From The Editor

Change. It's everywhere one goes nowadays ... [ More ]

Features


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.

Policy
By John Wihbey | October 21, 2008

Green investment insiders concede that climate change-focused and clean energy funds will get tossed around just like any other set of stocks - and are sometimes even more vulnerable.

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Policy
By Christine Woodside | October 21, 2008

Candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has bragged that running mate Senator Joe Biden is a down-to-earth family man who commutes by Amtrak train from Wilmington to Washington.

The Democratic Delaware Senator has been commuting by Amtrak for decades. He has long preferred train travel over driving 109 miles to work, unwittingly also choosing what is universally acknowledged to be the mode of travel with the smallest amount of carbon dioxide emissions.

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Essays
By Leslie King, MD, MPH | October 21, 2008

A day without a car would be difficult for many Americans - even the most earnest, intrepid, or eco-conscious. So, how about a day with little food, unsafe water, and polluted air? Add a debilitating vector-borne illness such as malaria to this devil’s brew, and you have a glimpse into the potential impacts of climate change on human health.

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Politics
By Bidisha Banerjee | September 23, 2008

Presidential candidates Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s responses to 14 questions about science policy provide insights into similarities and differences they might take in office.

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Politics
By Bruce Lieberman | September 23, 2008

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.

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Science
By John Wihbey | September 23, 2008

If Daniel Nocera’s energy vision prevails globally, each home and business will have its own, entirely sufficient power unit, charged by the Sun.

Industry-produced greenhouse gases will be vestiges of the old order, as solar-based “personal energy” systems power everything from televisions to plug-in electric cars and produce only water as a byproduct.

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Policy
By Christine Woodside | September 23, 2008

Writer, commentator, news source, and most of all critic, James Howard Kunstler combines an unforgiving disdain of America’s fossil fuel-based way of life with a scalding rejection of modern architecture, suburban zoning laws, and what he sees as much of the media’s complicity in the whole thing. A news junkie and major force behind the nascent “beyond the oil age” movement, Kunstler pulls no punches with his sharp tongue and engaging prose damning Americans’ over-reliance on their automobiles. His seemingly endless cheerless scolding doesn’t make him a pessimist, however, and certainly not a shy and retiring one. It’s just that the future he sees is a lot different from the one we have and the one that so many of his fellow citizens seem unable to see beyond.

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Policy
By Zeke Hausfather | September 23, 2008

A voluntary market for carbon offsets has emerged in recent years in the United States that in many ways parallels the global compliance carbon market in countries that have signed onto the Kyoto Protocol.

In contrast to the strict regulatory framework governing offset markets under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), however, a voluntary offset market lacks consistent and universally accepted standards for offset quality.

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Science
By Bud Ward | September 4, 2008

A ‘Sea Change’ in Findings from 1,300 Researchers?

Research scientists and journalists may be interacting lots more than generally thought, and the scientists’ experiences, at least, may be “far smoother” than generally thought.

That’s the gist of a new research report based on a survey of more than 1,300 researchers in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

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Media
By Bill Dawson | September 4, 2008

With the mainstream commercial media companies eliminating many hundreds of journalists’ jobs, new ventures such as the nonprofit Pro Publica, the New York-based investigative reporting organization, are trying to pick up some of the slack.

Now comes something really different: A for-profit energy corporation is starting an online video channel as “a brand-new media source,” to be staffed with people who formerly worked in conventional broadcast journalism and who will report on the very subjects the company is involved with.

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