Still can’t fathom why global warming isn’t more of a bugaboo to the average American (unlike, say, a case of pandemic hysteria)? Read Nate Silver’s take on this survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication. The survey contains various permutations of questions and lots of…Continue Reading…
On April 22, four years ago, I spent the day with Richard Cizik for this story. A lot has happened since then. In 2005, Cizik was the vice president for government affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), an influential group consisting of 45,000 churches and some 30 million members. He had been NAE’s…Continue Reading…
In 2003, Bill McKibben published an essay in the literary magazine Granta ($$ Req), titled, “Worried? Us?” What he rued then still holds true today: People think about “˜global warming’ in the way they think about “˜violence on television’ or “˜growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all. Hardly…Continue Reading…
Now that this day is here, I can imagine the current EPA Administrator gleefully thinking, in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, “You wanna piece of this…” Somewhere, Christie Todd Whitman is having a bad flashback.
American environmentalists don’t do complexity well. They live in a binary world of good guys and bad guys. Of late, the global warming issue has revealed this most starkly. So it bears watching how this will play out. Keith Johnson’s excellent take over at Environmental Capital covers all the bases.
This new poll of climate scientists by The Guardian will raise many an eyebrow. If the quotes in the article reflect where the climate science community is heading, get ready for an ugly debate that will probably split the environmental community. The mitigation crowd has already boarded its freight train. If the adaptation crowd gets…Continue Reading…
No environmental issue, other than global warming, generates as much controversy and misguided rhetoric as overpopulation. (The disclaimer at the top of the Wikipedia entry that I link to speaks for itself.) The population issue has loomed so large in the environmental movement that greens these days have a tendency to consider it part of…Continue Reading…
Andrew Sullivan is convinced that global warming is real, but he also belongs to the reality-based community, so he poses this dilemma: Should we bear the heavy economic and social costs of trying to mitigate it in the teeth of a global depression? Or should we find creative ways to adjust to and live with…Continue Reading…
“What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people “¨thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) “¨one idea stands out: resilience.”¨” So begins a must read piece in Fast Company by futurist Jamais Cascio. The concept of resilience, as defined by Cascio, means the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an “¨institution, or a…Continue Reading…