You know something's up, if "All the News That's Fit to Print" seems to be all climate all the time. Today's New York Times contains no fewer than six articles that have climate change and climate economics as their central themes -- and that doesn't even count the Magazine cover story. A quick reader's guide:
Andy Revkin starts us out with a balanced look at climatic "tipping points": is it gradually getting worse, or should we be even more worried about sudden, unexpected changes?
Next up, some individual activism during "Earth Hour" last night, when much of Times Square, the Empire State Building and many other monuments around the world turned their lights off in a rolling, intentional, international blackout to create some "political energy."
That energy seems to be radiating straight from the White House, which announced a series of meetings among key countries to address the climate challenge globally.
While governments are debating how to set up the necessary policy frameworks to guide the world onto a low-carbon development path, even loggers are already doing their part by looking at more sustainable ways of doing business and, at the same time, "creat[ing] jobs in places accustomed to losing them."
Investors, in the meantime, should rightfully be worried what climate uncertainty means for equity returns.
Leave it to Tom Friedman to put it all together in a look at Mother Nature's Dow, which ends with the mother of all climate solutions: "'we need a price on carbon.' Polluting the atmosphere can't be free."
Amen to that.
That list doesn't include one of the cartoons in the Week in Review Section. It's funny, but it confuses weather and climate. And it doesn't include the New York Times Magazine cover story on physicist and climate skeptic Freeman Dyson. It's not as funny, but should get your blood boiling nonetheless. Dyson provides an important reminder on scientific honesty and ultimately highlights the most crucial of points in the entire climate debate: the importance of decoupling economic development from greenhouse gas emissions.
