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Articles by David Roberts

David Roberts was a staff writer for Grist. You can follow him on Twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.

All Articles

  • The doctor and the life coach: A question for Andy Revkin

    I’m working on one last follow-up to my brutal-logic posts, but lemme just take a time-out to ask a question of my friend, NYT journo-blogger Andy Revkin, who seems to have thrown his lot in with Bjorn Lomborg and decided that talking about greenhouse-gas emissions is a drag. First, to frame things, a thought experiment: […]

    David Roberts Science

  • The top five takeaways from the Durban climate talks

    Talking about climate-policy developments gets tedious. Bear with us for the verdict on Durban.After running 36 hours into overtime, the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, finally wrapped up this weekend. As usual, all the dramatic stuff happened in the last 12 hours, after everyone had been beaten into submission by sheer exhaustion. I do […]

    David Roberts Science

  • The brutal logic of climate change mitigation

    In my last post, I discussed a new peer-reviewed paper by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. It paints a grim picture: The commonly accepted threshold of climate “safety,” 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] temperature rise over pre-industrial levels, is now properly considered extremely dangerous; even 2 degrees C is drifting out of […]

    David Roberts Science

  • A visual representation of renewable energy growth in the U.S.

    The folks over at Black & Veatch sent me a couple of interesting graphics today. Here is a U.S. map showing installations of non-hydro renewable energy in 1970: Click for larger version.Black & Veatch A few things jump out. One, there weren’t very many! Two, they weren’t very big. And three, they were all biomass. […]

    David Roberts Energy