I just raced through yesterday’s big NYTimes Special Section on Energy, both what hit the front stairs and the enhanced version on line. Did so after the wrecking ball that, at ClimateProgress, influential climate change blogger, Joe Romm, aimed at the Times and its section. Romm says that’s it, nobody should ever read the NYTimes again. He says so because the section is full of news on fossil fuel industry expansion but not enough, not much at all actually, on why it’d be much better to look forward to a future with no fossils fuels at all and a stabilized atmospheric concentration of CO2.
Romm’s energy sensibilities are on the side of the angels. We got an emergency unfolding and governments and their populaces are, most of them, pulling pillows over their heads so they can sleep. But his understanding of journalism and its job is, judging by this instance, nil. So please, don’t cancel the NYTimes. Like THAT would make for a better world, no more of the paper that has in the last five years relentlessly covered the facts about energy and geochemistry and climate more than any other major publication in the US.
Would the section have been better to have run a significant feature on the consequences to the planet if the growth curves of fossil fuel use implied by what industry and policy experts expect were to occur (not the same as what’s best)? Sure, why not. It is gut-wrenching to read, amid a few pieces on the struggles of the clean-energy business, how bullish analysts are on petroleum and natural gas. But cancel the paper? (*Retraction: A passage here mentioning police state mentality and censorship, in context with Romm’s recommendation, has been deleted. His call for everybody to stop subscribing to the NYTimes may be excessive, but so was my response. He did not call for a forced shutdown, by cops or mobs. I apologize for going overboard). To demand only one angle on news stories, an angle that has been given extensive coverage and is therefore not news anymore except when things come along to advance the ball, is to be wrong about what a news medium’s job is and the nature of the business.
Barely hardly at all related – except for being the flip side of the coin, sort’a news:
Energy & Environment Daily TV: Energy Policy: Rocky Mountain Institute’s Lovins says US can be off oil by 2050 ; E&E TV is must-see for energy wonks. Lovins has said things like this before, but interesting is his self-described circulation among the very fossil fuel execs whose jobs he’d like to see evaporate. He’s on a book tour. I dunno why he’s such a hard-ass on nuclear power, but he always has been. DC energy writers should follow the link for another reason – to see an ad on the page for a meeting in DC about, in part, sequestering carbon from natural gas plants. That’s another ought’a be.
– Charlie Petit
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