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Arabica Robusta

Climate Change Messaging: Avoid the Truth » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Na... - 1 views

  • Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger published the op-ed “Global Warming Scare Tactics” in the New York Times on April 8. Participants in recent debates over climate change may recognize their names. They’re the guys who run the Breakthrough Institute, a pseudo-contrarian “environmental research organization.”
  • While occasionally on point in its charges against the big organizations, the essay (based on interviews with mostly white male leaders of large national groups) had nothing to say about the environmental justice movement, or other grassroots groups led by women and people of color. It neglected as well the environmental movements of the Global South, today the heart of the climate justice movement.
  • Is fear of disruption of what Habermas calls the life-world the sole inducer of civic action? Of course not: social movements also cohere around other shared, negotiated understandings, identities, diagnoses of problems, and assessments of opportunities. Might fear paralyze rather than mobilize? Yes: in cases when the perceived threat appears impervious to resistance, and when commitment to the cause flags over time. Fear-based campaigns require a tangible evil: a draft card, a nuclear plant cooling tower, a polluting facility’s smoke plume, an Operation Rescue picket line.
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  • Of the massive, coordinated, ongoing effort by Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and the Heartland Institute (et al.) to do to climate science what the Tobacco Institute did to cigarette science, Nordhaus and Shellenberger have only this to say, “Some conservatives and fossil-fuel interests questioned the link between carbon emissions and global warming.” There’s no mention of how under- and mis-educated TV weathermen have been central progenitors of climate change skepticism. There’s no acknowledgement of how Big Coal, Oil and Gas have bought off local and national legislators, stalled attempts to put forward even wimpy programs (like cap and trade), or underwritten NPR’s gushing embrace of fracking.
Hans De Keulenaer

50 people who could save the planet | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Stranded polar bears, melting glaciers, dried-out rivers and flooding on a horrific scale - these were the iconic images of 2007. So who is most able to stop this destruction to our world? A Guardian panel, taking nominations from key environmental figures, met to compile a list of our ultimate green heroes
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