The New Year has begun with a blast of arctic air freezing much of the country. The winter weather - and of course it’s weather and not climate - isn’t exactly the kind of motivation people need to think about the globe’s warming.
The views expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni.
The New Year has begun with a blast of arctic air freezing much of the country. The winter weather - and of course it’s weather and not climate - isn’t exactly the kind of motivation people need to think about the globe’s warming.
Surprise - that President-Elect Barack Obama is confronting climate change in the midst of deepening global economic woes - and, again, surprise - that he took on climate change directly and firmly weeks before he officially takes office January 20.
Those were the hallmarks of several key news organizations’ reporting on the Obama taped video message November 17 to a climate change meeting of governors in California.
After Hurricane Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth, the 2007 reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and other events pushed the climate change issue higher on the public agenda, it may have seemed that it wouldn’t soon slide back down.
Newspaper endorsements in a presidential election reveal more than where the nation has been or where it is now. They point the way toward a national agenda for the future.
By that measure, most American newspapers saw little room on the next president’s “To Do List” for action on the climate issue. Perhaps it’s not surprising, given the recession and world financial crisis, grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a broken health care system, and continuing worries about public education and U.S. competitiveness.
Convention speeches, designed to introduce presidential candidates to American voters just beginning to pay attention, help define the priorities and passions of candidates and their parties.
If you were looking for more than a mention of the biggest environmental issue the planet faces, neither the Democrats nor Republicans were offering it as part of their convention rhetoric.
Opinion polls are fueling politicians and candidates to push for more U.S. offshore oil drilling, with the media looking on intently.
Since the issue became a political focal point in May and June, polling has been relentless: Zogby. Rasmussen. Field. Gallup. Quinnipiac. CNN. Bloomberg. The list goes on. All point to an increasing public desire to lift a moratorium on more domestic drilling.
The nation’s newspaper editorial pages used Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s mid-May climate change speech in Oregon to vent, pro and con, on the Arizona Senator’s policy prescription. A sampling of the commentaries, drawn from the climate change reporting database maintained by Environmental Health Sciences.
Making climate change a presidential campaign story is harder than it looks - though a lot of journalists tried to do so at the National Press Club April 11. There was no contest. That was the story.
Facing continued political stalemate in Washington, D.C., over federal climate change regulations, at least 800 mayors of cities large and small over the past three years have signed pledges to drastically reduce their carbon emissions.