More Gray, No Green

Over at A Plain Blog About Politics Jonathan Bernstein every Saturday asks the question, what mattered this week?  I was otherwise engaged for the weekend, so I'll make my answer here, especially since it's a strange one.  Of all the mostly idiotic things that happened last week, what may have mattered the most is the New York Times shutting down its climate information site, the Green Blog.  This follows the Times' shutting down its environmental news desk in January.

As Revkin points out in his note, the Times still maintains nine fashion blogs and eight sports blogs. But they couldn't be bothered with one on the most important elements in the fate of the planet.  (And I wonder, can Revkin's Dot Earth be far behind?)  What ever happened to that great gray lady responsibility?  She just couldn't think green.

This is a terrible time to be lacking in trustworthy places to find climate reporting.  There were so few sources to begin with, and now the newspaper site with the greatest clout has given up on that.  If the Times had continued, other newspapers with like ambitions would have to as well.  This is a setback.

We need a range, and we need some commitment.  Even while touting its Blue Marble enviro blog,  Mother Jones speculated that the Times action was because environmental news is inherently boring.  What I find inherently boring is progressive as well as regressive trendy cynicism, or the reflexive inflated coverage of every inconsequential stupid thing GOPers and other deniers say plus Joe Romm's ego trip at Climate Progress.  

Real Climate is really for climate scientists,  Grist can be good and also weightless, etc. Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker is consistently solid and eloquent, but she alone is not enough. They all deserve a place in the mix, but where's the mix?  At least enough newspapers and other sites are covering the stories and studies they all believe are big stories that you can compare their reporting and analysis.  But how about a site that does its own reporting, or that can quickly evaluate what's really new in a particular research finding?

As for environmental news being boring, ask folks on Staten Island and on the Jersey shore how bored they are. Frightened certainly--and climate news can be frightening.  That's probably more to the point than "boring."  Less stress to read those nine blogs on fashion, and forget.