Collide-a-scape

This is both clever and astute:

Oil shale is kind of like online journalism, there’s such potential there, but from the looks of it, we may never figure out how to make a profitable industry of it.

From there, Terray Sylvester of High Country News does a nice job deciphering the contradictory signals sent by Ken Salazar at a recent press conference, when the Interior Secretary announced the decision to  scrap what he termed the “flawed” oil shale research demonstration leases approved in the final days of the Bush Administration–and replace those with a new set of leases to be offered sometime in the future.

By now, Andy Revkin must feel like a tackling dummy. All this week, numerous liberal bloggers have singed him for this piece he wrote on the misrepresentation of climate data, in which he essentially equated Al Gore with George Will.

Gore’s camp has taken offense, respected scientists have registered their disapproval, and  climate change ideologues have gone barking mad.

Today, it’s George Will’s turn to be offended. In this column, Will throws a few soft jabs at Andy’s reporting and then digs in his heels over this previous column that triggered the fracas several weeks back.  Taken together, both of Will’s columns play Twister with science data to claim that concerns over global warming are exaggerated. Anyone familiar with Will’s position on climate change knows that he has sung this tune for years.

Yet, the outrage hurled at the Washington Post for publishing Will’s columns is off the charts. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. This is not 1998, when the American public was still pretty fuzzy headed about global warming.  The debate today has moved past Is global warming happening to How do we de-carbonize the world economy. I don’t see anybody in Congress (besides Inhofe) arguing about the science. The battlefront has moved to policy.

Sorry, Joe Romm, but I think you’re stuck in mud, fighting an old war. You and your cohorts are working up frothy umbrage for naught. What’s more, it’s totally out of proportion to Will’s actual influence and reach. Sure he’s got a nationally syndicated column. But Thomas Friedman has a pretty large megaphone too and I’d argue that he’s been a whole lot more effective at bringing the nation’s thought leaders ( and politically moderate Americans) over to your side.

Now let me be clear about something, because I’ve been teeing off on Romm and a few others all this week. I agree that Andy’s equating Gore with Will was off base. My beef is with the way Romm and Brad Johnson went about it. I’ve already made my case for why I think Romm was out of line.

Johnson’s critique of Andy’s column, while civil in tone, is undermined by his irresponsible character distortions of David Ropeik and Roger Pielke, Jr. At least Johnson provided a link to Ropeik’s website so readers could make some kind of independent assessment. With Pielke, Jr., who, like Ropeik, Johnson characterizes as having “ties to corporate, right-wing America,” there is no substantiation offered for this broad and vague depiction, much less a link to Pielke’s homepage, which would reveal an impressive academic record.

Moreover, earlier this week Johnson conducted an interview with Pielke Jr., and didn’t see fit to post any of it in his “updates” of the Revkin critique post. (But he found space for Romm and Gore’s spokesperson and others.)  So let me direct readers over to Prometheus, where Roger has posted the entire interview with Johnson. I think Wonk Room readers would find it interesting reading.

I’m all for vigorous, fiery debate. But not ad hominum attacks and weasly, unsubstantiated guilt-by-association smears.

Since I moved last August to Boulder, Colorado (temporarily), I’ve been a wee bit concerned about the mountain lions that occasionally pass through my Foothills neighborhood. (Yes, I know, I’m on their turf.)

My attitude has veered between healthy respect, outright fear, and typical, cartoonish New York bravado (who you looking at?).

My four year old son has somehow picked up only on the fear, so I can never get him to take out the garbage on his own yet. (Yeah, right, I don’t let him get more than a foot away from me–ever.)

Anyway, turns out that I was worried about the wrong animal species. The poor little guy got bit by one of his classmates in preschool yesterday. The little bugger who bit him broke the skin and left teeth marks too.

So I guess that should be the next metric that makes its way into a mountain lion story: how many preschoolers get bit every year by one of their buds, compared to how many get bit by a mountain lion.

Of course, when I get home after dark, I still make a beeline from the driveway to the front door. Can’t take any chances.

Last May, shortly before I left Audubon Magazine (where I was an editor for eight years), I received a flurry of angry calls from around the country.

None of these people knew me; they were trying to reach John Flicker, National Audubon Society’s President. My phone extension had become mistaken with the organization’s main number and suddenly I was being bombarded by fans of conservative radio host Michael Reagan. On one of his shows and in a subsequent column, Reagan directed his listeners to call Flicker, along with the presidents of EarthJustice and The Natural Resources Defense Council, and implore them to stop opposing domestic oil and gas drilling:

If you want to drill in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico or in the continental U.S.–where billions of gallons of petroleum are just waiting to be tapped–or build refineries, these three people stand in your way.

I’m sure it was news to John Flicker that he had this kind of influence, or that he opposed all U.S. drilling. (Hell, up until a few years ago, Audubon got money from a long-time gas drilling project in Louisiana that happened to take place on a wildlife refuge. Yeah, that was controversial.) But at any rate, Reagan’s listeners must have taken his rant seriously, because I was getting all those irate calls.

This episode sprang to mind today because of recent blog posts by Joseph Romm (see here and here), in which he attacks The York Times for this column by John Tierney and this news analysis by Andy Revkin. I’ve taken a stab at unpacking Romm’s missive against Revkin here and at another of his attacks on the Times here.

Romm’s slash-and-burn harangues are striking to behold for their stridency, and in this one, for his plea to readers to email Times editors and “demand a correction for the egregious mistakes” in Tierney’s column.

A similar vent-your-spleen tactic was employed by The Wonk Room at the end of its attack on Revkin.

Now I don’t have a problem with directing readers to other outlets (be they media or a government agency, or whatever) to express their opinions on a given issue. When I was at Audubon Magazine, providing contact sources for readers at the end of stories was routine practice. But we didn’t whip them up with mad-dog rhetoric or even tell them what to say.

By contrast, Romm and other bloggers are issuing directives to their respective flocks that urges them to express their outrage to the Times. 

The intent is transparent: to impugn someone’s reputation. And probably as effective and misdirected as those dopey phone calls I mistakenly got from Michael Reagan’s listeners last May.

Another day, another screed from Joseph Romm.

Joe, do you have any idea how shrill this latest broadside against the New York Times sounds?  Yes, there is legitimate debate to be had over the merits of comparing Al Gore to George Will, which is what science reporter Andrew Revkin does in this Times piece published today.

But your main debating points are lost in a blizzard of 1) meandering digressions on previous Revkin stories that supposedly contain factual errors; 2) inane, childish posturing on the use of “imperfect” word choices (in which you basically say, I’ll cop to it, but Andy won’t…) and, finally 3) silly asides (”Revkin owes Gore an apology”).

Some bloggers, such as my colleague Tom Yulsman, are aghast at Romm’s nasty and crude tone, while others, like David Roberts at Grist, are perhaps telegraphing a cryptic message of disapproval.

I think Romm is just driven batshit by his own sense of rightousness on the climate issue. He probably doesn’t even know when he’s being hysterical or inconsistent. For example, just a few weeks ago Romm was lauding Revkin for bringing necessary gravitas and climate change context to the Times‘ coverage of the Australian fires. (Be forewarned, you need to endure another hectoring Rommian post on how the rest of the media got the story wrong.)

Since then, however, the award-winning Revkin seems to have lost his reporting mojo, because now Romm suddenly wonders (in bold, of course):

whether Andy Revkin himself understands the state of climate science today and what happens on our current path of unrestricted emissions. I suggest he reimmerse himself in the recent literature and in discussions with leading climate scientists, if he wants to return to his former position as the leading climate reporter in the country.

Got that, Andy? You better get back up to speed if you want to reclaim that crown. You can start by calling up Al Gore, who “right now,” according to Romm, is the “best climate reporter in the country.”

And Andy, don’t forget to apologize to Al.

This absurd post by Joseph Romm, in which he accuses The New York Times of “media malpractice” due to supposed errant climate change coverage in several recent stories, reveals a doctrinaire mindset on the relationship between global warming and natural disasters that is becoming all too common in environmentalists.

Romm is ticked off because, among other things, this front-page Times piece on California’s drought didn’t mention human-induced climate change as a “likely” factor and that another Times piece on Australia’s catastrophic fires (”Australia Police Confirm Arson Role in Wildfires”) was improperly headlined.  Regarding the latter, let’s remember that straight news coverage of major disasters tend to highlight the newsiest developments of the moment. To Romm, though, the Times headline was a missed opportunity:

Apparently, the editors believe that blaming individual bad guys is the best way to frame the story, not blaming us all for all our contribution to human-caused global warming.

So let me get this straight: Australia’s tragic fires shouldn’t be pinned on arson, or bad fire managment, or recent settlement patterns, or least of all, parched conditions resulting from cyclical drought, but rather all of humanity?

Romm is particularly histrionic over the Caifornia drought story (”Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California”) that appeared on Monday. The Times reporter, Jesse McKinley, writes that:

The country’s biggest agricultural engine, California’s sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms and towns.

To Romm, there is nothing “unlucky” about this drought. As he rightly points out, California is experiencing a record drop in snowpack and rainfall. But it is also true that California has a long history of severe, periodic droughts, some of which McKinley informs readers of later in his piece. Romm never acknowledges this larger perspective in his post. Instead, he claims there is “abundant science” that shows the currently reduced snowpack and rainfall to be “precisely what we would expect from human-caused climate change…”

Not exactly. There is good science and legitimate concern that climate change will exacerbate Western droughts this century–but no smoking gun for this particular drought.

That’s not to say McKinley’s story couldn’t have been leavened with a forward-looking graph on climate change and projected linkages to future California droughts.

Somehow, though, I doubt this would have satisfied Romm, who lately sees climate change behind every wildfire, drought and heat wave.

In his latest rant, Romm seems to argue that any story on extreme weather should amount to a story on climate change:

In the past, I think the media and scientists felt they had to bend over backwards not to attribute any single weather event 100 percent to human-caused global warming — but today there is no excuse whatsoever for a senior reporter at a major newspaper not reporting that what is occurring now is precisely what climate science has been predicting would happen.

Better yet, Romm advises, why even bother with mainstream newspaper reporters, when

if you want to find the best journalism now on climate — the most science-based, the most fact-based, the most integrated and comprehensive, the most relevant to your lives and the lives of your children and the people you care about and indeed all of humanity — you must go to the web, specifically the blogosphere.

I’m down with that. I just wouldn’t advise anyone to seek out Joe Romm as your fact-based, truth-seeking guide.

In case you missed this, Ben Stein favors a carbon tax. Seems like the California resident and conservative economist is having “trouble breathing on too many days.”

But his argument is more against the unpredictability of cap and trade. That, and putting the same masters of the universe back in the driver’s seat:

Haven’t we just has a big lesson in what happens when we put traders ahead of producers and consumers? Have we forgotten that lesson already?

This editorial in Indian Country Today argues that tribal communities need to throw off the yoke of federal assistance and develop their own economic development initiatives (beyond gaming). I’m curious to see the reaction from tribal leaders, especially to this:

Winning legal and political battles to see our children live in poverty and with limited opportunities will not take us far, and in the long run will not preserve tribal communities, governments, or cultures. The American social welfare system is still necessary for most Indian communities, but it does not propose a clear plan, or any plan at all, for future community and individual development.

Indian Country’s next editorial on this issue should identify what it thinks are the kinds of economic development that will sustain Indian communities and lift them to prosperity.  I suspect that an attitudinal shift–one that calls for more social and economic integration–will be necessary, along the lines of what the Amish are starting to do, which was recently spotlighted in this New York Times story.

The evidence for civilization-killing droughts keeps piling up. Well…sort of.

All the worldwide headlines on this latest story about Angkor, the ancient Cambodian city, mention drought. And for good reason. As the AP reports, new tree ring evidence by scientists show

that Southeast Asia was hit by a severe and prolonged drought from 1415 until 1439, coinciding with the period during which many archeologists believe Angkor collapsed.

But as this previous research published in 2007 suggests, population pressure, deforestation and soil erosion had already started to stress the sprawling settlement.

Then there is the 1431 invasion of Angkor from Siam (now Thailand) to keep in mind.

Put it all together and you have, as one scientist interviewed in the current AP story explains, a knockout blow delivered by climate change:

We have these droughts occurring on top of preexisting pressures…It’s like pouring petrol on a fire. It makes social and economic pressures that may have been endurable disastrous.

American archaeologists studying the social chaos and eventual depopulation of the Four Corners region in the Southwest during the 13th century are often reluctant to put too much emphasis on environmental factors–despite evidence of similar mega-droughts.

But there seems to be an emerging pattern to the rise and fall of the Anasazi and Angkor, and other famous examples, such as  the ancient Maya, that is worth paying attention to today, given our current ecological and climate challenges.

Remember those controversial Resource Management Plans in Utah that the BLM rammed through during Bush’s final months? I covered the story here.

The federal land plans must be on increasingly shaky ground because the Utah State Legislature has drafted a resolution expressing its strong support for the way BLM handled them.

My favorite line in the Resolution:

WHEREAS, there was no cutting of corners or abridgement of processes in preparing the resource management plans