New York Times hits global warming hard this week
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0284
“To address global warming,” declared the editors of the New York Times this week, “the country needs new technology and more ambitious projects.” Their editorial blasts what they call “Congress’s failure to enact climate change legislation that would have placed a price on emissions and given businesses compelling economic reasons to clean up their plants and develop new technologies.” While the editors criticized Congress, others at the Times predicted a future in which human activity distorts the planet’s climate, with huge negative consequences.
Calling to mind recent comments by the Atlantic‘s James Fallows, the Times editors see Congress’s alleged failure illustrated in American Electric Power’s decision to shut down what the editors call “an ambitious experiment aimed at capturing greenhouse gases from a coal-fired power plant.” The Times had reported that shutdown a week earlier in a front-page article .
The editors call the shutdown “a disappointing setback to efforts to control harmful global warming emissions from coal, among the world’s most abundant fuels.” They continue:
Without industrywide federal standards in place, state utility regulators would not have allowed A.E.P. to recoup its investment through higher prices, making the whole project untenable.
Coal-fired power plants produce one-third of the nation’s emissions of carbon dioxide. Policy makers have other tools to help lower these greenhouse gas emissions, including regulations requiring more efficient plants. What they do not have is breakthrough technologies.
The A.E.P. project, located at a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, was the country’s most advanced attempt to strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases and store it permanently underground in deep-rock formations under the plant. The company had completed a small pilot program, and the Energy Department had promised to pay for half the final $668 million bill. But A.E.P. would have been on the hook for the rest.
Meanwhile, three Times articles predicted dire consequences from human-caused global warming:
- An op-ed headlined “Sizzle factor for a restless climate ,” by Heidi Cullen. The Times describes her as “a scientist at Climate Central, a journalism and research organization, [and] the author of The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed Planet.” Cullen’s book’s title summarizes her op-ed. Example: “Sweltering days in excess of 100 degrees, rare now, will become a regular feature of the Big Apple’s climate in the 2050s.”
- An op-ed headlined “Life after land ,” by Rosemary Rayfuse. She teaches international law at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Lund University in Sweden. On the assumption that “rising sea levels could threaten the existence of small island states such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives,” she offers thoughts on this theme: “If the international community cannot or will not slow global warming, the least it can do is help those states prepare for life after land by recognizing a new category of state—the deterritorialized state.”
- A front-page news feature headlined “Seeing trends, coalition works to help a river adapt .” In great detail, it predicts that “based on current warming trends,” the Nisqually River in the state of Washington “will become shallower and much warmer,” leading to a variety of environmental costs in “a natural system run amok.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
