James Fallows

China's top-down energy gigantism and a bottom-up American alternative

Instead of envying China for leading on coal plant research, why not focus on what the U.S. does well -- distributed, bottom-up, human-scale innovation?

A question for James Fallows about coal and focus

I waded into "Dirty Coal, Clean Future," James Fallows' new cover piece for The Atlantic, prepared to be outraged, what with coal being the enemy of the human race and all. But it turns out to be an incredibly cogent, accessible walk through some extremely vexed issues. Still I can't help wonder why he put the focus on coal's necessity rather than its evil.

Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs — we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs

I learned something new or, rather, old from reading Fallows’ blog. The famous metaphor* — “the fatally slow human response to climate change makes us like a slowly boiling frog” — is not quite right. As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz “demonstrated that frogs will indeed remain in slowly heated water, but only […]

The future of hockey sticks on an ice-free planet

A number of people asked me to reply to a blog post by Atlantic monthly columnist James Fallows in which he opines on a variety of climate-related subjects from Al Gore to the “Hockey Stick” graph. Since I have known Fallows for a long time – we share mutual interests in rhetoric and the late […]