Andy Revkin produced a truly bizarre piece over the weekend: "Middle Stance Emerging in Debate Over Climate." Frankly, I'm surprised it got past the NYT's news editors.
It strikes me as a good illustration of the limits of traditional journalism, since what Revkin's up to is not a description of a state of affairs -- i.e., reporting news -- but an attempt to frame a debate. Does that belong in the op-ed section? I'm not sure. It seems more like something that belongs on a blog. But it's clearly not news, though I'm sure thousands of readers will take it that way. (Note the paucity of actual data points.)
Revkin clearly wants to be seen as a reasonable voice -- not one of those kooky hippie extremists shunned by the Beltway Wise Folk. This has made him a rather gullible target for Roger Pielke Jr., for whom this "middle stance" has become a calling card and a ticket to media exposure. The entire piece reads like a Pielke press release -- it's a retread of his silly "nonskeptical heretics" shtick, about which I wrote here.
I find it wrong in every empirical detail and utterly wrong-headed in spirit.
Pielke wants us to believe three things:
- There is a "climate debate," dominated by extremists. On one side are those who say global warming isn't happening, or isn't a big deal. On the other side are those who say global warming will be a catastrophe and we should mobilize immediately to take action.
- Between these two extremes is a reasonable, balanced middle position, which is: We're not certain exactly what the effects of climate change will be, but the potential risks are large, so it's worth hedging our bets by acting to reduce emissions as an "insurance policy."
- The extremists on either side are invested in having a vicious two-sided fight and will thus try to exclude this reasonable middle stance.
This way of framing things has great appeal to those for whom being reasonable -- or more properly, being seen as reasonable -- is central to their self-image. The problem is, all those things are wrong.
On #1: There is no such two-sided debate. There is a group of people who spent a long time denying that climate change is happening. When that became untenable, they denied that warming is anthropogenic. That's now becoming untenable, so they're moving on to claiming warming will be mild, or we can't do anything about it, or the best way to prepare is to avoid regulation.
These people are not involved in a "debate" by any normal understanding of that word. They are not advancing good-faith positions in an attempt to discover the truth. They are shills, advancing the interests of a set of industries and the politicians those industries fund. Their empirical arguments, to the extent they have any, have been utterly discredited. They are rarely taken seriously by anybody but right-wing bloggers and James Inhofe. Oh, and Pielke, who needs them to construct his centrist cosmology.
On the "other side" from the denialists is not the monolithic catastrophist camp of Pielke's imagination, but a many-hued, multi-polar debate about how best to address climate change, how fast to act, how to communicate to the public about it, how much risk to tolerate, etc. Pielke sees himself as complicating and opening up the debate, but in fact he's doing the opposite, reducing the varied questions and positions to a flat two-poles-and-a-middle dichotomy. Again, that may suit his purposes, but it's not accurate.
On #2: what is the substantive difference between this position and the position global warming advocates have been advancing all along? Do these Wise Folk think global warming is not a big deal? No:
They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge ...
Do they they think we shouldn't be preparing? No:
Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources.
Sounds familiar. Perhaps the difference is that the Wise Folk think we should take small, incremental steps rather than making big policy changes? No:
Many in this group also see a need to portray clearly that the response would require far more than switching to fluorescent light bulbs and to hybrid cars.
One of the iconic Wise Folk, Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, is described thusly:
His goal, Dr. Hulme said, is to raise public appreciation of the unprecedented scale and nature of the challenge.
Gosh, that sounds familiar too.
So where's the beef? What's the difference?
Reading the story makes clear that the difference is one of tone and emphasis. This is about rhetorical style and temperament, not substance. The Wise Folk want to frame action as risk reduction and insurance policy rather than mobilization and crisis control. They want, in Revkin's near-parodic words, "the public to engage now, but not to panic."
To summarize: Aside from the denialist cranks, everyone agrees that global warming is a looming problem of unprecedented scale that needs to be met with long-term, fundamental change. But the people in the "middle" are unique in that they don't want the public to panic about it.
That's fine with me -- people can frame things however they want, however they think will be effective. But please spare us the canard that speaking in sweet dulcet tones that won't alarm David Broder puts you in the middle of some two-poled debate. It just makes you more likely to get on Meet the Nation.
As for #3, this is where Pielke reveals more than he intends. Because the issues here are so obviously about rhetoric and not substance, he correctly senses that people who have been advocating around this issue for years are going to say, "hey, that middle way sounds a hell of a lot like what we've been saying all along." And that would deny Pielke his position as Official Spokesman for the Wise Folk. We can't have that:
I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along. A two-sided debate rarely welcomes a third view, especially one that makes as much sense as that espoused in the NYT article.
Not to be all intemperate and extreme, but give me a %@#! break. Don't worry, Roger, nobody's going to try to take your ball. You make the mostest sense of anyone, ever. Happy?
Sigh. There's tons more to say about all this, but this post has gotten way too long. More later.
Comments
View as Flat
Andy Revkin Posted 7:36 am
02 Jan 2007
You're criticizing me for exploring a nuanced, incremental, and vitally important facet of the climate problem in a way different than the media norm for the past decade (which has been only to look at the edges of the 'debate')...
Are you implying that journalism should remain locked into its old norms for what constitutes news? Those are the same norms that prompted most media to ignore climate for 20 years (don't blame it all on Exxon; it's also about the media's traditional notions of what is a 'story' and what isn't... tsunami=story... sea level rise = ?)
More on that here (minute 32 or so):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6569848953143124...
The untraditional aspect of my latest climate story was precisely the aspect you're complaining about: my focus, for a change, on people spending careers dealing with climate who (other than Roger P, perhaps) do not tend to seek the media spotlight, but whose positions deserve airing.
Hulme, Wallace, Mahlman, and many others are worth listening to along with Hansen, Gore, and the rest.
Sure I frame this as a trend, because that is my strong impression. I make judgements like that all the time. That's my job. Not everything comes in a press release.
When the WMO expert group on hurricanes & climate issues a statement that contradicts the sense of consensus promulgated lately by some campaigners about links between warming waters and juiced-up storms, that is something that needs airing.
It's not a convenient story for the mass media (nuance... more warming will likely intensify storms a few percent...). But it needs to be accounted for in framing a climate policy that will catch fire beyond the edges.
In some ways, it'd be oh so convenient if global warming was a simple, old-fashioned environmental problem like the ones we all grew up with in the good old 20th century -- here and now, in your face, like smoggy skies or a sewage-filled river. But it is different. It is implicitly probabilistic and hard. It is imbued with uncertainty that is not going away soon enough to make bipartisan decisions on carbon costs or energy R&D investments easy.
In covering climate since 1988, my job has been, and remains, conveying the state of play, the state of policy, the rate of emissions, the lack of R&D, the problems with Kyoto-style approaches (without a technology push), the stances of everyone with a meaningful and reasoned approach.
More of my coverage is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/globalwarming
And...
Mind you, the hotter voices are essential in American discourse. They mobilize the (pick your number, but probably a single digit) X million or so motivated informed, 'active' folks out there.
But I've got to write for a much broader sector of society as well, which includes millions of doubtful, disengaged people who have yet to see the Gore film or read Betsy Kolbert's book, who don't understand how sciencew works, who may even -- gulp -- watch Fox News.
For them, it's news that the only substantive debate now is over how to address the human influence on climate.
For Gristmill readers, hopefully that's NOT news, so I completely understand why -- for your audience -- you'd write the critique you posted.
And I'm glad to keep this dialogue going. Happy 2007, and a stable climate to all...
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David Roberts Posted 8:22 am
02 Jan 2007
It's fantastic that you're covering the nuances -- the fact that this is a debate over acceptable levels of risk rather than pure hype or inevitable catastrophe. The only thing that bothers me is framing this view as the "middle" between two extremes. It just isn't. The denialist crowd is not parallel to the "overstate the urgency" crowd. Their motivations are not the same. Their sins are not the same. They are not involved in the same kind of undertaking. I object to equating them, as your story seems implicitly to do.
Also, there's a fine line between moral urgency and overstating-the-science urgency. Seems to me it's entirely possible to understand the exact state of science and still view the task ahead of us as both morally and temporally urgent (as Hansen does). We shouldn't lump Hansen in with some obscure internet-dude who claims NYC is going to flood next week.
But anyway, we're all groping our way forward here with no maps or guidebooks. Thanks for the thoughtful work you do, and for engaging so openly with your readers and peers. Keep it up.
And a climatically stable new year to you too!
www.grist.org
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caractacus Posted 8:37 am
02 Jan 2007
http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/challenge.html
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jjwfmme Posted 8:40 am
02 Jan 2007
You said: more warming will likely intensify storms a few percent
Yes, but a few percent could be significant. If you look at the bands of hurricane damage, they're not really that far apart. At one point the difference between minimal and extensive damage is only about 16 mph.
There are many ways to cover the way this government has handled climate policy. I agree with Professor Jay Rosen at NYU, that "the media thinks that it's covered this government pretty darn well... Which is one devastating illusion. It's been a rout, and it remains one." Professor Rosen's post was mostly about the Iraq War, but he makes the point that better coverage of this administration policy making in general would have been helpful.
Signed,
A worried citizen and media consumer.
PS: What are we going to do when Fox News buys the Wall Street Journal?
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sunflower Posted 8:57 am
02 Jan 2007
Your voice at NYT is valuable to far more people than those who read Grist, and I am very grateful for your contributions.
As I talk about global warming I find adults mostly ask "How will this affect my children?". They want an answer in a single sentence. Their children listen and they want the whole story. I agree with you that this dripping problem has fallen into the laps of children, our best hope.
One other pole between the extremes is time. The middle of the bell curve is moving as the extremes move with time. Twenty years ago it was mostly theory that CO2 would escape from warmer soils, from faster respiration of plants, from dying forests, more heat from albedo of melting ice, acidic oceans, plankton death, and so on. Twenty years ago we were told by media that these theories may become a problem after a hundred years and we have time.
Now, twenty years later, we are told that those assessments were too conservative, in part out the fear that industry deniers would attack and discredit scientists.
Observations have now reduced many of these theories into facts. The extremes moved and the middle of the bell curve moved with the extremes. The lack of urgency is on middle ground today, not tomorrow. I now regret finding comfort in the middle of the bell curve. It was a lazy dangerous mistake.
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wedjr Posted 10:15 am
02 Jan 2007
We want to be doing things that enable Americans to look back at us 50 year from now to say "Thank God they got their act together" rather than looking back to say "what in God's Name were they thinking."
Thanks for your excellent work, Dave and Andy.
Will
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Andrew Dessler Posted 11:11 am
02 Jan 2007
questions about what to do ("act now? act later? panic?") are fundamentally not scientific. differences here represent differences in values.
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wabranowicz Posted 11:55 am
02 Jan 2007
Climate change, what-to-do and, how-to-help considerations for most Americans are daunting. Framing the conversation, allowing for the middle road, and "showing me how" are what kept 'An Inconvenient Truth' from becoming a cause for mass suicide.
Those--like Al Gore and Laurie David-- who have pushed hard need to push harder. The mass has begun to move but not fast enough. Revkin's piece highlights that those who de-bunked the seriousness of the situation--or kept silent-- now understand we cannot underprepare.
No action is ever fully enough, but America, for the most part, is not listening. Revkin's piece, focusing on the scientific agreement that we need to prepare, coupled with todays Times article on CFLs and Walmart make it clearer. The two articles keep the issue in front of the part of the world that intensely cares, the one that knows it's an issue but, seems to say, "so what", and the one world that knows that economics will drive any solution if one is to be found. The energy challenge both articles highlight-- that a real solution might be found somewhere in the middle with passion driving issues, science focusing the debate and economics funding solutions--seem to be moving us forward.
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dobermanmacleod Posted 4:45 pm
02 Jan 2007
In the case of global warming: the alarmists are correct. Climate change is going to happen a lot quicker and more severe than people think (our emissions "trigger" is going to set off a chain reaction called "runaway global warming," more severe than past episodes, because our trigger is much stronger). Sorry if this doesn't fit in Revkin's extremist/centrist model.
Perhaps Revkin isn't familiar with the saying: you are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't entitled to your own facts. I can only wish Revkin lives long enough to see the product of his philosophy. Just like the cigarette companies fuzzied the health science of smoking, the science of global warming is getting fuzzied. Those journalists like Revkin who gives equal weight to each side in the global warming debate will eventually learn that somethings are too dangerous to play stupid with.
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David Roberts Posted 5:04 pm
02 Jan 2007
What I see him trying to do in this piece is the following: convince the great disinterested masses that there's something to this climate-change business by showing that the reasonable "middle" of the debate is now no longer "let's wait and see if it's really happening," but "it's bad, we need to act, let's just not panic."
In setting that up as the New Middle, he slights the strong voices of advocacy that have been working in this area for years. But I can't really hold it against him. This is how political debate seems to work these days -- you have to sacrifice your advocates, even if they are correct, in the name of creating a safe, comfy middle where the mildly interested can reside. As I said, it's less about the substance of the issues and more about perception. If the scary hippies who have been right about climate change for years have to be branded extremists to get the masses on board, I guess you could do worse.
www.grist.org
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Wadard Posted 8:45 pm
02 Jan 2007
If anyone still hasn't seen An Inconvenient Truth, it is now freely available from YouTube for free. :::[An Inconvenient Truth Conveniently on YouTube] although I recommend the cinema experience if it is still on in town.
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caractacus Posted 8:54 pm
02 Jan 2007
Stern is proposing policy aimed at stabilising emissions at around a 550 ppm CO2 equivalent, a figure which on most projections I've seen indicates some serious risks. Particularly to people in the developing world. (According to the Hadley Centre model, 550ppm has about a 70% probability of taking us to +3C)
What he's saying is in effect `450 is not achieveable without giving up growth, let alone the 400 ppm those naive greens keep on about, so let's just forget about it.'
He's then saying (and here I'm paraphrasing something he explicitly says) If we can reduce emissions by 1-3% per year, while growth continues at rates that can satisfy investors and if some optimistic assumptions about the biosphere's ability to regulate atmospheric greenhouse gasses are and remain true while we experience the effects of the emissions that have already happened, then stabilisation at 550 ppm may be feasible.
I say `remain true', because quite likely around 550ppm several key carbon sinks stop working so it's by no means certain that his assumptions about the rate at which the biosphere can self-regulate greenhouse gases will apply if we're going to approach 550ppm. That in turn calls into serious question his assumption that by reducing emissions growth by 1-3% per annum will do the trick, even if that is possible while growth increases at a rate acceptable to investors, which I personally beg leave to doubt.
At 550ppm, we're also in with a strong chance of seeing melting ice sheets, sea level rises of several metres and possibly runaway feedback caused by things like methane release due to melting permafrost and such.
He's talking about maybe stabilising at 550ppm, if a whole lot of things come together for his approach. Meanwhile a lot of people in the poor South are in very bad trouble, which is why he mostly discusses adaptation (ie learning to live with sea level rises, fresh water shortages, ecosystem collapses etc) in connection with the developing world. It also looks like part of the growth he's so keen on is going to come from lending them the money to adapt, so they can buy seeds with adapted genetics (presumably for growing under 2m of seawater) from Monsanto etc. Ch 12 and 26 make that bit fairly clear.
What he seems to be trying to do is make a case that by doing a little bit of regulatory fiddling here, at little bit of taxing there and a tiny bit of pump-priming where there is no alternative, that reducing carbon emissions globally can be turned into an attractive investment opportunity.
Stern's report targets a threshold (assuming they could really stabilise at 550ppm CO2 equivalent in the way he proposes) where we have a russian roulette player's chance of avoiding runaway climate change, and where the impacts on the UK, US and most of at least Northern Europe, are within a range that we can probably handle, given our fairly impressive technical and financial resources. It'd be pretty horrible, but not doomsday by any means.
The impacts at the threshold he's set of 550ppm are only likely to be massively fatal and otherwise completely disastrous for a few hundred million poor people in the developing world. Of course trying to save them, by aiming for stabilisation at 400ppm, would probably be impossible while maintaining the reproduction of capital on the scale to which we, or at least the ruling class, have become accustomed.
Which is why a few hundred million poor people are a sad but necessary sacrifice in the minds of our leaders (and a potential investment opportunity, let's look on the bright side chaps!).
I think he's aiming for a level of 550ppm CO2 equivalent, that is dealable-with (at a fat profit for some) in the UK (and the nice bits of the US), irrespective of the effects elsewhere, and that he thinks is compatible with continued economic growth. If he'd aimed for what the climate scientists are mostly suggesting as 'safe' (please take a paragraph or two of qualifications about levels of certainty and what 'safe' is meant to mean as read here) which is 400ppm, then the impossibility of continued economic growth would call the whole neo-liberal economic programme, and perhaps capitalism itself, into question.
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Andy Revkin Posted 10:28 pm
02 Jan 2007
And I, too, see our best hope, perhaps, in getting the next generation to absorb that their world (climatic and biological and more) is largely being shaped today by their parents' decisions -- or lack of engagement. I'm not being coy when I explain to audiences that one reason I wrote my new climate book for kids (anyone 10 and up) is I'm not convinced today's "fossils" (as youth climate activists call us grownups) are going to get this in time. You can read first chapter online here: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/globalwarming
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Andy Revkin Posted 10:30 pm
02 Jan 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/energychallenge
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amazingdrx Posted 11:17 pm
02 Jan 2007
It is impossible to understand why this attitude persists in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Mass production of the technology we already have in batteries, solar cells, solid oxide fuel cells, wind power,geothermal heating/cooling and on and on, will not only pay it's own way, but it will create a huge economic boom.
With real capitalism. What we have now, monopoly capitalism, is the problem. Have you seen "Who Killed The Electric Car"?
And do us all a favor and try to pay attention to reality Andy. You have a huge audience and with that comes responsibility. Not just to your own career. I know you probably would never be featured in the times again were you to state the obvious points I mentioned. But that needs to change.
The NYT needs to change, along with the conventional wisdom that renewable energy will stop economic growth in its tracks.
The NYT, and all other media at the time, ignored the Wright brothers for four years after their first flights. They gave up flying in despair for 2 1/2 years. They were considered crackpots.
The same effect is in operation in this stalled energy revolution.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 12:00 am
03 Jan 2007
"the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory"
Dr. Hulme did you see how the ice is melting as portrayed in Gore's movie? And you still think there is time to take some sort of so-called "reasonable" middle ground? Wouldn't want to depress people! (maybe the anti-depressant makers would see a bottomline corporate motive to publicize the facts about global climate disaster?)
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caractacus Posted 12:15 am
03 Jan 2007
If there's 'overwhelming evidence to the contrary' why is Stern dismissing the sort of target the scientists are asking for of 400ppm and even 450ppm as uneconomic and too hard to do without hurting the economy?
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sunflower Posted 12:47 am
03 Jan 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 12:49 am
03 Jan 2007
Repeating conventional wisdom that supports the status quo. Based on propaganda supplied by the mass delusional corporate media.
Altairnano's new 10 minute charge battery costs only 2000 dollars for a 40 mile range in a plugin car. Will it take 4 years for that to be reported in the mass media?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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JMG Posted 1:07 am
03 Jan 2007
(The talk is available for free through Global Public Media, http://www.globalpublicmedia.org.)
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caractacus Posted 1:48 am
03 Jan 2007
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caractacus Posted 2:10 am
03 Jan 2007
As a government economist, a representative of the 'mainstream' we were talking about above, he's constrained in such a way as to be unable to seriously consider a target that would have an unacceptable impact on growth, ie return on investment. In order to talk seriously about even 550ppm CO2e, he's got to make the strongest case he can for profitable investment opportunities.
From his perspective, no solution that calls economic growth into question is a viable one.
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sunflower Posted 2:43 am
03 Jan 2007
If the the solution does not come from the private sector then all that is left is political leadership.
Nothing is happening.
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caractacus Posted 2:58 am
03 Jan 2007
Neither public or private sector can therefore do anything at all that would seriously impact return on investment year on year. To his credit Stern has a pretty brave try at making a case that by using the World Bank/IMF to foist climate change insurance and GM crops on the parts of the world most affected, they can get a decent ROI out of the people they'll be starving, dispacing etc at 550ppm, but it's really not a very nice picture even if he could get it adopted seriously, which I doubt.
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d41295 Posted 6:46 am
03 Jan 2007
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jjwfmme Posted 7:27 am
03 Jan 2007
This line of argument is so tired. All you have to do is go to any major news website (BBC, for instance) and get the same story that Roberts and company posts here. Or go to the IPCC for that matter. If Grist went away tomorrow, we would miss its great coverage, but on a basic level the same information would be out there.
Please, d41295.
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d41295 Posted 8:23 am
03 Jan 2007
And the British papers and magazines are well known for their hyping of the science stories they cover, especially global warming.
The IPCC is not extremist.
Face it: the extremist position advocated for here by Roberts might be strongly influenced by their bottom line. They have a direct financial stake in expressing the most extreme view possible. If you criticize the right for their financial entanglements, you have to criticize the left as well.
That stresses the importance of true journalists like Andrew Revkin, who can be objective in a way that David Roberts cannot.
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sunflower Posted 8:47 am
03 Jan 2007
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caniscandida Posted 8:51 am
03 Jan 2007
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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sunflower Posted 9:03 am
03 Jan 2007
Monk Doug.
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David Roberts Posted 9:10 am
03 Jan 2007
www.grist.org
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caractacus Posted 9:35 am
03 Jan 2007
If you want to call someone an extremist, pick on me, because I would argue that capitalism and sustainability are fundamentally not compatible.
Lots of Love
XXX
Caractacus
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sunflower Posted 9:55 am
03 Jan 2007
As Grist knows, the big money is in 501(c)(3) non-profits.
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John McGrath Posted 2:20 pm
03 Jan 2007
See re: Iraq War.
I don't attribute any malice or anything to Revkin (good on him for participating here, and for his kids' book) but it's clearly the dynamic at work. Al Gore was right about climate change decades before any American political leader, but he's an "extreme" in Revkin's piece.
It's incredibly insulting to those of us who didn't swallow pure, uncut lies for the last twenty years. And it's a shame that American journalism still, after everything, can't escape the straitjacket of denigrating the correct.
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caractacus Posted 8:09 pm
03 Jan 2007
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-Globa...
Follow the money eh?
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amazingdrx Posted 12:29 am
04 Jan 2007
They have plenty of extra cash for propaganda and endless appeals. When will the fine be zero. Will even half of the 5 billion be payed. Doubtfull.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 12:39 am
04 Jan 2007
Apparently they were in a "credibility" seeking phase? Hehehey. It included pictures of them in their "hippy" years.
Go to otherpower.com to see real hippies building actual renewable energy products, communally. This has to be the least expensive, cleanest power since Jacobs Wind Electric from Minnesota held sway in the clean energy arena.
http://www.otherpower.com/
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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314159265 Posted 12:48 am
04 Jan 2007
Ha! It probably is tired because it´s so truthy.
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downtoearth Posted 11:55 am
05 Jan 2007
But I agree with David that there really is no climate debate. I guess the big question now is, what are we going to do about climate? We need all voices to push for change.
See my full post about this on my blog, Down to Earth
-Dan Kulpinski, editor, reference.aol.com
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