Beyond an Unreasonable Doubt | Conservation Magazine

Three new books dissect the anatomy of climate-change denial
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If the world’s top climatologists are all convinced that the burning of fossil fuels is causing dangerous global warming, why do the media keep giving equal time to deniers? No matter how strong the scientific consensus becomes, the campaign to discount climate change—financed by the fossil-fuel industries and conservative foundations—continues. Fortunately, so does the effort to set the record straight and tell people the truth. The past year has brought three superb books documenting the paid political attack on climatology, which is nothing less than a paid political attack on science itself.
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It’s a sad state of affairs when a late-night comedian has a better understanding of science than an NBC correspondent. But that may be our fate. Bill Maher also spotted that MSNBC story and had this to say on his HBO show: “Mainstream media, could you please stop pitting the ignorant versus the educated and framing it as a debate? . . . Devastating worldwide climate change is happening, whether you phone in for it or not.” ❧

Charles Alexander is a former editor at Time Magazine, where he directed the magazine’s environmental coverage. After 23 years there, he is now an independent journalist aiming to raise environmental awareness through writing, editing, speaking, teaching, and consulting.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Electric Car Industry Isn’t Going to Save Us - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

We all have our off days; Tom Friedman (a man I admire) had one last Sunday in a New York Times column calling for higher gas taxes and a crash program to build electric cars. As usual, he’s worried about the right things and is even ahead of the curve. The piece raises some serious questions about the future of the American middle class, our dependency on gasoline creates both environmental and security problems, and China in particular is making some long term investments in infrastructure that are likely to exacerbate some of the competitive issues we currently face. But electric cars won’t save the American middle class. They won’t even save China.