Friday, November 19, 2010

Time mag author laments that alarmist Time covers haven't "done much to move the needle"

Politics: Will Bipartisanship Ever Be Possible on Climate and Energy? - Ecocentric - TIME.com
In fact in retrospect, the experience was a little depressing, as Margot Roosevelt of the Los Angeles Times points out in a post on the summit.

A number of the more prominent speakers that had been advertised for the summit—like Schwarzenegger's chum James Cameron, certainly a convinced enviro—dropped out and sent video messages. There was a lot of time given over to promotional videos from sponsors like BMW and the Aga Khan Development Network, less to substantiative discussions about the real future of climate policy. At one point a video ran on Schwarzenegger's first climate summit two years ago, which featured a message from then President-elect Barack Obama, promising that his Administration would "mark a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs." All that did was remind us of how far we'd gone—in the wrong direction. (The fact that the video included a glimpse of disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who attended the 2008 summit in full pompadour, only served to remind the audience of how dated it all was.)
...I don't think you can use science to convince wavering Americans that climate change is the dire threat it really is. (Certainly the stack of TIME cover stories warning about the extreme dangers of climate change haven't done much to move the needle, and we're supposed to be mainstream.)

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