The Tracker has been marveling at the immense flow of news recently on supermajority politics in the US Senate, wobbling prospects for new American resolve on health care and climate change, the storms roiling the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the credibility of what still seems like settled science, and the ructions roiling the US electorate. Also, I’ve been despairing at any way to sensibly track or analyze it all – much of which, after all, is already unmissable by the news-savvy regulars at ksjtracker.

I’ll start small by pointing to one exemplary piece of broad-perspective news writing. Business Week‘s Daniel Whitten and Kim Chipman, along with two editors given credit at the bottom, manage to put most of those moguls into one story today that can be skiied top to bottom in a few moments. It filed a few hours before the State of the Union address, but takes that into account too. This is efficient, instructive news writing.

By the way, maybe it’s all the noise before the storm. I had not seen it before but just read, at Grist, an angry column-essay filed a few months ago by a climate activist named Adam Sacks (a man with a background in politics and holistic medicine, sigh). It makes a fervent case that there is as much as or more delusion on the fix-the-climate side of conversation than there is among those who can’t see any sign it needs fixing. It not only provided the spooky pic for this post, it is well worth reading by anybody interested in the general topic. This goes particularly for reporters on the pertinent beats. Is there a far bigger story out there than such narrow-focus things as geo-engineering, cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and the imminent opening of the Arctic Ocean to commerce? Such as – that scientists worried about global warming, with a few exceptions, are keeping a secret? That they, in their hearts of hearts, think it’s too late to avert catastrophe with any program that is remotely plausible. Are eco-activists prattling along about a new, green, no-regrets economy enablers in denialism? Maybe night sweats fuel the sort of thinking behind any moves among IPCC report writers to slightly tweak the science to get policy makers off the dime. That’s a gloomy story. It, one surmises,  needs better coverage even if it does further paralyze a nervous public and its lawmakers into timid inaction.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.