Green Tech and $$. Boston Globe: Waning German solar subsidies. NYTimes: Saudi oil sheikhs want bail-out. And CJR on the Energy Beat.
These days it seems the energy and greenhouse effect beat is as much about business and money as it is about technology and global coupled climate models.
Thus we find, at the New York Times in the Business Section, this report from Jad Mouawad and Andrew C. Revkin: Saudies Seek Payments for Any Drop in Oil Revenues. This seems a bit like extortion. One would like to read a bit more on the Saudi rationale for wanting such compensation. If spelled out, it might make sense. Maybe not too.
And at the Boston Globe, a story attributed in part to the AP: Next German gov’t to cut solar subsidies ; Reason appears to be both the nation’s overall budget problems and the feeling that as solar power goes mainstream it needs fewer special favors. The topic provides a vehicle for a general reminder to readers of the immense effort the German gov’t has put behind fostering a large solar energy sector.
This is late, but the two stories illustrate the timeliness of a piece a few weeks ago in the Observatory blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, by Curtis Brainard and Cris Russell. Entitled The New Energy Beat, it includes a Sidebar listing some of the energy-focussed web pages and print stories to be found at such media outlets as the Chicago Tribune, Discover magazine, The Guardian, NYTimes, MIT Technology Review, and many others, some of them local or regional. It’s an important story on demands placed upon media to regard energy and related matters as essential news that merits its own beat writers. The challenge, it says, is to make the subject “pop.” It also dissects the tendency of many outlets to steer slightly clear of public policy schisms over the reality of climate change by writing stories on it as news about energy policy. All reporters on the beat should take a look.
- Charlie Petit
