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Where are low-income and minority greens in the media?

Once again this year, the spring season brought a flood of green-themed magazines to super-market checkout stands and airport news racks all across the country.

And once again, the faces of non-white and non-affluent Americans were almost entirely missing.

Our new environmental movement is rapidly gaining visibility and momentum. That is very good news. Life-or-death ecological issues finally are starting to get the attention they so urgently deserve. And we can all celebrate that.

But now we would be wise to start paying closer attention to the kind of coverage that we as environmentalists are getting. Because I see a disturbing pattern of exclusivity that is starting to set in. And that kind of elitism can sow the seeds for a very dangerous, populist backlash, down the line.

To see what I mean, just flip through the pages of Vanity Fair's recent green issue (the one with Leo DiCaprio and that cute polar bear cub on the cover).

File under: dubious accomplishments

New York Times Magazine manages the somewhat astounding feat of conducting a thoroughly boring interview with Bill McDonough, one of the most interesting people on the planet.

Keeping an eye on the ‘wingers

(Part of a series of posts keeping an eye on Planet Gore, the National Review blog devoted to obfuscating on climate change.)

New research finds low cost for tackling climate change. But not when that research is reported by Planet Gore. Sterling Burnett recently authored a classic example of PG's disinfotainment. He writes:

Has the media completely lost objectivity and the search for the "truth" with regard to the issue of global warming. The latest reason that made me ponder this question arose with the "non-story" of the recent reports by MIT and the CBO detailing the substantial costs and regressive nature of the costs that are estimated to arise if any of the current domestic proposals restricting carbon emissions to combat global warming are enacted. Despite the best efforts of Senator James Inhofe, among others, to get these studies publicized, I have barely seen a mention of the findings of either of these reports in the mainstream media.

He goes on to say, "it has surprised me how economic and science reporters have also ignored the MIT and CBO reports." The same week I read this, however, I saw a science news article on the MIT report ("Damn you, Science magazine," as Jon Stewart might say). The article requires a subscription, but I have copied the key figure below:

Expect a lot of it

As I mentioned the other day, MarketWatch is doing a big series of articles on business and climate change. This one gets right to the heart of why we’re hiring a D.C. reporter. Now that things have transitioned from whether there’s going to be climate legislation to what climate legislation is going to look like, […]

Corn ethanol bubble stretched thin

Expect the venture capitalists who started this pyramid scheme to quietly jump ship, leaving those who came in last holding the steaming bag. This article is behind the Wall Street Journal subscription wall and I can't post the whole article, though I would certainly like to. Several excerpts follow:

Earlier this year, Mr. Chambliss introduced a bill calling for even greater ethanol use, though with one striking difference: The bill caps the amount of that fuel that can come from corn. Turns out Georgia's chicken farmers hate corn-based ethanol; Georgia's pork producers hate corn-based ethanol; Georgia's dairy industry hates corn-based ethanol; Georgia's food producers hate corn-based ethanol; Georgia's hunters hate corn-based ethanol. And all that means Mr. Chambliss has had to find a new biofuels religion.

(Thanks again, KO!)

Or is it just us?

April may have seemed on the cool side in this country, but globally it was the third warmest on record (and the warmest April ever over land). In fact, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reports that "globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the warmest on record for January-April year-to-date period."

Drudge reported the April news perversely: "WARMING ON HOLD? April’s temperatures were below average ..."

April temperature anomalies are shown on the dot map below. The redder it is, the hotter it is:

It runs together several distinct things

There's been a nice, coherent-if-incipient debate on cap-and-trade on this blog lately, which I've alas been too busy to reply to. But I wanted to throw in just one small thought: it just might be time to ditch the whole notion. It conflates at least three things together, and as they are all quite different, the "trading debate" as we know it is both confusing and confused.

Is your town?

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide "walking lane" painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?

Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at "walk?! in traffic?!"

Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for most pedestrians, but it's not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.

People react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don't. "It's not safe" is what the overwhelming majority say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it's safer than most assume -- on which, more another day.)

So what would cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?

Friday music blogging: Dolorean

You know what’s nice on a sleepy Friday afternoon? A love song. Here’s one of my favorite love songs of the last decade: “Dying In Time,” by Dolorean. (They have a fantastic new album called You Can’t Win, but this is from their last one, Violence in Snowy Fields.)

The ethics of climate change

It's probably rude to point to this RealClimate post on a recent meeting at the University of Washington on Ethics and Climate Change, since it mentions me. But it's really Paul Baer, EcoEquity's Research Director, that attended, and who got top billing as the author of the "influential" (and out of press) book Dead Heat.

The real issue here, as far as we're concerned, is the notion of "developmental equity," which we are trying to develop and defend as a normative and politically salient alternative to "equal per capita emissions rights."

Anyway, this is worth a quick read. The comments are many, and besides, authors Eric Steig and Gavin Schmidt prove the worth of the philosophical approach by defining an "Easterbrook fallacy."

I knew there had to be a name for it.