mainstream media

NYT gets schooled by readers on efficiency

Last week The New York Times had an editorial singing the praises of energy efficiency. It wasn't bad, nor particularly great -- mixing up conservation with efficiency, focusing too much on oil/transportation, and never giving a decent sense of scale.

On Sunday, however, came a battery of letters in response to the editorial, all of which are excellent and all of which expand the focus in new ways. One of them is from Tom Casten, father of our own Sean and champion of recycled energy. Another emphasizes steady long-term research; several praise solar power's potential; another notes the key role of walkable communities and transit; another mentions meat consumption.

There's a lot of untapped, unaggregated expertise out there on this. I hope the NYT notices the great feedback and pursues the issue further. Imagine how much efficiency we could wring out of our economy if we had the whole culture focused on it.

Government investment in the Midwest will grease the skids for cap-and-trade

The New York Times, in an article entitled, "Geography is dividing Democrats over energy," makes much of an alleged split between policymakers on the coasts, vs. those in the Midwest and Plains states. Somehow coal and manufacturing are grouped together, challenging a concern for global warming:

"There's a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts," said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. "It's up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it's cheaper."

Since many, if not most, of my posts attempt to explain why manufacturing and green issues are mutually reinforcing instead of at loggerheads, I find this all very troubling. The problem seems to be that a cap-and-trade policy would make coal more expensive, thus making electricity for manufacturing more expensive. In addition, cap-and-trade might make energy-intensive industries, such as steel and chemicals, more expensive as well.

I think the way to square this circle is to pair cap-and-trade with direct governmental investment to assist coal dependent areas turn to green energy. In other words, if cap-and-trade legislation was passed along with funding to build the wind and solar systems needed to replace the coal plants (and the attendant electrical grid upgrades), then nobody would be worse off. In fact, the Midwest and other manufacturing states would prosper by manufacturing the very wind turbines and solar panels that would be used to replace the coal plants as well as generating any potential on-site solar and wind power. But that would require big bucks from the federal government.

Unless cap-and-trade is accompanied by direct funding for clean energy construction, I'm afraid cap-and-trade will be in big trouble in Congress.

NYT fails to acknowledge the job-creation opportunities from climate legislation

On the front page of Wednesday's NYT, we learned that Midwestern Democrats hate the climate. Or something. The ostensible point of the article was to highlight the geographical split between the climate change policymakers from the Obama administration and the House -- predominantly from the East and West coasts -- and the moderate Midwestern and Plains-state Democrats in the Senate who, according to the NYT, actually care about jobs.

For the record, the article, while admitting that President Barack Obama is, you know, Midwestern, ignored the fact that Ray LaHood and Tom Vilsack, Secretaries of Transportation and Agriculture, respectively, 1) are also from the Midwest, and 2) will have a significant role in devising an economy-wide solution to climate change.

And this is not to underplay the legitimate concerns that representatives from coal-dependent manufacturing states have. But this mostly just points to the greater weakness of the article -- the way it plays into the idea that addressing climate change will be some kind of job-killing catastrophe. This from the same newspaper that could write a feature on the tremendous job creation underway in Iowa related to wind-turbine manufacturing, a serious growth industry given that the nearby Plains states are considered the "so-called Saudi Arabia of wind." Keep in mind that enormous wind turbines will likely never be imported from abroad since one of these monstrous steel blades can barely fit on an oversize tractor-trailer much less be flown around the world on a 747. Indeed, the industry's potential for the Midwest led President Obama to visit a turbine factory in Ohio just the other week.

NYT's Revkin seems shocked by media's own failure to explain climate threat

Who determines the set of ideas the public is exposed to -- and how they are framed? The national media.

The media's choices are especially important in a decade when the Executive Branch -- the principal force for setting the national agenda -- was run by two oil men who actively devoted major resources to denying the reality of climate science, ignoring the impacts, and muzzling U.S. climate scientists.

Yet the national media remains exceedingly lame on the climate issue, as a searing critique by a leading U.S. journalist details (see "How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics"). The media downplay the threat of global warming (and hence the cost of inaction). And they still hedge on attributing climate impacts to human action.

This criticism extends to our premier reporters, such as the New York Times' Andy Revkin. Indeed, I (and dozens of other people) have an email from last week that Andy sent to Mark Morano (denier extraordinaire staffer for Senate denier extraordinaire James Inhofe). Andy asserts:

I've been the most prominent communicator out there saying the most established aspects of the issue of human-driven climate change lie between the poles of catastrophe and hoax.

Following that shockingly un-scientific statement, he includes the link to his 2007 piece, "A New Middle Stance Emerges in Debate over Climate," that touts the views of Roger A. Pielke Jr., of all people! The "middle stance" is apparently just the old denier do-nothing stance with a smile, a token nod to science, and a $5 a ton CO2 tax -- which is why I call them denier-eq's.

Now if the top NYT reporter is pushing the mushy middle -- if he writes things like "Even with the increasing summer retreats of sea ice, which many polar scientists say probably are being driven in part by global warming caused by humans, if his stories have online headlines like Arctic Ice Hints at Warming, Specialists Say -- why on Earth would it be news that the public is itself stuck in the mushy middle?

And yet in both the NYT article and his blog, Revkin makes a huge deal of a poll that, if anything, merely reveals how bad the media's coverage of the issue is. His blog post, "Obama Urgent on Warming, Public Cool" and his article, "Environmental Issues Slide in Poll of Public's Concerns," completely misframe the issue. Let's start with the blog:

Media's 'decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress'

One of the country's leading journalists has written a searing critique of the media's coverage of global warming, especially climate economics.

How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change [PDF] is by Eric Pooley for Harvard's prestigious Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Pooley has been managing editor of Fortune, national editor of Time, Time's chief political correspondent, and Time's White House correspondent, where he won the Gerald Ford Prize for Excellence in Reporting. Before that, he was a senior editor of New York magazine.

In short, Pooley has earned the right to be heard. Journalists and senior editors need to pay heed to Pooley's three tough conclusions abut how "damaging" the recent media of the climate debate has been:

1. The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus ... that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones ... The press allowed opponents of climate action to replicate the false debate over climate science in the realm of climate economics.
2. The press failed to perform the basic service of making climate policy and its economic impact understandable to the reader and allowed opponents of climate action to set the terms of the cost debate. The argument centered on the short-term costs of taking action -- i.e., higher electricity and gasoline prices -- and sometimes assumed that doing nothing about climate change carried no cost.
3. Editors failed to devote sufficient resources to the climate story. In general, global warming is still being shoved into the "environment" pigeonhole, along with the spotted owls and delta smelt, when it is clearly to society's detriment to think about the subject that way. It is time for editors to treat climate policy as a permanent, important beat: tracking a mobilization for the moral equivalent of war.

Precisely.

Pooley is one of the few major journalists in the country who understands that global warming is the story of the century -- if we don't reverse our emissions path soon, it will tragically be the story of the millennium, with irreversible impacts lasting for many, many centuries (see here).

In a conversation Saturday, Pooley told me, "I think this is the only story going forward." That's why, although he remains a contributor to Time magazine, he is devoting most of his time now to researching and writing a book on the politics and economics of climate change.

The first step for Pooley was an analysis of media coverage over the past 15 months. In a long introduction to the different roles reporters can play, Pooley notes:

Carbon price volatility is a real issue

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were at it this week, flogging stories about how falling carbon prices are threatening clean technology. I've written before about how easy it is to get distracted by carbon prices, which, under cap-and-trade, are more of a symptom of a broader issue, not a cause.

The Journal piece is fairly defensible. The Times piece is fairly hopeless:

Another blow to the sector is the tumbling price of permits for emitting carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. In countries where emitters must buy these permits, like those in the European Union, low prices mean emitters have fewer incentives to make their production process more efficient or move to less greenhouse gas intensive fuels.

FOX News continues quest to endumben viewers

If crime rates are rising, how come I didn't get mugged today?

P.S. from Grist's Russ Walker: Given the example above, it's not hard to see why so many Americans don't believe human activities are causing global warming. Some grim polling data here from Rasmussen (though the survey questions aren't exactly written in such a way to reflect the true complexity of the issue...)

Grist pulled no punches in covering all of George Bush's dirt

  A movie no one would make.   Imagine that back in 1999 you were a Hollywood studio executive and a movie producer brought you the following pitch: A bumbling, incurious child of privilege wastes his youth on Oedipal rebellion. After stumbling through a series of failed business ventures and an undistinguished stint as governor […]

New York Times creates dedicated environmental reporting team

This is extremely kick-ass news: The New York Times is creating a dedicated unit of eight reporters, with their own full-time editor, to cover environmental stories.

Columbia Journalism Review has all the details:

That editor is Erica Goode, a former behavior and psychology reporter turned Health editor who has been at the Times since 1998 and spent her last year in Baghdad covering the Iraq War. Her impressive team comprises Andrew Revkin and Cornelia Dean from Science, Felicity Barringer and Leslie Kaufman from National, Elisabeth Rosenthal from Foreign, Mia Navarro from Metro, and the Washington bureau's Matthew Wald, who writes for the paper's Energy Challenge series (another multi-department project).