Articles by Joseph Romm

Science says we are turning the West into a desert

A major new study in Science by a dozen water experts, concluded humans are the primary cause of changes in Western river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack in the past 50 years -- and things will only get worse if we don't act soon. The abstract of the study, "Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States" (subs. req'd), led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, states:

A metaphor for climate change and modern politics, in film form

That would be the title of An Inconvenient Truth, if it had been produced by the Coen brothers -- since young men (and women) are poised to suffer through the worst consequences of our immoral short-sightedness. (This is not such an odd pairing of movies, considering that No Country star Tommy Lee Jones was the Harvard roommate of Al Gore).

I do think No Country for Old Men deserves the Oscar for best movie of the year because it is brilliantly constructed and acted -- and delivers a powerful, coherent message to all of us from the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy.

Yet this is easily one of the most depressing and nihilistic major movies ever made. On the nihilistic/life-affirming story scale, where Hamlet is a 1 and It's a Wonderful Life is a 10, No Country is easily a zero and perhaps deserves negative numbers.

Normally I do not like movies with an unhappy ending, and this movie arguably has about the unhappiest ending a movie of its kind could possibly have -- but the movie did seem to me a perfect metaphor for modern American politics and global warming.

[You can read the basic plotline here. Since Wikipedia is untroubled by spoilers, with nary a warning, why should I be? Note to people who haven't seen the movie: (1) I'm assuming you have figured out that when a film is titled No Country for Old Men, you can be sure it does not end well, and (2) this post will not make much sense to you.]

A safety valve in Lieberman-Warner is senseless

I see no point whatsoever in passing a climate bill this year that includes a safety valve. I have blogged on this before, but it bears repeating as we appear to be getting to the endgame negotiations in the Senate on the Lieberman-Warner bill. Bottom line:

If you want to get a 60% to 80% greenhouse gas cut in four decades, you just can't waste time with safety valves. We need to get to a price of $30 to $40 a ton for carbon dioxide as soon as possible -- and if it needs to go higher than that because conservatives block the progressives and moderates from legislating aggressive technology deployment strategies that would keep costs low, well, as the saying goes, "We'll burn that bridge when we come to it."

If you just want to pass a bill that makes it seem like you're doing something while in fact doing little, then go for it! But surely a year's delay (waiting for a somewhat wiser Congress and an infinitely wiser president) is better than a pointless bill.

In an article titled "Sponsors of Senate emissions bill seek compromise on cost provisions," Greenwire (subs. req'd) reports:

Mary Matalin calls global warming ‘a largely unscientific hoax’

Mary Matalin, conservative operative and wife of liberal operative James Carville, explained on CNN today why conservatives don't like McCain's views on global warming: It's "a largely unscientific hoax." Oh, well, then never mind.

Her husband takes a different view (duh): "What we need to do, as a party, is try our best to focus on those two issues, energy independence and global warming, above the other environmental and energy issues out there."

So to him, global warming is the top environmental issue. To her it is a hoax. If they can be married, why can't the Sunnis and Shiites live in harmony?