Andrew Revkin's well-regarded Dot Earth blog has moved to the Opinion page, now that he has moved on from his staff position at the New York Times. As Curtis Brainerd notes at the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Revkin "has expressed a desire to move even farther beyond the constraints of traditional news reporting."
To kick off the "new iteration" of his blog, Revkin has an excellent post laying bare his thoughts on the "climate crisis" and the "energy quest" - specifically what we need to do fill the global energy gap and mitigate climate change:
"I'm talking about a sustained [energy] quest, from the household light socket to the boardroom, the laboratory to the classroom, the smart post-industrial American city to the struggling, (literally) powerless sub-Saharan village. This is not some onerous task, but an active, positive assertion that the ways we harvest and use energy -- an asset long taken for granted and priced in ways that mask its broader costs -- really do matter. Dry places do this with water all the time. In Israel, there is no toilet without two flush options. It's not some goofball green concept; it's just the way things are done.
You've heard a lot about an energy revolution of late, involving a (temporary) burst of spending from the stimulus legislation. But it's building from a paltry base of both public and private investment in the energy arenas where breakthroughs could really expand the menu of energy options required to sustain a prospering, healthy planet as the human growth spurt crests. I'm not saying that a sustained investment in scientific research is remotely sufficient, on its own, to drive an energy transformation. But I do see levels of investment in such inquiry as a proxy for our overall interest in this issue."
See our previous coverage and watch the video below for more on what Andy Revkin's been up to since leaving the Times:
