Articles by Joseph Romm

Years after everyone else, GM and Toyota execs skeptical about hydrogen cars

That Saturday Night Live-esque headline was inspired by a story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Top executives from General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. Tuesday expressed doubts about the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near term and suggested their companies are now betting that electric cars will prove to be a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a large scale.

Really? Hydrogen cars of dubious viability? Who ever could have guessed that in a million years? And electric cars are "a better way to reduce fuel consumption and cut tailpipe emissions on a large scale"? I'm shocked, shocked that anyone could come to that conclusion.

What if the MSM simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction?

If those who counsel inaction and delay succeed, billions of humans will suffer unimaginable misery and chaos while most other species will simply go extinct.

Maybe the best one line description of our current situation I have read is:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

That's the final sentence in Elizabeth Kolbert's fine global warming book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and as I'll show in this post, it is entirely accurate.

How can the traditional media cover a story that is almost "impossible to imagine"? I don't think they can. I'll be using a bunch of quotes, mostly from the NYT's Revkin, not because he is a bad reporter -- to the contrary, he is one of the best climate reporters -- but because now that he has a blog, he writes far more than any other journalist on this subject and shares his thinking. A new Revkin post, "The Never-Ending Story," underscores the media's central problem with this story:

I stayed up late examining the latest maneuver in the never-ending tussle between opponents of limits on greenhouse gases who are using holes in climate science as ammunition and those trying to raise public concern about a human influence on climate that an enormous body of research indicates, in the worst case, could greatly disrupt human affairs and ecosystems.

This sentence is not factually accurate (the boldface is mine). It would be much closer to accurate if the word "worst case" were replaced by "best case" or, as we'll see, "best case if the opponents of limits on GHGs fail and fail quickly." The worst case is beyond imagination. The word "holes" is misleading. And this isn't a "tussle" -- it is much closer to being a "struggle for the future of life as we know it." And all of us -- including Andy -- better pray that it ain't "never-ending. " Before elaborating, let me quote some more :

Renewable energy subterfuge

The following is a guest essay by Daniel J. Weiss and Nick Kong. It was originally published on the Center for American Progress website.

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"Watch what we do, not we say," Attorney General John N. Mitchell accurately warned at the dawn of the Nixon administration. This could also be a fitting epitaph for President Bush's energy policies. Despite frequent claims of support for renewable energy over the years, the record shows consistent opposition to efforts to spur investments in clean wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.

The subterfuge began when President Bush announced his administration's National Energy Policy on May 17, 2001. The White House's plan was based on recommendations provided to Vice President Cheney from coal, oil, nuclear and other dirty energy companies. The speech included a soothing nod to renewable electricity -- five weeks after the administration proposed slashing millions from renewable energy programs.

The routine has varied little since Bush first took office. President Bush pays lip service to clean energy technologies, while opposing many voluntary incentives and other efforts to promote these very same technologies. Often, these events occur only days apart.

Another attempt at sleight of hand will occur on Wednesday, March 5, when President Bush addresses the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference. This speech comes just seven days after the administration opposed House passage of the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act, H.R. 5351. This bill would extend tax credits to encourage producers and homeowners to employ wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy technologies. Without an extension, an estimated 116,000 construction workers and other employees will lose their jobs.

President Bush will no doubt use his speech to extol the virtues of clean energy technology incentives even while he prepares to wield his veto pen to stop legislation that would do just that. This will only be one event in a long string of Bush rhetoric that doesn't match reality:

Hansen throws cold water on cooling climate claim

NASA's James Hansen has weighed in (PDF) to ...

... expose the recent nonsense that has appeared in the blogosphere, to the effect that recent cooling has wiped out global warming of the past century, and the Earth may be headed into an ice age. On the contrary, these misleaders have foolishly (or devilishly) fixated on a natural fluctuation that will soon disappear.

As Hansen explains: