I’m a big fan of Jim Fallows, and not just because he once hired me, at USNews & World Report in late 1997, the last hiring he got past publisher Mort Zuckerman before the latter canned him for ostensibly not having a savvy enough sense of news (and that’s a laugh). Also, not because he wrote one of the great take-downs of Beltway journalism, his “Breaking the News” book that got him hired at USNews as its editor in the first place. It’s because he sees big issues with a calm, far-sighted brio.
Among his specialties is China, where he’s lived and visited off and on for, like, forever. I just caught up with an article he had in the December Atlantic, Dirty Coal, Clean Future. It says just because China is digging coal as fast as it can and has oodles of it and has utterly fouled its own nest with coal-spawned smog and other crud, not to mention being the worst carbon emitter on the planet, there’s no reason to think that China + Coal = an entirely bad thing.
He writes that way behind the scenes, China has gotten utterly dead set serious about decarbonizing coal. Which the in crowd calls sequestration. Not only that, tests of ways to do it are being run over there like gangbusters. If it can work, it says here, China is likely to learn how first. Hope so. And so much for America taking back the mantle of energy innovator supreme any time soon.
Tip of the hat: I decided to read this Fallows piece this morning after reading an absorbing gathering of links and comments and other bits by Keith Kloor at his blog, Collide-a-Scape. It has mainly to do with scientism, journalism, churnalism, and the irrationality of thinking that rational argument is the key to changing the opinions of people who, outwardly, seem simply not to have thought things through.
– Charlie Petit
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