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
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An interview with smart-growth expert and author Anthony Flint
Few debates in the U.S. are more emotionally charged than the one over sprawl — the exodus, since World War II, of America’s middle class from cities to far-flung residential areas. Environmentalists, small farmers, and social-justice activists deplore sprawl for its unhealthy effects on land and communities. Suburbanites bristle at the attacks on their personal […]
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Gore’s sources
I forget who sent me this, but there's a nifty post over on unbossed.com about the sources used for Al Gore's famous slideshow.
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Samuelson’s counsel of despair
A column by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post has conservatives all a-twitter -- appropriate, I guess, since it gathers all the state-of-the-art conservative talking points on global warming in one place.
Browse around at reactions and the impression you will get above all is that conservatives just don't take the subject very seriously. They're looking for some clever arguments so they can move onto other stuff that gets their viscera churning (terrorism, evil liberals, etc.). This headline is typical: "WaPo: Global Warming a Bunch of Bull."
Of course, that's not what the column says at all. What the column says is that we can't really do anything about global warming, and any politician who says otherwise is a hypocrite. It advocates despair and surrender.
There are two primary points in the column, and one conclusion that follows from the two points. Let's take them in order.
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Goldberg grapples with the big question
Both Matt and Ezra have commented on this question, quoted approvingly by Jonah Goldberg from a reader email:
If Al Gore were to be convinced that global warming WAS a natural phenomena, would he be so worked up about it? I don't think so, yet the consequences would be the same.
Let's address this in three ways.
1. Would it make a practical difference if global warming were natural? Would it change our response? Of course. I don't know how to put it any more simply than I did in this post:
