CreativeGreenius’s Recent Comments

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  I came here via your Twitter feed which I dig following.  Thanks for the Nelly hook up too.  I have it on while I'm writing you this comment.  I think I'll follow it up with Stevie Wonder's Master Blaster from Hotter Than July and go older school...

  I'm glad to see you bringing this subject up because I feel strongly about it.  I was moved to write a piece in my blog, Creative Greenius, this morning with my own take on the topic:

  The Real Climate Change Debate: Are All Deniers Evil or Are Some Merely Ignorant?

  Even though you find Joe Romm's various cyber fueds with folks like the Breakstuff Institute tiresome, I've learned an awful lot from Romm and enjoy reading him every day.  I think we need people like Romm who know what they're talking about, won't knuckle under to the bullyboy tactics of the mostly right-wingers and neo cons who belong to the denier cult.  I don't always agree with Romm and have been reprimanded by him in the past and had my comments moderated by him too, but his blog, Climate Progress, is consistently a source of information I don't get elsewhere.  I liked his book too. 

  I think Romm's focus on the mainstream media's failure to do more than play the "stenographer's" role on the climate change story has been particularly strong and on point and is particularly relevant here.  I don't know if I would have discovered Eric Pooley's work on the subject and become a fan of his writing, without first reading about Pooley's How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change on Climate Progress.  That's where Pooley's line about the media acquiescing to the "stenographer" position comes from and it's a good one. 

  I like the way Pooley frames his story in the opening paragraph of his paper's introduction:

  "Suppose our leading scientists discovered that a meteor, hurtling toward the earth, was set to strike later this century; the governments of the world had less than ten years to divert or destroy it. How would news organizations cover this story? Even in an era of financial distress, they would throw teams of reporters at it and give them the resources needed to follow it in extraordinary depth and detail. After all, the race to stop the meteor would be the story of the century."

  I personally believe that it's the failure of the mainstream media, along with elected representatives - both backed by the same self-serving fossil fuel industry's money to burn - that has made fertile soil for consensous science and daily evidence to be ignored while nut job conspiracy theorists and defiantly ignorant purveyors of propoganda are given the respect and presumption of credability they will never earn or deserve.

  Your conclusion, "There are no sidelines," says it very well, because as the timer "beep-beep-beeps" that our time is up, on one side is right and ever less possible salvation - and on the other side is wrong and ever more possible condemnation. 

  And yeah, it really IS as black and white as that.

  On Gideon Rachman: Inability to prevent mass suffering and death a "dilemma for climate activists" posted 4 months ago 8 Responses

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  Bad Week To Be In The Coal Business

  What a bummer for the polluting destroyers who make up the coal industry.

  First the Bush Administration and the DOE pulled the plug on FutureGen, the phony "Clean" coal experiment which was mostly a way to launder money... our tax dollars in exchange for technology that has never proven to work.  First they asked for 900 million per coal fired electric plant, then they said it was going to cost twice that - $1.9 billion, but everyone knew that really meant $2 billion, maybe 2 billion five.  All for crappy technology that couldn't get the job done.  Stick the fork in that scam.

  Then a few days later, the Wall Street Crowd announced that they weren't going to finance any more dirty coal fired electric plants.  With carbon mandates coming the profit is going out of that business and so too is the investments.

  And now this latest hit for being the mercury poisoners that they have always been.  Lame duck Bush is now too impotent and devoid of political capital to keep the con from being exposed.

  I hate to kick anyone when they're down, but not in this case.  RIght now is the time to step on the coal industry's neck and choke off their oxygen supply until they can't breathe anymore.  After all, that's what they've been doing to all of us for the last hundred years or more.  And that's what they were planning to do for the foreseeable future.  But now they won't be allowed to.

  Now that their lethal con job has been stopped here in the USA, it's time for us to help our fellow victims in China where they're opening a new super polluting, mercury-spewing coal-fired electric plant every single week.   Let's find our common ground with Chinese citizens on the issue of eliminating coal as a fuel source and replacing it with clean, renewable energy.

  Can we do that?

  Yes we can!  All we have to do is start.On Bush's controversial mercury rule for power plants struck down by federal court posted 1 year, 9 months ago 5 Responses