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.
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Is climate denialism postmodern?
Jack Handey has nothing on his deep thoughts.Photo: Satyakam KhadikarA few months ago, in a post about the larger significance of the right’s climate denialism, I said this: “Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.” In a New York Times Magazine piece last weekend, […]
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What we have and haven’t learned from ‘Climategate’
I wrote about the “Climategate” controversy (over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit) once, which is about what it warranted. My silent protest had no effect whatsoever, of course, and the story followed a depressingly familiar trajectory: hyped relentlessly by right-wing media, bullied into the mainstream press as he-said she-said, […]
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Why it’s hard to make polluters pay for their own messes
Scoffing at the idea of externalities is a lot easier when wearing a gas mask.Industrial boilers and incinerators currently receive an enormous public subsidy. They emit toxic air pollutants like mercury, cadmium, and acid gases, which even in extremely small amounts cause a range of health maladies from asthma to heart attacks to premature death, […]
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Climate reformists challenge old economic models
A few weeks ago I wrote about the seemingly different futures foretold by climate science and climate economics. The former is filled with peril and haunted by the unthinkable, the latter blithely assured of continued prosperity. Most economic modeling, you’ll recall, forecasts the continued rise of global gross domestic product (GDP) — people in the […]
