Category: Environment & Energy Stories

  Reporters got a slight reprieve this week from weariness while writing yet another global warming story on records set and on ecosystems and economies stricken by climate-related natural disaster. The reason is that both of the latest examples are such extreme events that even the most jaded reporter on the climate beat has to be hitting the keyboard with vigor - imaginations going overtime trying to find fresh ways to express the superlative. The first instance of news is that the temperature average in 2012 for the 48 contiguous US states not only set a record as has been expected it demolished the old one by a margin that few would have imagined likely - a full effing (ie Fahrenheit) degree. Even though global temps last year were about on par for the new-normal but scorching last ten years, the US experience is a standout and not in a good way. The second is that in Australia temperatures have gone so high, and keep in mind it is still early in the Southern summer, that...

In an attention- getting story this week (more than 17,000 Facebook likes as of this morning), Mother Jones political blogger Kevin Drum poses a fascinating question - is long-time contamination from 20th century leaded gasoline one of the major causes of violent crime? Cleverly titled, "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead", the story delves into research that consistently maps out a connection between lead exposure and crime rates.

He begins by looking at the notable late 20th-early 21st century drop in violent crime in this country (barring, of course, mass murder which has ticked up), pointing out that the coast to coast reduction cannot logically be attributed to a patchwork of local police initiatives. What's needed, Drum says, is a coast to coast explanation, something in the national environment. Perhaps, for instance, a chemical exposure...

Salon just put up an intriguing long yarn from writer Zac Unger. It reads like the transcript of an engrossing seminar in a journalism school on the confusing ground that reporters must cross while trying to learn whom to trust as a source.

   Good on Salon for giving it more visibility. The piece originally ran elsewhere, where we'd have missed it, so to give due, primary credit ...

• Pacific Standard (erstwhile Miller-McCune) : The Fuzzy Face of Climate Change ;

   The Pacific Standard hed with its clear suggestion of ambiguity is better than Salon's "The Polar Bear Just Might Outlive Us All." For one thing, whole species do...

The New Yorker recently ran two wonderful stories. While quite different in style both are unmistakably about  the changing environment. This includes the drastic loss of our planet's accumulated richness in the last century or so. It's all our fault and it's accelerating, no denying that in these yarns. But references to such grim reflection are muted. To my mind the two pieces illustrate the penetration into wonk-talk first and into journalism now by a spirit of accomodation, even resignation, to the drastic changes fossil fuel emissions and human growth are wreaking. We must, serious people say, stop trying to horrify people into stopping the cause of the change. Tell them it's all about energy efficiency, self-sufficiency, or green jobs. Adaptation was once a term shunned among enviros as defeatist. Now it, and geo-engineering, are fully acceptable. Full-on mitigation is for another day, or decade. That's too bad by my lights. But it sure is hard to...

  GfK stands for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, a consumer research institute and polling company that a professor founded in Nuremberg in 1934 (a rather distinctive era in German history). It is now a behemoth with 12,000+ employees in 37 countries. Oh, you knew that? I bet you did. I did not until this morning learn what a GfK is. 'looked it up after scanning through the Associated Press's science newsfeed. It included this important if incremental piece of news with a partly-baffling headline, filed Friday:

• AP - Seth Borenstein: AP-GfK Poll: Science doubters say world is warming; The lede, in fine inverted pyramid style, sums things up with keen dispatch: A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the US government should...

Last week, Mother Jones republished an investigative story on the FDA's profound failure to protect Americans from foodborne illnesses. The story originally appeared in OnEarth magazine, a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

It's a strong story, citing example after example of the FDA's failures, bad behavior by food-handling companies, and procedures and regulations that seem to fall far short of what's needed to protect the public's health. 

That's all we would ordinarily expect an investigative story to do. In this case, however, I felt the story would have been helped by some reporting on the political context in which the FDA operates, and reporting on what might be one to improve the situation.

Pointing out, for example,...