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