mainstream media
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One more communique dribbles in from the gamma quadrant
You don’t see super-wingnutty stuff like this very often in the mainstream media any more. This was my favorite bit: But didn’t the Nobel Peace Prize go last year to Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for their eco-warnings? Yes. And the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of […]
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What I would like to say in the New York Times
I’m going to pretend that instead of a silly article diagnosing a pretend disease in The New York Times, I was given a chance to speak on the op-ed pages of the Times. Ignoring for a moment how unlikely that is, here’s what I would have said. —– Last weekend my family and I appeared […]
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Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash
My father used to say of his profession that newspaper editors are the people who come down from the mountaintop at the end of the battle and shoot the wounded. A massive credit crunch and a drop in the price of fossil fuels can mean only one thing to the editors of the traditional media […]
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Short-term cost assessment skews the CW on carbon regulations
Joe says Andy Revkin’s article on the candidates’ climate plans is reasonably fair, and I suppose I agree. It’s fair as a representation of conventional wisdom, if not particularly accurate as a representation of reality. (That’s not Revkin’s fault — claiming one side in a dispute is correct, while both the other side and the […]
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Frontline documentary ‘Heat’ looks at the politics of global warming
The PBS program “Frontline” is premiering a new two-hour documentary about global warming on Tuesday night: Heat, produced by Martin Smith. Though it kicks off with discussion of melting icecaps, it’s way more heavy on the political side of the issue than the scientific. It puts the presidential candidates’ rhetoric on climate change into the […]
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Green journos: Scientific and idealistic and ignorant and cootie-covered
MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman pens a truly incoherent and dunderheaded attack on environmental journalists. Look at this mess, taken from the middle of the piece: Beyond sticking to a few catch-phrases and earnestly spouting a do-good philosophy gleaned from Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the media aren’t doing much to try to explain the green […]
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Concord vs. Keynes in the nation’s editorial pages
Ruth Marcus gets it wrong: [The economic crisis] could give the next president more maneuvering room to extricate himself from unaffordable campaign promises and to build political consensus for painful but necessary budgetary choices. Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman gets it right: And this is also a good time to engage in some serious […]
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Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, part 2
In 2007, NPR broadcast a now-infamous climate debate on the proposition “Global warming is not a crisis.” In theory, this sounds like an easy win for the “nay” side — “crisis” is obviously the mildest of words to describe the greatest preventable existential threat to the health and well-being of future generations. But in practice […]
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The Environment Report naively pushes Monsanto-related study praising rBGH
I don’t know much about Environment Report, a non-profit producer of radio reports about, uh, the environment. But I can’t say I’m impressed by its recent piece on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the genetically modified "feed enhancer" for dairy cows that Monsanto recently sold to Eli Lilly. In it (transcript here), reporter Shawn Allee […]