Articles by David Roberts

Look, he’s on the teevee!

I just got back from taping my first ever appearance on national teevee. I'm here to report that it is a truly surreal experience. There I am, sitting alone in a room, with awkwardly rigid posture, speaking to a yellow arrow above a camera in response to a disembodied voice that keeps telling me to "smile more," struggling to recall the snappy talking points I'd written down at 2am the previous morning. Totally natural!

The show is The Climate Code, a Weather Channel program hosted by Heidi Cullen (who we interviewed last year). They're interviewing five or six people about the top 10 climate stories of the year, and then they'll smoosh the whole thing down into a half-hour program, so it will probably be a blink-and-you-miss-me sort of thing.

Nonetheless, if you want to see me looking like a deer in headlights, speaking in a slightly-too-loud voice and an ill-fitting earnest tone, tune your idiot boxes to the Weather Channel on Dec. 17, 5pm EST. It should be good for a laugh.

Huh?

People who want to poo-poo the environmental movement are fond of making a particular argument. It goes like this:

You go on and on about how the earth is "in trouble" and "out of balance." But guess what, dude, the earth is billions of years old. Nothing we could do could hurt it.

Yes. Right. Obviously. Though we may take ourselves out, and a good chunk of the earth's current biodiversity with us, the planet itself will survive and eventually regenerate new species.

What I don't get is ... so what? Why does this pop up so often? What's the force of the argument supposed to be? It mystifies me.

Gore: Oscar winner

An Inconvenient Truth will win the 2007 Oscar for Best Documentary. You heard it here first.

On a related note: below the fold, you can watch video of Al Gore's surprisingly funny appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last week. (Thanks to Treehugger for uploading the video.)

Must be seen to be believed

What can you say?

(hat tip to reader CR)