In defense of his call for Nazi war crime tribunals for people who deny the reality of global warming, David Roberts now claims, "I was not 'calling for war crimes tribunals for [all] global warming deniers.'" Roberts claims I "distorted"...
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In defense of his call for Nazi war crime tribunals for people who deny the reality of global warming, David Roberts now claims, "I was not 'calling for war crimes tribunals for [all] global warming deniers.'"
Roberts claims I "distorted" his words. Actually, all I did was quote them. Here they are again so that readers can make their own judgment:
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
It should probably go without saying that the effect of Roberts' histrionics is not to frighten guys like John Christy, William Gray and Richard Lindzen. Rather, the effect is to enforce ideological orthodoxy among environmentalists and to give global warming deniers a new way to paint environmentalists as extremists, as Sen. Inhofe did with Roberts' blog posting last year.
Continue reading "The Peacock at Grist" »
For as long as I can remember, people have compared bad stuff to the Holocaust. Their unconscious assumption is always that, in doing so, their concerns will gain more power and credibility.
But with his comments about coal "death trains," NASA scientist James Hansen proved once again that this is a dreadful assumption to make.
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For as long as I can remember, people have compared bad stuff to the Holocaust. Their unconscious assumption is always that, in doing so, their concerns will gain more power and credibility.
But with his comments about coal "death trains," NASA scientist James Hansen proved once again that this is a dreadful assumption to make.
Hansen was approvingly quoted by Joe Romm, former DOE official and blogger at the Center for American Progress, in an email, posted to Grist.org on July 26, 2007.
If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains -- no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.
Happily, several Grist bloggers objected.
But Hansen apparently didn't listen to Grist bloggers. (I know it's hard to believe). Hansen kept on making Holocaust comparisons.
Continue reading "Hansen's Holocaust Comparison: Or, Why Moralizing on Global Warming Won't Work" »
Happy Thanksgiving -- here's some photos to remind us not only of how special our earth and species are, but also how magnificent the universe is. These are photos selected by astronomers of some of the Hubble telescope's best....
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Happy Thanksgiving -- here's some photos to remind us not only of how special our earth and species are, but also how magnificent the universe is. These are photos selected by astronomers of some of the Hubble telescope's best.
"The more that the IPCC resembles an advocacy group with a narrow political agenda tied to the Kyoto Protocol, the more it risks its credibility, legitimacy, and ultimately, its sustainability."
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If you believe it is time to reduce coal and oil consumption, then it is time to connect the dots - recognize human intervention has become the meaning of the earth and embrace invention as the key to eco-triumph.
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Two articles in today's Science Times reinforce major Breakthrough themes - human have become the meaning of the earth and it is time to imagine eco-triumph through that most core human value, invention.
Continue reading "Connecting the Dots" »
This is taken from our event with Michael Pollan at UC Berkeley....
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This is taken from our event with Michael Pollan at UC Berkeley.
Continue reading "Michael Pollan and Break Through on You Tube" »
For the next week, we'll be serializing the introduction to Break Through -- "From the Nightmare to the Dream -- here.
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For the next week, we'll be serializing the introduction to Break Through -- "From the Nightmare to the Dream -- here.
Continue reading "From the Nightmare to the Dream" »
The old global warming debate was between those who thought global warming was serious, human-caused, and requiring action and those who didn't. That debate is coming to an end. In its place is being born a new debate, one centrally focused on solutions. Revkin's new blog has provided a place for thoughtful discussion about new ideas -- and it has arrived just in time.
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The New York Times' Andy Revkin has been one of the few reporters writing on global warming to point out what every serious energy expert in the U.S. has long known: new regulations alone won't do nearly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Continue reading "The New Climate Debate" »
Yesterday the New York Times' Andy Revkin wrote a story about us and two other "environmental centrists." It's sparked a heated debate on Andy's blog, and at Grist. Ted and I have both written responses. Click here for mine and...
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Yesterday the New York Times' Andy Revkin wrote a story about us and two other "environmental centrists." It's sparked a heated debate on Andy's blog, and at Grist.
Ted and I have both written responses. Click here for mine and click here for Ted's.
Human intervention has created new hybrid species of wolves blurring the concept of the natural condition. Like it or not, the Wolfe story is one more example of how humans have become the meaning of the earth, so lets move on.
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While you were reading the New York Times on Break Through, you may have noticed the article about how the Great Lakes wolf has hybridized into a new species. The article describes how human habitat destruction, followed by protection created conditions for the Great Lakes gray wolf to cross breed with other wolves and coyotes. Based on DNA analysis the "pure" wolf has effectively become extinct.
Continue reading "A Hybrid is Born" »
The New York Times' Andy Revkin did a full package today on the New Environmental Centrists, of whom Ted and I are two. Click here for the print article. This is introductory the New York Times TV segment on the...
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It is time for global warming activists to leave behind their focus on the "planetary crisis" and the regulatory-centered agenda and embrace an energetic and inspiring vision that captures people's minds, hearts and votes.
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Global Warming After Gore
By Teryn Norris
Published: Alternet.org, Nov 10th
Al Gore's Nobel Prize was a momentous event we should all applaud. Now it is time to move on and get smart about the climate movement's next steps. First, we should deal with some of our own inconvenient truths: global warming continues to rank extremely low among voter priorities, and Congress is going nowhere fast. The question we should ask ourselves is, how can the climate movement retool its politics for the post-Gore era?
It is high time for global warming activists to leave behind their focus on the "planetary crisis" and the regulatory-centered agenda, and embrace an energetic and inspiring vision that captures people's minds, hearts and votes.
Despite last year's "tipping point" in public attitudes toward climate change, Pew polls find that it still ranks dead last among voter concerns. It is of little surprise, then, that the Washington Post ran a front-page article on recently titled "Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats." Nor is it surprising that the best provisions of today's congressional energy bill would still allow U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030, effectively making the recommendations of the world's leading scientists unattainable.
Continue reading "Global Warming After Gore" »
Like Hurricane Katrina before them, the wildfires that raged across Southern California gave Americans a terrifying look at what life on a hotter planet is going to look like. While it is impossible to lay the blame for any specific fire on global warming -- just as it is impossible to blame global warming for any given hurricane -- we know that higher temperatures lead to drier forests and more intense and more frequent forest fires, just as higher ocean temperatures lead to more intense hurricanes.
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Like Hurricane Katrina before them, the wildfires that raged across Southern California gave Americans a terrifying look at what life on a hotter planet is going to look like. While it is impossible to lay the blame for any specific fire on global warming -- just as it is impossible to blame global warming for any given hurricane -- we know that higher temperatures lead to drier forests and more intense and more frequent forest fires, just as higher ocean temperatures lead to more intense hurricanes.
Continue reading "Preparing for the Fires Next Time" »
Ecological and subsequent systems collapse is a possibility, and one that has to be considered and carefully analyzed. But there's another question, no less important, that must be also asked: What must be done to trigger a progressive rather than reactionary reaction in the face of widening paranoia about the dark possibility of ecological collapse?
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One of the central arguments of Break Through -- one that has so far been ignored by True Believers at places like Grist -- is that global warming is going to create new political fault lines that don't fall along the left-right divide.
We write:
Climate change and the political response to it is already defining a new fault line in the culture. On one side of that line will be a global NIMBYism that sees the planet as too fragile to support the hopes and dreams of seven billion humans. It will seek to establish and enforce the equivalent of an international caste system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to energy poverty in perpetuity. This politics of limits will be anti-immigration, anti-globalization, and anti-growth. It will be zero-sum, fiscally conservative, and deficit-oriented. It will combine Malthusian environmentalism with Hobbesian conservatism.
On the other side will be those who believe that there is room enough for all of us to live secure and free lives. It will be pro-growth, progressive, and internationalist. It will drive global development by creating new markets. It will see in institutions like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund not a corporate conspiracy to keep people poor and destroy the environment, but an opportunity to drive a kind of development that is both sustainable and equitable. It will embrace technology without being technocratic. It will seek adaptation proactively, not fatalistically. It will establish social and economic security as preconditions for ecological action. It will be large and transformative, but not millenarian.
Continue reading "How Global Warming Will Force Political Realignment" »
The ascendancy the political right has been marked by the emergence of a communications machine. Stem cell research has created a conundrum with an ironic result.
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The ascendancy of right-wing politics has been marked by the emergence of a communications machine. Messages are developed to reinforce a series of strategic frames to be disseminated through an extensive political and media network - that vast right wing conspiracy. Discipline results from casting issues in stark terms, such as good vs. evil, with no middle ground. The anathema to the system is cognitive drift, a decidedly democratic attribute, where the speaker articulates a nuanced policy position or engages in deliberative give-and-take. Given the success of this formula, it has been intriguing to see right-wing think tanks and politicians break from this game plan on the issue of stem cell research.
Continue reading "Off Message" »
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