NY Times: A few more in the Gray Lady’s energy & climate watch
It is difficult for The Tracker to imagine how much, in the past year or two, the NY Times must have published on energy and climate news, features, thumb suckers, profiles, columns, essays, op-eds, multiple series (what is the plural of series anyway?) and such. The past weekend and today continue the barrage.
The biggie is James Traub’s long profile and encounter with Al Gore, in the Sunday magazine.
It captures the man’s anger, his melancholy, and his sense of vindicated prophesy. Most hopeful line: Gore says the rate of social change is nonlinear. The Tracker’s intuitive catastrophe theory sense (wild ass guess alert!) is that a furious public about-face is almost upon us, nonlinearly.
Almost the whole Sunday magazine is green — calling itself “The Architecture Issue” with multiple pieces on efficient new building designs. The rendering is of the super-enviro (so the developer says) Bank of America tower rising in NYCity.
Others included, on Sunday, another “The Energy Challenge” installment from the biz section. Matt Villano went to Hawaii for a look at the islands’ notable move toward biofuels. Why, with Brazil’s example, has it taken the sugar cane growers so long to start planning some ethanol distilleries out there?
And today, for calibration of the US predicament, Somini Sengupta reports India’s electricity crisis. India is throwing up nukes, wind farms, biofuel plants, and so on. But most new power is from coal-fired plants. Yet the nation is so short of electricity hundreds of its shiny glass high-rises belch diesel smoke to run “backup” generators.
The Week-in-Review section has a piece that punctures the “czar” monicker given to managers of US policy pickles. Hmmm — does the Times have a czar to coordinate all its energy and climate coverage? A committee? It looks coordinated. Could all this ink be but an emergent property of complex, nonlinear events?
-CP
Loading ...