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Hertsgaard on the environmental movement

Mark Hertsgaard's cover story in The Nation this week is a long look at the current fortunes and reconfigurations of the environmental movement: "Green Goes Grassroots."

To eco-geeks like yours truly, it's a familiar story: the movement realizes it's gotten top-heavy and D.C.-centric, too reliant on wonky techno-language, too depressing, and too insular. So it is:

• pouring more money and resources into supporting local organizing;
• trying to speak in simple language;
• focusing on solutions and can-do spirit; and
• creating alliances with a variety of other interest groups.

I've heard all this before. My worry has been that it is, in a phrase made famous by hapless terrorist wannabes loudly arrested by the Bushies in the run-up to the mid-terms, "more aspirational than operational." Hertsgaard's piece does marshal some solid examples, but not quite enough to make a convincing case there's a real, broad, sustained change taking place. I hope there is.

The piece touches briefly on a subject that's extremely important and too-little-discussed inside the movement (for obvious reasons): the role of foundations. This captures the problem well:

In Goodell Company, unabridged

In 2001, around the time Dick Cheney's secret-recipe energy plan made its debut, Jeff Goodell was in West Virginia reporting on coal's rising fortunes. He'd been sent to do a story for The New York Times Magazine, but the material spilled over into a new book, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future. It's a journey from the mines of Wyoming, across the plains by rail car, into the belly of the turbines in the east, and all the way to China, following the tale of the black rock that still, after all these years, afflicts and enables us.

As the fossil fuel that isn't running out, coal's been rebranded as a means to achieve energy independence. With the assistance of a friendly administration in the U.S. and burgeoning demand from China and India, the industry looks set to build hundreds of coal-fired power plants in coming years. And despite the gasification/sequestration PR, the momentum is strongly behind old-school plants that laden the air with particulates and the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

Goodell recently visited Grist HQ for a leisurely chat about coal's past, present, and unsettling future. Here follows a full transcript; for the abridged version, go here.

Journalistic courage

It isn't about environmental reporters specifically, but the thoughts of veteran journalist Walter Pincus about courage should be required reading for them too:

Journalistic courage should include the refusal to publish in a newspaper or carry on a TV or radio news show any statements made by the President or any other government official that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public.

Word.

(via TPM)

Help wanted: Web geek and word worm

Hey Gristmillers. In case you haven't heard, Grist's editorial and production teams are each seeking an intern to work in our lovely new office.

So, if you possess some HTML and Photoshop skills, or are a fact-checker extraordinaire, and want to work with some of the coolest people in Seattle, check these internships out.

A muddled message on solutions

This country's public discussion about global warming desperately needs to move beyond the tiresome back and forth about whether it's happening. We need to start discussing solutions -- in many ways a more complex and difficult topic.

CNN's Lou Dobbs offered just such an opportunity last night. He had on three climate scientists: Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and Alan Robock.

Watch what happens. Here's the first opportunity:

DOBBS: Well, if you all as leading scientists, with your best science, your best minds working in the field, agree that there is global warming and that greenhouse gases emissions are responsible for all or part of it, what can we do, Gavin, to deal with the issue?

In other words: Enough about science. We believe you. What should we do?

Varmint Cong

Organic farmers in Colorado ask state to blast rodents out of their holes They say life imitates art, but until now, life had stubbornly refused to imitate Caddyshack. Behold! Organic farmers in Colorado have asked the state Division of Wildlife to look into controlling prairie dogs and other burrowing critters by … blowing them up. […]

Oil hits $78/barrel

Ouch.

Talking point: Climate nonlinearity

Global warming will not necessarily mean a slow, steady rise in temperature, to which we can gradually adjust. Climate history contains sudden, lurching reconfigurations. Says the IPCC, as quoted by the U.S. EPA, "complex systems, such as the climate system, can respond in non-linear ways and produce surprises."

We might be able to adapt to an incremental warming trend, but such a surprise -- e.g., the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation -- would be likely be catastrophic.

What are the chances of a sudden shift? No one knows for sure. Low, we think, for now, probably. Such things are, almost by definition, difficult to predict with any certainty. What we do know is that we increase the probability of such a catastrophe with every ton of CO2 we put in the atmosphere.

We are rolling dice with humanity's future.

Eddie Vedder to shame you with his environmental giving

Pop-superstars-turned-moody-hasbeens-turned-pop-superstars Pearl Jam recently pledged to donate $100,000 to groups that focus on climate change and other environmental concerns, as a way to offset their carbon emissions. Many of the recipients are, not surprisingly, in the Seattle rockers' home state. (Although there's at least one local nonprofit they seem to have missed ... what were they thinking?)

While the "carbon neutral" concept is trendy right now, Pearl Jam has followed this model for donations before.

Pearl Jam has aided other green causes in the past, including donating money to preserve a Madagascar rain forest to atone for environmental damage wrought by its last tour.

Vedder also recently gave an extremely large tip to his hair stylist to atone for the Mohawk hairdo he sported for their last album.

Be very afraid

An unusually forthright commentary from Lee Dye on ABC:

But how much will it change? How will that affect us? And how soon?

Those are the tough questions, and some of the answers will remain elusive for years to come. After all, predicting climate, even day to day, is foggy at best. Given the variables, it may be the most difficult science of all.

But many experts confide privately what they aren't yet ready to announce publicly: Change is accelerating at a dramatic rate.