Articles by David Roberts

Environmentalism goes local

It's certainly not the first piece on environmentalism going local, but this WSJ story has some good stuff on rural and agricultural activism in particular. And I didn't know this:

The Sierra Club, based in San Francisco, has more than doubled the number of its local community organizers nationwide to about 100 from 40 over the past four years, while keeping its lobbying presence in Washington flat over the same time.

The CEI ads

OMFG, so, I finally went and watched the TV ads to be aired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute a week before An Inconvenient Truth is released.

I'm not sure what I expected, but these things are genuinely funny. They look like nothing so much as a parody produced by Saturday Night Live. The tag line -- the last line of the ad, read dramatically as a little girl blows a dandelion -- is: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

It's a pro-CO2 ad. Seriously. It turns out, we breathe CO2 out. And plants absorb it. It comes from animals! And oceans! Who could hate it?

As though there were a huge cabal of people out there who viewed this particular molecule as intrinsically evil.

Obviously, I'm not in the target audience. But I can't imagine anyone being persuaded by something so self-evidently absurd. I guess we'll see, though.

(One thing to note: It's "some politicians" and "global warming alarmists" making these claims about global warming. Not, say, scientists.)

Update [2006-5-17 15:48:57 by David Roberts]: Oh, I also meant to draw attention to a classic interview with CEI founder Fred Smith, from which this amazing passage is drawn:

And so it begins

Al Gore mentions "relapse."

Update [2006-5-17 10:14:32 by David Roberts]: In other Gore news, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is launching a full TV ad campaign against him "global warming alarmism" a week before Gore's movie opens. Think Progress has the lowdown on CEI.

Americans and Climate Change: The perfect problem

"Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action" (PDF) is a report synthesizing the insights of 110 leading thinkers on how to educate and motivate the American public on the subject of global warming. Background on the report here. I'll be posting a series of excerpts (citations have been removed; see original report). If you'd like to be involved in implementing the report's recommendations, or learn more, visit the Yale Project on Climate Change website.

Below the fold is the first half of the introduction to part one, which describes how global warming is a "perfect problem."