Articles by David Roberts

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.

Talking Points

Climate and energy have entered mainstream dialog. They're being discussed on op-ed pages and cable news, by ordinary people around the water cooler (do they still have those?), outside of environmental and policy-wonk circles. Hell, Rory's grandparents bought her a Prius on Gilmore Girls. Or so I hear.

This is all to the good: these are extraordinarily important issues, and every concerned citizen should be at least minimally educated about them.

Problem is, there are lots of folks out there with a vested interest in confusing people and derailing these discussions. They are armed with misleading factoids and bogus rhetorical tricks, and seek to kick up enough dust to convince the public that it's all just too complex and they should leave it up to politicians -- politicians bought by the very vested interests in question. There are massive misinformation campaigns afoot, and your average Joe or Jane is outgunned.

So, I'm starting a series of posts called Talking Points. The idea is to provide short bits of ammunition for y'all to take out into the public square. I want to collect arguments or ideas or notions or turns of phrase that might be useful when talking to people about climate- and energy-related matters. I'll try to avoid wonkiness and scientific jargon.

And of course I'd love it if you left your own talking points in comments, or emailed them to me.

Stay tuned.

Clean Automotive Technology funding

It's over a week old, but it's still worth reading Michael Stebbins' piece in Seed about the cool things coming out of the EPA's Clean Automotive Technology program -- including the nifty "hydraulic hybrid" UPS truck -- and Congress' short-sighted refusal to fund it adequately:

... between 2002 and 2006, the President's annual budget requests and Congress had tag-teamed the Clean Automotive Technology program, slashing its budget in half to $10 million per year for the 35 engineers working to reinvent the engine. In his budget request for 2007 -- released just after his State of the Union address, in which he announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to decrease our oil imports from the Middle East as much as 75% by 2025 -- the President asked Congress to cut the budget for the program to a paltry $3.6 million.

Jerks.

Brilliant

A friend who inexplicably still reads Wired religiously pointed me to this interview with Larry Brilliant, who was recently put in charge of Google.org, the philanthropic foundation set up by the Google guys.

Brilliant's quite a guy -- check out the whole thing -- but naturally this jumped out at me:

What's your mandate?
We'll have three big areas: climate crisis, global public heath, and global poverty, not necessarily in that order. I'm going to approach this the way a venture capitalist would -- map out the industry to see what the gaps are. You fund an initiative, learn what works, and ask, "Will it scale?"