If ignorance is truly bliss, then green-blogger Brendan DeMelle has got to be one the happiest people on the face of the earth. Attempting to ridicule the Heartland Institutes’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, set to kick off in Chicago this Sunday, DeMelle relied on tired arguments that might otherwise be persuasive if they were either: a) relevant, or b) accurate. The following pretty much sums up DeMelle’s take:

…this denial-a-palooza fest is dripping with oil money and represents a blatant industry effort to greenwash oil and coal while simultaneously attacking the credibility of climate scientists.

The entire conference can therefore be dismissed out of hand. Nothing to see here except a bunch of posers on the take, right? Had he been blogging during the Renaissance, no doubt DeMelle would have advanced the same kind of argument to defend the accepted version of “settled science” back then:

Pay no attention of that fraud Galileo. You know he’s part of the Accademia dei Lincei, right? And you know that group is funded by that rich aristocrat Federico Cesi, right? How can you believe a guy with those connections? How can the Pope and all those Cardinals possibly be wrong?

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We hear a lot about the tea party movement’s supposed potential to inspire violence an awful lot from the left and their allies in the lamestream media. It’s a predictable response to a powerful grass-roots movement that they aren’t capable of understanding: crank up the fear machine boys! If bogus charges of racism won’t stick and if the tea parties themselves are peaceful – if  passionate – protests, then you have to find some theme with which to frighten independent middle-America away from a movement to which they would otherwise instinctively sympathize with.

To wit: OK, maybe the tea-partiers themselves aren’t violent, but by expressing their anger with regard to big government, they will surely inspire some fringe nut-job to violence!

Bill Clinton, in his  recent New York Times Op-Ed said that it’s fair to draw “…parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today.” ABC News dutifully picked up on the theme:

“Watch your words,” warned ABC News, reporting that Clinton “weighed in on the angry anti-government rhetoric, ringing out from talk radio to Tea Party rallies.”

Got all that? Millions of Americans can band together to peacefully protest the incursions of swelling bureaucracies into their private lives and their government’s assumption of crippling debt, but they’re – by definition – dangerous, because they might inspire some lunatic into an act of violence. If that’s truly the issue, why doesn’t the MSM apply the same standard when it comes to another wildly-popular movement that, despite the fact that the vast majority of its adherents are peaceful activists, inspires violence not in theory, but in fact? (more…)

When it comes to environmental topics, the biggest failing of the lazy, old media is not what they tell you, but what they leave unsaid. Yesterday’s release of the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2010 report provides textbook examples of how mainstream journalists can’t, or won’t, take the time to do their jobs. Most MSM stories covering the ALA report read like slightly modified versions of an ALA press release, which, one suspects, was probably the case. Consider this talking point that the ALA kindly provided:

The report finds that unhealthy air posed a threat to the lives and health of more than 175 million people—roughly 58 percent of the population.

Forbes’ Tim Kiladze dutifully regurgitated this misleading talking point back to readers:

The ALA found that over 175 million Americans, or 58% of the population, live in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution.

That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn’t it? Downright scary too. Fifty-eight per cent of the population is at risk? But, having been trained in the sciences rather than journalism, when I read something like that, I can’t help but wonder: why aren’t people dropping in the streets if things are so bad? Or, put another way, what does a subjective term like “unhealthy air” actually mean? (more…)

Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.

Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.

My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts. (more…)

If you live in a coal state, make no mistake about it: Barack Obama and the Administrator of his USEPA, Lisa Jackson, are looking to take you down, by any means – direct or indirect – at their disposal. Among the schemes in the pipeline is this: a proposal that would make burning coal to produce power a much more expensive proposition, by attaching billions of dollars more costs before the residue of the coal-burning process could be reused or disposed of. Ironically, Obama and Jackson are on the threshold of making an ill-considered decision that would undermine one of the most successful recycling programs in the history of the nation.

USEPA is deciding whether or not to declare the ash that remains after burning coal a hazardous waste. The agency began considering reclassification following a disastrous release of 1.7 million cubic yards of fly ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant, a large coal-fired power station located east of Knoxville, Tennessee, in December 2008. That release, caused by the failure of an earthen retention wall, caused many environmental groups to renew their call for the USEPA to classify coal ash as a hazardous waste.

The Sierra Club, and other environmental groups, maintain that this action is necessary because coal ash contains, among other things:”…arsenic, selenium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, boron, thallium, and aluminum – toxic heavy metals that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and neurological disorders, and which clearly threaten nearby communities and ecosystems.” (more…)

When even the New York Times finally picks up the pungent aroma of a scandal, you’ve gotta figure that the stench is overwhelming. Recently, the Times decided this bit of news was finally fit to repeat: that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been playing fast and loose with scientific data regarding “climate change.” That story has only been buzzing about the blogosphere for weeks now, so hats off to the “newspaper of record” for taking notice of the situation with such alacrity.

This is a milestone of sorts. The Times has – finally – chosen to publish a story about global warming that did not primarily consist of Andrew Revkin’s fawning assurances that alarmists were the guardians of holy writ and skeptics are alchemists in the employ of Exxon-Mobil. Prior to this happy event, I thought the chances of the Senate passing a cap and trade bill were slim, but that the possibility still existed. Now that the New York Times has finally acknowledged that global warming skeptics may have a point or two after all, we may administer last rites to Waxman-Markey. Good riddance.

But how did we get here? Al Gore’s hucksterism and that silly movie of his, which any legitimate scientist – even among the alarmist crowd – has to laugh at, deserve a lot of the blame. But the biggest problem was the way that the old media and policy makers embraced the collectivist agenda of the IPCC. This shameful episode has been an object lesson of what happens when we follow Obama’s doctrine of following the lead of the would-be global government crowd, rather than letting America and her allies lead the globe toward a bright future. (more…)

This April, USEPA expects to finalize a rule intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from mobile sources (cars, trucks, buses, etc.), largely by demanding greater fuel economy in the transportation sector. No doubt there will be much rejoicing among the tree-hugging set when that happens, but there is another consequence to that action that has largely flown under the old media’s radar: the day that the mobile source rule goes final is the day that the Agency starts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other large industrial sources.

It’s a matter of regulatory logic. Once the Agency starts to regulate a pollutant in one sector, it must regulate said pollutant in all sectors under its purview. When and if this side effect of the mobile source rule come to light, it will – no doubt – be used as a “gotcha moment” by environmentalist groups and the old media. “See, now EPA is going to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Act, because you wouldn’t give us cap and trade. We waaaarned you!” (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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