Ecotrust in the News
The New York Times
May 22, 2009
by Andrew C. Revkin
Navigating the Fog of Climate Policy
I’ve often compared the truth-seeking process of journalism, when dealing with a complex subject, to the increasingly endangered art of celestial navigation. I only toyed with that skill when I was lucky enough to be on the crew of a circumnavigating sailboat 30 years ago (the preceding link is to a narrated slide show explaining the relationship of that voyage to this blog). In the middle of the Indian Ocean, I watched the skipper, Lon Bubeck, take a sight on a star, make some calculations and draw a line on a chart. We were somewhere along that line, plus or minus a range of error to each side related to the precision of his watch, the sextant (ours was cheap and plastic) and other factors. But he’d repeat the process with other stars until there was a triangle created by multiple lines. The more sights, the tighter the triangle and better the estimate.
In trying to get close to reality on climate change, particularly on policy questions, the same kind of practice is vital. If you choose to focus on a single line of thinking, you may end up way off course. There’s a new star out there in the online constellation of viewpoints, a Web site called RealClimateEconomics.org. The effort, more think tank than blog, was created by a network of economists and others, with support from two environmental groups and a foundation, working to strip away some of the spin surrounding the intersection of climate change, politics and money. The project is headed by Kristen Sheeran of Ecotrust. There’s certainly plenty of spin these days and will be ever more as the Waxman-Markey climate clean energy and security bill moves slowly through the Capitol Hill gantlet. (I’ve been meaning to write about the significance of a climate bill not having the word climate in its title, which presumably has to do with the lack of traction the issue has with voters).
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