Eric Pooley: How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? | Harvard U.
Eric Pooley is a Time Magazine correspondant and a fellow (former fellow) at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
Analyzing news coverage of the 2008 debate over the Lieberman-Warner bill, which included a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, Pooley finds:
1. The press misrepresented the economic debate over cap and trade. It failed to recognize the emerging consensus among economists that cap and trade would have a marginal effect on economic growth and gave doomsday forecasts coequal status with nonpartisan ones. ...
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.
Hat tip: Joe Romm
the sudoku-playing with the press
The press' tantamount neglect and complacency has made it an effacer of hard facts, deciding to assuage rather than warn.
I'm hopeful and amzed by today's ability to aggregate tons of information, illuminating patterns that show obvious signs of growing distress both with our climate and with our media, as this article has done.
Thank you for contributing to the effort of shifting our trajectory of demise towards something more sustainable.
Namaste!
Hearing the president (albeit of the EU) frame the context of "global warming" is most welcome. He is both right and wrong. He is quite correct in his observation that the so called green movement has been and is exploiting global warming and climate change to seize power and run modern society back to some stone age fantasyland. He is utterly wrong to equate this with the notion that there is no problem with fossil CO2. There is a big problem only its not bearing down on us at the slow pace of changing glaciers, it is much near than that.
While many international leaders debate or work toward emission reduction strategies and carbon capture and storage the real problem is not tomorrows CO2 but yesterdays CO2. Nor is the problem the role CO2 has in Global Warming. We must turn our attention to the 1000+ gigatonne carbon bomb, two centuries of accumulating CO2, still mostly in the air as it takes centuries for airborne CO2 to equilibrate with the rest of the planet. Reports call the alarm of ocean acidification, adding acid flames to the raging fires of fossil CO2. What’s missing is mention of the best, only, means to fight ocean acidification and CO2 in the air. Just 500 gigatonnes of yesterdays CO2 has reached the oceans where Revelle’s Rule tells us 80% of CO2 ends up. The first carbon bomb will be exploding in the ocean for more than a century even if we stop the emission of new CO2 today. No amount alternative energies, recycling, bicycling, or “clean coal” will tend to the first carbon bomb. Sure lets reduce the size of the second bomb but first things first.
Here's how to Fix CO2
ONLY ocean replenishment and restoration can enlist, as allies, the most powerful force of nature - the ocean plants, the bloomin’ plankton. But high and rising CO2 in the air is not only responsible for ocean acidification worse it has fed green plants on land making them greener, bushier, and living longer making them "good ground cover." Ground cover improvements have reduced the amount of dust blowing in the winds by 1/3 in just a few decades. For the oceans dust in the wind brings vital mineral micro-nutrients, that terrestrial Yin (dust) is just as important as rain, the Yang, blowing from sea to land nurturing plant life. Since earth and ocean satellites went aloft 30 years ago we've measured decimation of ocean plants, 10% are gone from the Southern Ocean, 17% from the N. Atlantic, 26% from the N. Pacific, and 50% from the tropical seas. Just yesterday, a few decades past, ocean pastures grew more verdant consuming 4-5 billion tonnes more CO2 each year than today.
Today, as stewards of our blue planet, we must replenish ocean micro-nutrients to restore the verdant ocean pastures. If we bring the ocean plankton blooms back to levels seen only 30 years ago those plants will annually convert billions of tonnes of CO2 into ocean life instead of acid ocean death. Those verdant restored ocean pastures will deliver 7 times the CO2 reductions called for by the Kyoto Protocol. To begin, and we must without delay, the work requires only tens of millions of dollars, to succeed in a matter of a decade requires only a few billion dollars. In the bargain the restored oceans will feed everything from tiny krill to the great whales and everything and everybody in between - fish, seabirds, penguins, seals and us.
Replenish and restore the oceans without delay. Read more at www.planktos-science.com