend of passionate advocacy and lucid analysis that Ross
Gelbspan brings to this, his second book about global warming, is
extremely readable because the author's voice is so authentic.
When Gelbspan first encountered the issue as a reporter nine years
ago, he writes, he had no inkling of how it would change his life.
But as he put together the evidence of the global climate crisis
he describes in this book, he found himself pulled inexorably to
do more than simply write about it. So he now feels called to a
kind of mission: to describe what is happening, to single out the
specific failures and misdeeds of politicians, energy companies,
environmental activists and journalists who share responsibility
for our predicament, and then propose bold solutions that --
unlike more timid blueprints already on the public agenda -- would
in his view actually solve the problem.<br>
<br>
For a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the top of his game, this
is a career detour requiring courage I greatly admire. Moreover,
he candidly describes how, as he opened himself to the
implications of what he was learning in his dogged pursuit of this
story, he has undergone something of a personal transformation. He
writes that it has become ''an excruciating experience to watch
the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of persistent and
pathological denial.'' He describes how mountain glaciers around
the world are melting, most of them rapidly. And he cites early
examples of environmental refugees like those created in recent
weeks in Bangladesh, vulnerable to catastrophic flooding as sea
levels rise.<br>
<br>
In the course of this transformation, Gelbspan has become a
different kind of reporter, one who recalls the great reforming
journalists of the first decade of the 20th century -- Upton
Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and others -- who not only
reported on political corruption and corporate excesses but
connected them to larger destructive patterns that had developed
in the economy and politics of their time. They agitated for
policy reforms, many of which were enacted into statutes when they
became part of the progressive movement's agenda: antitrust laws,
the Food and Drug Administration, railroad regulation, wage and
hour laws, workmen's compensation and child labor laws, to name a
few.<br>
<br>
It is in that spirit that Gelbspan pursues solutions for climate
change that can ''also begin to reverse some very discouraging and
destructive political and economic dynamics as well.''<br>
<br>
Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the
American news media's coverage of global warming for the past two
decades. Indeed, when the author investigates why the United
States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that
fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he
concludes that the news coverage is ''a large reason for that
failure.''<br>
<br>
At a time when prominent journalists are writing mea culpas for
allowing themselves to be too easily misled in their coverage of
the case for war in Iraq, Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis
of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive
and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil
companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top
television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about
global warming because a previous story had ''triggered a barrage
of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition'' -- a fossil fuel
industry lobbying group -- ''to our top executives at the
network.''<br>
<br>
He also describes the structural changes in the news media, like
increased conglomerate ownership, that have made editors and
reporters more vulnerable to this kind of intimidation -- and much
less aggressive in pursuing inconvenient truths.<br>
<br>
Gelbspan's first book, ''The Heat Is On'' (1997), remains the
best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry
has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists
who began to make themselves available for mass media interviews
as so-called skeptics on the subject of global warming. In fact,
these scientists played a key role in Gelbspan's personal journey
on this issue. When he got letters disputing the facts in his very
first article, he was at first chastened -- until he realized the
letters were merely citing the industry-funded scientists. He
accuses this group of ''stealing our reality.''<br>
<br>
In this new book, Gelbspan focuses his toughest language by far on
the coal and oil industries. After documenting the largely
successful efforts of companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the
policy process, confuse the American people and cynically ''
'reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,' '' as one
strategy paper put it, he concludes that ''what began as a normal
business response by the fossil fuel lobby -- denial and delay --
has now attained the status of a crime against humanity.''<br>
<br>
I wouldn't have said it quite that way, but I'm glad he does, and
his exposition of the facts certainly seems to support his charge.<br>
<br>
Gelbspan also criticizes the current administration, documenting
its efforts to ''demolish the diplomatic foundations'' of the
international agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol, and
describing its approach to energy and environmental policy as
''corruption disguised as conservatism.'' Again, he backs up his
charge with impressive research. Moreover, his critique is far
from partisan. He takes on environmental groups for doing way too
little and for focusing on their own institutional agendas rather
than the central challenges.<br>
<br>
When Gelbspan addresses the subject of solutions, he first gives a
detailed analysis of all the significant plans that have been
offered, and then endorses a maximalist approach called the World
Energy Modernization Plan, developed six years ago by an ad hoc
group that met at the Harvard Medical School. His basic argument
is that it is far too late in the game to waste time on strategies
that might be more politically feasible but don't actually do
enough to begin to solve the problem.<br>
<br>
He may be right, but the plan's authors, though distinguished,
remind me of Sam Rayburn's remark that he'd feel a lot better ''if
just one of them had ever run for sheriff.''<br>
<br>
THE fact is, many who have worked on this problem believe it may
be essential to begin with a binding agreement among nations and
then, after governments and industries shift direction, toughen
the goals. That is the formula used successfully in the Montreal
Protocol in 1987 to begin reducing the emissions that cause
destruction of stratospheric ozone. Three years later, the
standards were dramatically tightened in the London Amendments,
and by then most resistance had dissipated.<br>
<br>
The Kyoto Protocol (which may soon become legally effective if
Russia ratifies it, even though the United States has not) has
been criticized by many, including Gelbspan, for not going nearly
far enough to reduce the emissions that cause global warming. But
it has simultaneously been condemned from the opposite side for
going too far. If Kyoto does take effect, we may find that after
industries and countries begin to comply, it will be easier to
expand the limits of what is politically possible.<br>
<br>
But Gelbspan's point is a powerful one and is well argued. And he
has, in any case, performed a great service by writing an
informative book on a difficult but crucial subject.<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/hot-enough-for-us.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Politicians-Journalists-Crisis--And/dp/0465027628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936832&sr=8-1&keywords=boiling+point+ross+gelbspan">http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Politicians-Journalists-Crisis--And/dp/0465027628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936832&sr=8-1&keywords=boiling+point+ross+gelbspan</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Heat-Is-On-Prescription/dp/0738200255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936855&sr=8-1&keywords=the+heat+is+on+ross+gelbspan">http://www.amazon.com/The-Heat-Is-On-Prescription/dp/0738200255/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387936855&sr=8-1&keywords=the+heat+is+on+ross+gelbspan</a><br>
<br>
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