Economist.com leads today with a pessimistic analysis of air travel's impact on the environment.

Newsweek stands up to the naysayers

Kudos to Newsweek.

I don't have a subscription, so I don't know if this is last week's issue or this one's. But all I know is I was happy to see this - on the cover, no less:

(the footnote reads: "*Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine.")

So much of the American media up until this point has treated global warming's existence as a political question - phrasing such as "some scientists believe that...", giving global warming deniers the same screen time as reputable scientists, and so on and so forth. For Newsweek to take the issue out of the arena of political "debate" and depict it as what it is - science under attack - is not only brave journalism, but crucial at this stage in history. One key thing the article mentions again and again is that the "denial machine", as they call it, worked not only to kill climate change bills in congress, but to keep the public skeptical - and it is that skepticism, perhaps even more than the ineptitude of congress itself, is what is preventing action more than anything else at this stage.

Hopefully this will be the one of the first actions taken by the mainstream media to take the global warming discussion out of its politicized, pseudo-scientific bubble of "legitimacy" and "consensus", and place it into actual significant discourse about what needs to be done - the real question we all need to be asking.

Excerpt:

Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine's campaign. It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. "If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action," says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995. By appointing former coal and oil lobbyists to key jobs overseeing climate policy, he found, the [Bush] administration made sure that didn't happen. Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial—and therefore no basis for making policy. Ex-oil lobbyist Philip Cooney, working for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, edited a 2002 report on climate science by sprinkling it with phrases such as "lack of understanding" and "considerable uncertainty." A short section on climate in another report was cut entirely. The White House "directed us to remove all mentions of it," says Piltz, who resigned in protest. An oil lobbyist faxed Cooney, "You are doing a great job."

The response to the international climate panel's latest report, in February, showed that greenhouse doubters have a lot of fight left in them. In addition to offering $10,000 to scientists willing to attack the report, which so angered [California Senator Barbara] Boxer, they are emphasizing a new theme. Even if the world is warming now, and even if that warming is due in part to the greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, there's nothing to worry about. As [global warming denier and MIT meteorologist Richard] Lindzen wrote in a guest editorial in NEWSWEEK International in April, "There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe."

You can read the article in its entirety here - I recommend you do.

Two interesting Times articles about biofuel today: Ethanol Makes a Hot Market for Farmland and The Energy Challenge: Cooking Up More Uses for the Leftovers of Biofuel Production.

Bush may be changing his tune on climate change. "U.S. President George W. Bush vowed earlier this year to gather leading polluters together to discuss climate change and now he’s set the date: Sept. 27-28. Invitations have gone out to France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Japan, China, Canada, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa as well as the European Union and United Nations. Reports say the president even intends to address the conference." This is actually the same week as a similar UN summit on the same subject - which may or may not be a coincidence.

Many American cities are already working on conforming to the Kyoto Protocol despite no action being taken by the Federal government, including the nation's first carbon tax in Boulder, CO.



The former mayor of Bogota, Colombia on modern urban design and "cars vs. people". Coming from what I would consider predominantly "people-friendly" Boston, I find this really interesting. (via TreeHugger)

The world's water tables are falling. (What's a water table?) "Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come at roughly the same time. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially unmanageable food scarcity." Scary stuff.

Solarcentury, a company I talked about briefly earlier, just completed a(nother) massive solar array on the roof of an office building in London. Why aren't we seeing this in the US already?

The Nag is cute website (and British, again) which will send you little reminders once a month about "one easy thing you can do to be greener, cleaner and, if you're not careful, a tiny bit smug." Sounds fantastic to me, but I think I'm already pretty smug as-is.

The Times' #1 most emailed article:

In Praise of Tap Water. "Tap water may now be the equal of bottled water, but that could change. The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap water, the less political support there will be for investing in maintaining America’s public water supply. That would be a serious loss. Access to cheap, clean water is basic to the nation’s health."