David Roberts

Why I love Twitter, and random thoughts on social media and sustainability

December 18, 2011

Any day now, I’ll attract my 10,000th follower on Twitter. Whoever you are, thanks. Not coincidentally, Twitter has become my favorite social-media platform. So this seems like a good moment to reflect on social media, sustainability and journalism.

Like most of you, I imagine, I’m spending more time lately with social media — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and blogs (obviously) — and less with newspapers, magazines, television, radio and books.  While there’s obviously overlap between digital and traditional media, I’m finding social media to be an increasingly  efficient and effective way for me to gather and absorb information, which is what I do.

This post is not about how social media is transforming corporate sustainability–although clearly it is. Business has fewer secrets. Corporate communication has become a two-way process. Corporate shaming campaigns are more powerful than ever. Greenpeace targeted Kit Kat and Nestle very effectively last year on Facebook and YouTube, gay activists at All Out brought pressure on PayPal to drop its business relationship with hate groups and a petition on change.org helped spark a national conversation about shopping on Thanksgiving. This is powerful stuff.

Today, though, I want to talk about my own experience with social media. These platforms can be immensely valuable but they can also be a time suck. Here’s my thinking, as of now:

Why I love Twitter: I was on a conference call on August 23 when my home office started to shake. My first reaction was that a car or truck had hit the house. Then I checked Twitter, and found a bunch of posts about the earthquake that was making its way up the east coast. (Within a minute, according to Twitter, there were 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets.) Friends in New York read about the quake on Twitter and felt it moments later.

The point is, Twitter is a super-fast way of keeping up with the news. More important, it’s the best way I know of to stay abreast of the news that I need to know — about business, sustainability, energy, climate and corporate social responsibility. That’s because I’ve found people I trust on Twitter who share what they are reading and thinking about. By spending 15 to 30 minutes a day on Twitter (not counting the time reading links), I can stay on top of news and commentary that matters to me. [click to continue…]

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Daniel Yergin: Why shale gas is like Walmart

November 8, 2011

The breakthrough energy innovation of the 21st century is not thin-film solar, sophisticated wind turbines, advanced biofuels or small-scale nukes.

It’s shale gas.

So says Daniel Yergin, the energy guru and author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, $35), who was interviewed today (Nov. 8) by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Washington. Yergin, the best-selling author, consultant and all-around energy guru, is right: The ability to extract natural gas from shale, using a controversial technique known as fracking, is reshaping America’s energy landscape.

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” Yergin said. He likened its impact on the energy business to the arrival of a new Walmart in town, which shakes up competitors, big and small.

The impact of cheap, abundant natural gas on energy usage has enormous implications for the climate crisis.

Cleaner-burning gas could replace dirty coal as a fuel to generate electricity. Then again, Yergin said: “It’s does create a more challenging marketplace for wind and solar and everything else.” [click to continue…]

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Natural gas: friend or foe of sustainability?

November 28, 2010

Most environmentalists would cheer the discovery of cheaper ways to generate electricity from wind or solar power. They would lament the news that prices are dropping for dirty fuels like coal or oil. But what about natural gas? Are abundant supplies and low prices for natural gas good for the environment–or not? Is natural gas a “bridge” to a clean energy future? Or is it a detour?

That’s the topic of a free webinar that I will moderate on Tuesday, November 30, with natural-gas experts Geoff Styles and David Hone at The Energy Collective. To register, click here.

These aren’t hypothetical questions, of course. Natural gas supplies are growing and prices are down. As The Walt Street Journal reported last year:

A massive natural-gas discovery… in northern Louisiana heralds a big shift in the nation’s energy landscape. After an era of declining production, the U.S. is now swimming in natural gas.

…Huge new fields also have been found in Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. One industry-backed study estimates the U.S. has more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped, enough to satisfy nearly 100 years of current U.S. natural-gas demand.

Some people will tell you this flood of natural gas will displace coal, and thereby reduce carbon emissions. This was the theme of a recent [click to continue…]

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A devastating critique of cap-and-trade

December 1, 2009

“You can only compromise to a point before a solution isn’t really a solution.”

That, in a sentence, is about as succinct a critique of the cap-and-trade legislation pending in Congress as you are likely to read. For more, when you have 10 minutes, watch the video below from Annie Leonard, best known as the creator of The Story of Stuff. In language anyone can understand–it’s a cartoon, after all–she argues that a global cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gases, which is what the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks are all about, won’t solve the problem of global warming.

She makes great points. Among them:

Giving away the permits to pollute under a cap-and-trade system is inequitable. As she puts it:

Industrial polluters will get the vast majo of these valuable permits for free. Free! The more they are polluting, they more they get. It’s like we’re thanking them for creating this problem in the first place.

The U.S. has a moral obligation to help poor countries which didn’t, after all, create the global-warming mess we’re in. As she says:

Don’t we have a responsibility to help those most harmed? It’s like we had a big party, didn’t invite our neighbors and then stuck them with the cleanup bill. It’s just not cool.

Carbon offsets are a risky business. She worries:

The danger with offsets is that it’s very hard to guarantee that real carbon is being removed to create the permit, yet these permits are worth real money, This creates a very dangerous incentive to create false offsets—to cheat. Now in some cases cheating isn’t the end of the world. In this case, it is.

Her solution? Cap emissions, let EPA regulate them, tax carbon, use the money for clean energy or to help poor countries adapt or mitigate their emissions.

In an ideal world, maybe. Her solution isn’t as simple as it sounds. Any effort by EPA to regulate emissions could be tied up in the courts for years.

In today’s world, forget it. As David Roberts points out in his acerbic critique-of-the-critique in Grist, the problems with cap-and-trade legislation as it is now written are a direct result of the power of the fossil fuel lobby. When Big Coal and Big Oil go toe-to-toe with Big Green, industry wins.

The fundamental problem we’re facing is that the environmental movement–even at its most mainstream– doesn’t have the clout to get a truly strong climate bill enacted. Getting even the current watered-down version enacted will be tough. Indeed,  inside-the-Beltway BINGOs (big NGOS) worry so much about losing supporters  that they are reluctant to engage in an honest conversation about climate change: That is, one that says we will likely have to sacrifice now–by paying higher prices for energy, subsidizing renewable power, and sharing clean tech with poor countries–to save the planet for future generations.  Instead, they chant the mantra of “green jobs.”

One more thing to note about this video: Leonard says carbon trading will be run by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Enron, the people who gave us the dot-com bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis. (Somehow Bernie Madoff’s name comes up as well.) She doesn’t like markets or big business, clearly.

This isn’t an argument. It’s name-calling.

But because some people in corporate America have screwed up so badly lately, it is, unfortunately, effective name-calling.

That’s a problem for those of us who still believe that well-regulated markets–including a carbon market–can be part of the solution to global warming.

Your thoughts?

UPDATE: I rushed this blogpost into “print” yesterday because Annie Leonard’s video was sweeping through the green blogosphere and I was eager to join the conversation. In retrospect, I wouldn’t call her critique “devastating” in the headline. “Pointed” or “hard-hitting” would be better.

What’s more, while Leonard effectively highlights the flaws of cap-and-trade, the policy debate around whether it will work, whether it has worked in Europe, who will benefit, whether a carbon tax would be better, why offsets are essential to any cap-and-trade scheme (or not) is obviously much more complicated than any 10-minute video or 800-word blogposting can capture. (See the comments to David Roberts’ post if you like, for a useful discussion of these issues, with numerous links.) For what it’s worth, I believe cap-and-trade can be made to work despite its dizzying complexity and the risks of gaming the system–although I’d prefer to see a cap-and-dividend approach where the proceeds from auctioning permits are returned to consumers or even a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

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The smearing of Van Jones

September 7, 2009

The first time I heard about the conservative, red-baiting crusade against Van Jones, I thought, this is ridiculous, even funny. “Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green? White House appoints ‘radical communist’ who sees environment as racial issue,” was the headline on an influential far-right website known as World Net Daily. What is this, 1952?

I’m not laughing anymore.

Van_jones_dream_reborn

There’s a lot to say about the way Van Jones was hounded out of Washington by Fox News opionator Glenn Beck and his allies. Much of it has been said in the last couple of days. Because others have done a good job digging into the back-and-forth about Jones, I don’t want go there. Nor do I  want to defend everything that he has said or done. He clearly made mistakes, most notably and recently signing a so-called Truther petition in 2001, an act for which he has since apologized.

But I’ve covered Jones on a handful of occasions in the last few years, and I’ve really been impressed. So I want to add a few observations about him, about the controversy and about where this is leading:

1. The charge that Van Jones is a communist is laughable. Van was a political radical and a prison reform activist after he graduated from Yale Law School during the 1990s, but so what? Like many of us, he evolved. I first heard him speak about social justice to a conference of Business for Social Responsibility, a liberal business group, a few years ago and he wowed the audience.  He then  became a leading advocate for green jobs and environmental justice. He told me in a column in 2007 that the environmental movement has “to start talking the language of work, wealth and health, which is the language of everyday Americans.” “Work, wealth and health” could be a Republican slogan. He spoke last year at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference, along with the likes of Bill Ford and Bill Clinton, and he wowed the crowd of well-to-do business people. He’s a progressive, like millions who voted for Obama. A communist? Give me a break. [click to continue…]

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