Even as extreme weather worsens and the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change gets more alarming, it was hard to find any television outlets touching the subject this Earth Day.
However, there was one show that addressed climate change with a sense of urgency.
While CNN ran stories about “acts of green” and Fox News hilariously lamented that the earth “is not friendly to human beings,” former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm devoted a large portion of her show, The War Room, to the most pressing environmental story in history.
Granholm featured three segments on climate and energy issues, bringing in Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Jeffrey Sachs to talk about the consequences of inaction. She also gave her own forceful monologue urging people to put politicians in office that “will allow your children to have a future on this planet.” As Granholm put it, “Your thinking small does not serve the world”:
“Across the political spectrum Democrats, Independents and Republicans now see that the climate is changing….
The climate is changing. But excuses for inaction have not. And nature doesn’t care about excuses.”
Watch it:
Al Gore appeared on the show, saying that he believes the small group of vocal climate deniers will eventually lose their voice: “We have got to win this. And we will win this. Because the reality is what it is.”
Al Gore Endorses Filibuster Reform |
Speaking at the South by Southwest conference earlier this week, former President-elect (and United States Senator) Al Gore said that he is “for changing” the Senate’s increasingly unworkable filibuster rule, although he expressed pessimism that doing so is an achievable goal. Gore’s comments came in response to a question by ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Faiz Shakir. As Gore noted, several Democratic senators “tried a novel approach at the beginning of this Congress, and it was squelched.” Gore expressed more optimism, however, that social media and other Internet advocacy tools can be used to put “pressure” on elected officials to “do the right thing.” Watch it:
NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.
After crossing the legendary Drake Passage, we came in sight of the Antarctic continent. It is a majestic, otherworldly place. The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts northward toward South America, is lined with ice-covered mountains and surrounded by abundant wildlife in the sea. But even on this continent that looks and feels pristine, a troubling process is underway because of global warming.
The ice on land is melting at a faster rate and large ice sheets are moving toward the ocean more rapidly. As a result, sea levels are rising worldwide. Most of the world’s ice is contained in Antarctica – more than 90 percent. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which lies south of the Peninsula, contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by more than 20 feet. Part of the ice sheet, the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, is among the many in Antarctica that are shrinking at an accelerating rate. This has direct consequences for low-lying coastal and island communities all over the world – and for their inland neighbors.
In analyzing the relationship between melting ice and sea level rise, it is important to distinguish between two kinds of ice: the ice on land and the ice floating on top of the sea. When floating ice melts, sea level is not affected, because its weight has already pushed the sea level upward. But the melting of glaciers and ice sheets resting on land does increase sea level rise. So far, the melting of small mountain glaciers and portions of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland has been the main contributor to sea level rise from the loss of ice. (As the oceans warm up, their volume naturally expands, and this too has been a contributor to a small portion of the sea level rise that has occurred in the age of global warming).
Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could warm more rapidly than the global average. “This prediction has proven true,” Gore writes. “Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average.”
Although the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent are remote from almost all of human civilization, their warming has drastic implications for billions of people. With the melting of those almost inconceivable reserves of ice, the planet’s sea levels are rising. Scientists now expect 21st-century sea level rise — on the scale of three to six feet or more — will be dominated by the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.
Gore is leading an expedition of “civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens, as well as “many of the world’s leading climate scientists” to see how man’s negligence is transforming the forbidding continent:
To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries on this voyage will be joined by many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica.
The Climate Reality Project is asking everyone to host their own expeditions wherever they live. As the new plant hardiness zone maps from the USDA remind us, we don’t even need to leave our backyards to see the effects of the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon pollution we have pumped into the atmosphere with the profligate burning of fossil fuels.
Nor do we have to leave our neighborhoods to see the signs of positive change — community gardens, electric cars, solar panels, wind turbine manufacturers, and more in the growing mass movement to build a sustainable, resilient civilization on our changing planet.
Polarization on Climate Jumped in 2009 — Long After Gore’s 2006 Movie
Percent of Americans Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen, by Political Ideology, from McCright and Dunlap
Conservative columnist Michael Gerson broke sharply from right-wing orthodoxy today when he ended an op-ed on climate change with this bombshell:
The extraction and burning of dead plant matter is not a moral good — or the proper cause for a culture war.
As evidenced by the presidential debates and recent Congressional hearings and speeches, it is in fact an article of faith for much of the national GOP that extracting and burning fossil fuels is a moral good, a matter of national security and economic security. Drill, Baby, Drill!
Imagine Gerson telling the attendees of the Republican National Convention that what they are chanting for isn’t a moral good. He’d be drummed out of the movement.
And in his op-ed, “Climate and the culture war,” Gerson gets that the planet is warming rapidly, creating many dangerous impacts, and the best explanation is human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Unfortunately, accompanying this bombshell is a dud, Gerson’s tired — and erroneous — blame-the-messenger strategy for the culture war:
No cause has been more effectively sabotaged by its political advocates. Climate scientists, in my experience, are generally careful, well-intentioned and confused to be at the center of a global controversy. Investigations of hacked e-mails have revealed evidence of frustration — and perhaps of fudging but not of fraud. It is their political defenders who often discredit their work through hyperbole and arrogance. As environmental writer Michael Shellenberger points out, “The rise in the number of Americans telling pollsters that news of global warming was being exaggerated began virtually concurrently with the release of Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”
Obviously, any “fact” offered up by confusionist Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute is likely to be a nonsensical myth — and this one most certainly is. There is no polling data to support that view, as is clear from the chart above from the 2011 journal article, “The polarization of climate change and the polarization and the American publics view of global warming.” I confirmed this with co-author Riley Dunlap when the study came out, which I’ll discuss further in a later post.
And yes, it is laughable that Gerson has the nerve to blame Gore or anybody else for the culture war or the polarization of any issue. Gerson “served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter from 2001 until June 2006, as a senior policy advisor from 2000 through June 2006, and was a member of the White House Iraq Group.” Gore just made a movie and then use the proceeds to try to depolarize the issue whereas Bush/Cheney politicized science, and specifically climate science, more than any administration in history.
As an aside, blaming the messenger is certainly an emerging climate strategy for many in the conservative movement since it lets them off the hook. You see, folks, it isn’t the disinformation campaign — which Gerson never mentions — or the power of the fossil fuel lobby — which Gerson never mentions. It’s those darn “defenders” of scientists who are to blame. I wonder who scientists could possibly need defending from? But I digress.
Let me go back to the polling data because it is certainly a widely held myth that Gore is responsible for polarizing this debate. That is a myth conservatives love to tout, of course, and it is one the Breakthrough bunch has repeated again and again. But it just isn’t true.
As an important aside, it is pretty well-known from social science research that people take crucial cues (as to their beliefs) from elites and that Republicans tend to take their cues from Republican elites and Democrats tend to take their cue from Democratic elites. So it would be hard for Gore by himself to polarize the debate in any case. Indeed, Gerson himself notes that:
In 2005, then-Gov. Mitt Romney joined a regional agreement to limit carbon emissions. In 2007, Gingrich publicly endorsed a cap-and-trade system for carbon.
Many, many Republicans embraced cap-and-trade around that time and didn’t flip flop on climate until 2009, suggesting again it was something other than Gore’s advocacy to blaim (see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change). Let’s remember that the GOP presidential nominee ran on a platform of climate action and cap-and-trade — even his conservative VP, Sarah Palin, endorsed it. That’s a key reason again that you see in the top chart that the liberal-conservative polarization did not accelerate until 2009, when a certain person got elected with overwhelming majorities and the prospect of an actual climate bill became quite real.
The folks behind Current TV are confident they’ve found an underserved niche in the news market. “We’re going to punch the establishment in the mouth,” Cenk Uygur said at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday. “They have their plastic, fake, robot anchors on there who do not deliver the news. They give you this he-said, she-said drivel.” “I’ll be able to show you something and listen to these guests and tell our viewers what are talking points and what aren’t talking points,” promised Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose news show starts on January 30, giving Current a full prime time lineup. “I’ve delivered talking points. I know them when I hear them.” Viewers are “looking for a place that connects the dots in a way that makes sense to them,” Vice President Al Gore told us.
The question is how Current can distinguish itself from its competitors in substance as well as tone—and get viewers to connect the dot from the news they’re watching now on MSNBC or CNN to the different product that is Current. It’s one thing to say, as Uygur did, “If you turn to CNN to find out what’s going on in politics, you’re wasting your time,” or another to point out, as Gore did, that “MSNBC has some liberal-oriented shows in the evening, but they have put on the RNC chairman…They start the day with a conservative show,” and another to get them to switch to another product.
Good journalism and good signings help, of course. Gore touted the fact that the network’s won “won every award in journalism.” And certainly one way Current might distinguish itself from its competitors would be to invest heavily in investigative reporting and documentaries. MSNBC’s been expanding its anchored shows, particularly on weekends with the addition of Chris Hayes and now Melissa Harris-perry, and it’s probably true that Current has to fill out its prime-time lineup to keep up. But breaking stories, providing new reported context on major events, and elevating stories that are flying under the radar would be an even more dramatic break with the existing cable model than simply offering a competing brand of analysis. On MSNBC, Hayes has gotten credit from the tech community for doing a segment on the Stop Online Piracy Act: clearly, there are major communities that feel underserved, and could be up for grabs by a network willing to break out of the standard menu of cable news topics.
It would be particularly interesting to know what’s bringing viewers to Current, particularly since David Bohrman, the network’s president, told us that while the average age of viewers for news coverage on the other cable networks was in the 60s, the average age for Current is 47, and for election coverage, it dipped to 36. “If we can mine this, we’re going to have viewers and customers for many years to come,” Bohrman said. Which is true, but the network needs more of them.
When I asked about how Current intends to boost those numbers, Bohrman said that he didn’t want to reveal too much about the network’s marketing strategy. But he indicated that the rollout of Granholm’s show would be promoted by an advertising blitz similar to the one that launched Keith Olbermann’s show on Current. And he emphasized the importance of having a full primetime lineup of news programming to match the amount of information on other networks. Uygur also suggested that the way Olbermann’s ratings took off when his show took on a more progressive bent was proof of the power of persistence, and that the space he’d opened up already counted as a success: “it allowed all of us to be on television.”
But I’ll be very curious to see what else the network plans to do to fight for market share. Unlike a network like Starz, which is only in 19.5 million households, Current has 63 million subscriber households. It’s less an access problem than getting people to hit the right channel buttons. Mending fences with lynchpin talent like Keith Olbermann, who will be hosting upcoming election coverage for the network, will help. But so could questioning the model of the business Current is in.
By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 12, 2012 at 2:55 pm
by Zachary Rybarczyk
Is Al Gore a secret gamer?
Known for advocating climate protection measures through books, movies, TV shows and concerts, the Nobel Laureate is venturing into a new medium to spread his message: video games.
Gore’s nonprofit climate education and advocacy organization, the Climate Reality Project, recently teamed up with global brand and trend consultants at PSFK to challenge design firms to create an interactive video game that uses the momentum of social media and gaming to advocate taking action on climate change and quash misinformation.
Video games and social media will play a key role in the future of fighting climate change, Gore says, as policies needed to accelerate the transition to clean technologies are blocked by oil, gas, and coal industry’s influence on our government.
“The architecture of the public square on the internet is very similar to when the country was founded, when the print-based media were dominant. Individuals have easy access, almost no barriers to access, ideas matter.”
Watch a short speech and roundtable with Gore on the subject:
Vice President Al Gore is disappointed that Newt Gingrich has turned his back on climate action after having appeared in one of his global warming ads, but doesn’t take it personally. Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination this year, Gingrich has said the ad he did with Nancy Pelosi in 2007 was the “dumbest single thing I’ve done.” Gore told the Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur that he thinks the Republican candidates are being “bludgeoned” by special interests to “toe the line”:
I appreciated him agreeing to my request that he did it, and I don’t want to be ungracious now. I’m grateful that he did it, and I’m sorry that he’s changed his position. But what it says is more about the condition of the political system today, particularly in the Republican Party, but really across the board. The special interests have so much power, they’re really able to bludgeon the candidates to toe the line.
Watch it:
“Mitt Romney used to have a different position,” Gore noted when asked about Jon Huntsman’s recent climate reversal. “Several of them did.”
Gingrich To Gore In 2008: ‘Your Friend, Newt’ |
In 2008, Al Gore called to ask whether Newt Gingrich, the former Republican U.S. House speaker now running for president, would appear in a television ad calling for action to address climate change. Gingrich, who was promoting his latest book Contract With the Earth and urging “green conservatism,” agreed. In an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News that he wrote to the former vice president, Gingrich thanked Gore “for the opportunity to participate in the Protect Climate ad campaign.” He signed the March 2008 note, “Your friend, Newt.”
Even as extreme weather worsens and the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change gets more alarming, it was hard to find any television outlets touching the subject this Earth Day.
Former Vice President Al Gore is heading to Antarctica to highlight the extraordinary changes greenhouse pollution is causing even in our most remote continent. When Gore visited Antarctica in 1988, scientists were predicting it could 
The folks behind Current TV are confident they’ve found an underserved niche in the news market. “We’re going to punch the establishment in the mouth,” Cenk Uygur said at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday. “They have their plastic, fake, robot anchors on there who do not deliver the news. They give you this he-said, she-said drivel.” “I’ll be able to show you something and listen to these guests and tell our viewers what are talking points and what aren’t talking points,” promised Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose news show starts on January 30, giving Current a full prime time lineup. “I’ve delivered talking points. I know them when I hear them.” Viewers are “looking for a place that connects the dots in a way that makes sense to them,” Vice President Al Gore told us.
by Zachary Rybarczyk
