Tomorrow morning the Science section will feature an article by William Broad titled “From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype.” The storyline is very simple and familiar: some scientists say Al Gore is exaggerating his claims about global warming, some scientists say he is exaggerating them not so much, actually Al Gore is conveying everything fairly accurately and fully understands the science, but again folks, this reporter found someone who would say he’s exaggerating. Byline March 13, 2007, but it might as well be a reprint from March 13, 1992. The Al Gore-as-Ozone-Man thing… it’s so fifteen years ago. This article was irresponsibly bad for three reasons, outlined below the jump. Why is this relevant to a youth blog? Because the New York Times owes us more than to treat the biggest public policy issue of our century as a gossip-fest.

First, this is a transparent hit piece. It is the kind of useless non-news that a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter like Broad should not have been so silly as to pursue as a storyline. This is about as meaningful a story for the public as the fact that Al Gore was advised to wear brown clothes when running for President.

This is non-news not because of what has been written about, but how. This is an irresponsibly bad piece of reporting (secondly) because it has been conveyed as if this reporter is covering a trial or a messy divorce, where facts might be disputed or unknown. It’s not news that someone called Al Gore’s documentary “shrill alarmism” in the Wall Street Journal if it’s not true! It would have been entirely possible to write an article by addressing how An Inconvenient Truth squares by comparing it to scientific facts. (These facts are available through such means as the tubes of the internet. I believe accredited journalists at the New York Times have access to this research tool.) The fact is that had this article compared the film or Al Gore’s statements to actual facts, Broad would probably not have had a story. He would have had to think up a story based on science, or reality.

Third, this is irresponsible because if the Times wants to run a Gossip section, they are entirely able to. In fact, they already do: “Sunday Styles.” The media has played a useless and often detrimental role in reporting in the public interest on global warming, as simply one example, because it has for years chosen to portray global warming as political theater. It is a reporter’s job to write stories, it is an editor’s job to squash the dumb ones. Beyond all the reasons listed above for why this story should not have been written, it should not have been run by the editors.

If it wants to remain credible, (and in the case of the Times, profitable) the media must accept its responsibility to act in the public interest and the full implications of this. It’s not good enough not to print lies, it’s necessary to print the truth. Most of the time the media fails to do this, it is because of sins of omission rather than commission – holes in the story rather than inaccuracies. To write an article that contains accurate quotes from real people but which, through omission, conveys an inaccurate narrative, or worse, perpetuates outright lies, is no better with regard to this public mission than to run fabricated stories. I just kind of thought we’d seen the end of stories like this one.

This signal came because of massive opposition to the coal plants from mayors, churches – and not least, students! – in Texas and nationwide. It’s also coming because Wall Street can see that the cost of emitting carbon – and destabilizing the climate – will soon have to be factored into the cost of operating a coal plant – making coal unprofitable.

And what about the 3 plants that TXU will still plan to build? We’re going to stop those too, probably the old fashioned way, with grassroots organizing and by continuing to enlist Texans against dirtier air when Texas could have a cheaper, safer, clean energy future.

Environmental Defense and the Natural Resouces Defense Council helped broker this deal and while they should be congratulated for getting TXU to this point, they’ve indicated they’re happy stopping about 70% of the proposed carbon emissions from these coal plants. I suppose that’s a passing grade, but only barely. I doubt Fred Krupp and Frances Beinecke, the directors of these respective organizations, would be happy if their children brought home C-minuses on tests. The stakes are higher for us – I think it’s safe to say that students will be calling to stop 100%, alongside the 3 communities who are still facing a dirty and dangerous new coal plant in their backyards.

“How do you feel about the state of America today? Is our country headed in the right direction? What changes would you make in the next year? The President goes on TV every January to tell us what he thinks, but now it’s YOUR turn to tell us what YOU think!”

Such luminaries as former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta and Markos of Daily Kos will be the judges. The winner will be announced the same day as President Bush’s State of the Union, January 23. Submissions are due by January 15. I’m sure the fine, upstanding young readers of this blog can think of some things that would improve the state of our union.

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake. The mass of ice broke clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole.

Have you ever watched a glacier “calf” icebergs into the sea? About two years ago I stood on a vast glacier coming right off a ring of unnamed peaks in Patagonia. As my group trekked across it we could hear periodic snaps that echoed like gunshots across the expanse. This was ice breaking off the mountain cliffs and creaking in the icefall below us where the glacier emptied into a valley. And this was an ordinary sunny day, and these were just the everyday sounds of a slow-moving (and melting) river of ice.

The Canadian ice shelf was already sea ice – its collapse isn’t going to raise sea levels, although it might disrupt shipping lanes. This is unlike the ice fields that really matter, in Greenland and Antarctica – the ones that would dramatically raise sea level if they ever catastrophically collapsed like this. They might never. They might go slowly. But I can hear that glacial creaking in Chile, punctuated by an occasional crash as the ice reaches a snapping point. If you’ve ever been on a glacier, your ears will remind you that you’re not on solid ground – you’re on ice waiting on a little sun and a little melt to crash downhill towards the sea.

PS – You’ll be doubly concerned about keeping those shipping lanes clear from pesky global warming-induced icebergs when you read this: “There’s significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we’ll have to keep monitoring [the ice shelf's] location over the next few years.”

More interesting for me though is the quote from the Chairman of Shell UK in the Reuters story on the report: “For business, tackling climate change is both a necessity and a huge opportunity. We have to step up to the challenge.” Hm, that last phrase – it sounds vaguely familiar. And that part about opportunity, that’s a word you almost never hear from the major environmental groups.

What does it mean when the only ones talking about “opportunity” in the face of a “challenge” in the context of climate change are young people and oil companies?

It means that the major enviros need to get on their game if they’re to have any hope to be the ones that lead and inspire people to take on the task of addressing climate change. Cursory searches of major U.S. environmental organization websites return press releases about “missed opportunities” to take one action or another – but rarely, if ever, does an environmental organization refer to a real-world, non-environmental benefit that could made possible by taking action on an environmental issue that would not be possible otherwise. That, to me, is the definition of opportunity that will make people start thinking that that cycling carbon out of our economy is going to be anything but a enormous pain in the ass.

But that is clearly what businesses have in mind when they talk about opportunity. And that’s what young people have in mind as well, because many young climate activists feel that a clean energy economy will have numerous ancillary benefits far beyond simply protecting our climate – creating openings for all kinds of economic, social, and environmental initiatives.

And I would say that’s a key reason why modern businesses are viewed as dynamic, forward-looking organizations by most people, while environmental organizations aren’t, even though businesses are working for private profit while environmentalists are clearly working for public benefits.

As the report cited above clearly shows, and as others have said before, the biggest economic opportunity the U.S. has is to become the global leader in clean energy technology and in doing so avert a destabilized climate.

Edit: It’s only fair to note that Al Gore is one environmentalist who has started making the opportunity case, including his use of the business executive parable “the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the characters for danger and opportunity”… which unfortunately is not really the case.

There are hundreds of campaign events going on this month – see what happens when candidates in your area get asked some tough questions on what they’re doing to stop global warming, and maybe whether they’re Loyal to Big Oil. You know where to send the video.

After a long (but still absurdly inexpensive) cab ride from my hostel and attempting unsuccessfully to decipher Chinese characters on street signs, I met on Tuesday morning with representatives of Green Camp and GSF at the GSF office in the Haidian District. Green Camp’s main activity is to sponsor annual trips to sensitive ecological areas for Chinese college students – and over 10 years it has produced numerous student leaders who have formed environmental associations at their own universities. GSF focuses on assisting such environmental associations with training programs and a newsletter about activities at different universities. The growth of the student environmental movement in China seems to have been slow but steady over the past decade – GSF and Green Camp were both formed in the mid-1990′s, making them only a few years younger than the first national student environmental networks in the U.S.

On Thursday afternoon, the Greenpeace-sponsored Solar Generation team in Beijing met me for dinner in the Xicheng District. Over a dinner including roast chicken – head still attached – they told me about their efforts to address renewable energy and climate issues in China. Although the Chinese government is more forthright in acknowledging anthropogenic climate change than the U.S. government is today, not surprisingly this addresing this issue is as difficult in China as in the United States, if not moreso. Nonetheless, these students seem excited to take their message to Chinese students. This year the program, as part of the global Solar Generation program that Greenpeace sponsors, will make grants to environmental associations at 5-10 universities to address energy issues and will sponsor a film-making trip to Shanxi Province, in which 25% of China’s massive coal reserves can be found. These new actions will supplement the 8 univerisities already working together in Hong Kong on a similar “Solar Campus” campaign.

The two countries that – because of their enormous coal reserves – have more power to decide whether we stop global warming or not are China and the United States. For this reason alone, building a powerful student movement for climate protection and environmental protection in general in China will have a global impact. In all these meetings, I talked with activists about how student organizations in the U.S. can support their critical work – conducting trainings, translating materials, collaborating at international meetings, and more. We hope for this to be the basis for a continuing relationship. One key, however is overcoming the Chinese-English barrier. So if you’ve got Chinese language skills and want to devote some time to building this collaboration, please email me at nathan.wyeth@ssc.org – there’s a lot of work to do.

“It is getting hotter, and the ice caps are melting, and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air. And I think we really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. If we are contributing to the destruction of this planet, we need to do something about it.”

The shock waves from this statement will reverberate through American politics for a long time.  It may precipitate the coming true of Al Gore’s prediction that George Bush will change his position on global warming before the end of his term in 2009.  Senator Roy Blunt, a conservative Christian, may reconsider his statement, quoted in a post below, that he intends to allow no global warming legislation through the next session of Congress.  But for now, there’s only one thing to say: Amen. 

The “energy security” agenda that will be discussed by the G8 in July, a copy of which was leaked to and analyzed by our friends at Oil Change International, is all about massive investment in fossil fuels ($17 trillion over 25 years) in order to secure energy supplies for the G8 countries. When a discussion about energy is framed in terms of “energy security” alone, this tends to mean talking about fossil fuels to the exclusion of the kinds of energy solutions that could actually bring security – efficiency, conservation, clean energy sources, and more.

In today’s world it is not possible to have a responsible or even rational discussion about energy policy to the exclusion of the climate. In preparing to push fossil fuels this year, the G8 leaders will not just be ignoring the urgent problems they identified last year, they will be actively undermining any progress made to stop global warming.

In discussing “energy security” for rich nations through fossil fuels, the G8 countries will also be abandoning their discussion of debt, development, and global poverty. Energy security for rich nations means oil being exported from Africa to Europe or the U.S. in pipelines that pass through communities lacking reliable electricity for light bulbs. It means cheaper gas for North America, drought in China, and sea level rise in Bangladesh. And (hat tip to Oil Change International again) it means expanding oil production in places like West Africa and Central Asia and in turn causing higher international debt for these countries (read the linked report – it’s counterintuitive but persuasive). You can’t have a discussion about energy security without talking about poverty and securing energy services for all.

Are President Bush or the new conservative Harper government in Canada likely to oppose Putin’s oil and nuclear agenda? That question isn’t even worth answering. But the spotlight is on Tony Blair of the UK, Jacques Chirac of France, the new Prodi government in Italy, the new Merkel government in Germany, and the Koizumi government of Japan: will they allow Putin to lead the G8 in this abdication of leadership on global warming and poverty, or will they keep the biggest challenges the world faces where they should be, on the top of the agenda of the world’s most powerful leaders?