Articles by David Roberts

‘When you drive, society becomes an obstacle.’

This screed by George Monbiot is mostly directed at a particular set of UK organizations, but it contains worthy insights with broader application:

Increased lava flow …

I once claimed that environmental humor is never funny.

But Will Ferrell as President Bush, speaking on global warming? Kinda funny.

(via EE)

Chock full of good news … ha ha …

Top 10 lists are all the rage, but if seeing King Kong the other night taught me anything, it's that more isn't always better. In that spirit, here are my nominations for the top five environmental stories of the year.

1. Katrina

The discussion about Hurricane Katrina and global warming largely missed the point. Of course global warming didn't cause Katrina -- any given weather event is the nexus of thousands of causes, proximate and distal. The exact degree of attribution scientifically supported is a question for eco-wonks and science geeks.

The point about Katrina that will linger in the public's mind is: Oh, that's what climate can do.

And, relatedly: We are totally and completely unprepared.

2. Bush wins on climate change

Despite taking fire from an astonishing array of sources -- Tony Blair, Democrats, city mayors, state attorneys general, celebrity spokesfolk, science advocacy groups, a majority of the public, and even Republicans in Congress -- the Bush administration succeeded in delaying significant efforts to address climate change for another year. At home, at the G8 summit, at the Montreal U.N. climate talks, it simply dug in its heels. No one figured out how to move it.

McKibben in NYRB

I don't have a new intro, so I'll just steal my last one:

"Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them."

The latest is "The Coming Meltdown," in the New York Review of Books. There's not a lot of new info in it (unless you're interested in the two books reviewed), but as always, it's engagingly written and contains some juicy quotes. How about this, from Harvard's James McCarthy:

Scientists are by training and nature conservative and ... have probably underestimated our impact. Fifty years from now -- I hope I'm wrong -- I think you may be living in a world where you don't go outside between one and four in the afternoon.

Whee!

And some classic McKibben:

It is hard not to approach this year's oncoming winter in an elegiac mood .... We are forced to face the fact that a century's carelessness is now melting away the world's storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It's as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it's no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening.