Two former EPA administrators (under Republican Administrations) take a trip down memory lane: The air across our country is appreciably cleaner and healthier as a result of EPA regulation of trucks, buses, automobiles and large industrial sources of air pollution. There are three times the number of cars on the roads today as in 1970, yet…Continue Reading…
Via Judith Curry, I see there is an announcement for a new round of Capitol Hill-sponsored theatrics. The scheduled hearing is titled: Climate Change: Examining the processes used to create science and policy That’s going to be quite a show, given the deliberate bundling of science and policy. Roger Pielke Jr. should be able to…Continue Reading…
Long before William Cronon rocked Wisconsin Republicans’ world, he rocked mine when I read his first book, Changes in the Land. It pretty much reoriented my intellectual framework. (Another journalist seems to have had a similar experience.) Here’s the 1984 NYT review of the book that launched Cronon’s career. But I’m just a piker. There…Continue Reading…
I’m a student of environmental history. I’ve also long been interested in how humanity, society, and the environment have coevolved. Let’s take the example of fire as one of the major agents of change. As William Cronon writes in his introduction to Steve Pyne’s Fire: A brief history: The process of fire’s coevolution with humanity…Continue Reading…
Being in the moment.
Nothing seems to shake the climate rafters like a fierce debate over the labels that combatants use to smack each other around. Although this thread from yesterday is still going strong, I thought I would break out a comment that rises above the scrum: My belief is that those who are affected most negatively by the…Continue Reading…
This is painful to rehash, but I want to draw your attention to a streak of foreign policy ignorance that persisted in the 2000s. On a related (and more recent) note, four days after President Obama authorized a military campaign against Libya, I found this headline disconcerting: Who are the Libyan Rebels? U.S. tries to…Continue Reading…
Whether you believe the term”climate denier” is used accurately or unfairly in the climate debate, I’d be curious to hear what you think of this headline atop Andrew Bolt’s latest column: Six million Jews didn’t die so Combet could smear a sceptic
It wasn’t that long ago that George Monbiot was accusing Stewart Brand of running the most insidious and subtle exercise in corporate propaganda I have yet encountered. I thought it was a tad hyperbolic. But that was then. It turns out that both of these environmentalist icons share remarkably similar views on nuclear power, coal, and…Continue Reading…