Articles by David Roberts

Futerra’s principles of climate change communication

In today's Daily Grist we reference a piece on BBC about "climate porn." More specifically, it's about a new report on climate-change coverage in the UK press.

The report was put together by "sustainability communications" outfit Futerra. It's called "Climate Fear v. Climate Hope" (PDF).

The basic problem, as summarized by Futerra's Solitaire Townsend (which, by the way, isn't a bad porn name): "The style of climate-change discourse is that we maximize the problem and minimize the solution." Global warming itself is discussed in apocalyptic tones, accompanied by terrifying pictures. The solutions -- change your light bulbs! -- appear weak and defeatist in contrast.

Turns out Futerra's David Willans reads Gristmill, and let us know in this comment that Futerra has released a guide (PDF) for how one should discuss global warming. He says:

It's a distillation of a good few feet of research papers on how to communicate climate change and environmental issues. It was the foundation of the UK government's climate change communications strategy.

So, I looked it over, and yeah, it's interesting. And short. Because I know everyone hates PDFs, I've reproduced it below for your edification. Thanks to Futerra.

Wal-Mart and culture

This NYT piece about Wal-Mart's failure to fit in culturally in various of its international conquest states is just fascinating. Apparently wanting everything available in one place, at the lowest possible price, in huge impersonal stores is not a fundamental feature of human nature, but a cultural artifact. In Germany, for instance, the company is just giving up entirely.

Trolling through the article, I pulled out these nifty tidbits:

It’s probably nothing

Glaciers in Alaska melting twice as fast as scientists predicted.

Geothermal energy

In yesterday's MIT Technology Review there's an interview with Jefferson Tester, who claims that geothermal power is a potential game-changer in the energy world.

Technology Review: How much geothermal energy could be harvested?

Jefferson Tester: The figure for the whole world is on the order of 100 million exojoules or quads [a quad is one quadrillion BTUs]. This is the part that would be useable. We now use worldwide just over 400 exojoules per year. So you do the math, and you know you've got a very big source of energy.

How much of that massive resource base could we usefully extract? Imagine that only a fraction of a percent comes out. It's still big. A tenth of a percent is 100,000 quads. You have access to a tremendous amount of stored energy. And assessment studies have shown that this is thousands of times in excess of the amount of energy we consume per-year in the country. The trick is to get it out of the ground economically and efficiently and to do it in an environmentally sustainable manner. That's what a lot of the field efforts have focused on.

The idea is to break up super-hot rock way down in the earth, flood it with water that absorbs the heat, and bring the water back up, in effect mining the heat. Tester says the technology's been successfully demonstrated and we could have commercial-scale plants up and running within 10 to 15 years.

The advantage over other renewables is that geothermal provides steady baseload power: