The first question you might ask about Joseph Romm’s new book, Straight Up (Island Press:$19.75 from Amazon), which compiles some of the finest and fiercest posts from his widely read blog Climate Progress, is, why is it a book at all?
Consider the paragraph below, from a Dec. 8, 2009 piece on an op-ed by Sarah Palin in The Washington Post:
The newspaper that just editorialized, Many — including us — find global warming deniers’ claims irresponsible, has just published a grotesquely irresponsible and falsehood-filled piece on climate science and the hacked emails by that leading light of science, ex-Governor Sarah Palin. This is a woman that recently embraced the fact-free birthers.
Here’s the same paragraph in Straight Up:
The newspaper that just editorialized, “Many — including us — find global warming deniers’ claims irresponsible,” has just published a grotesquely irresponsible and falsehood-filled piece on climate science and the hacked emails by that leading light of science, ex-Governor Sarah Palin. This is a woman that recently embraced the fact-free birthers.
Notice the difference?
The book naturally lacks the hyperlinks that are the lifeblood of blogs and permit bloggers to use shorthand because proof is only a click away.
But the excision of links leaves Romm, who has a Ph.D.in physics from MIT but is the son of a journalist and is, at core, a media creature, in a vulnerable place.
There are no distractions when you’re reading him on cellulose and he can’t instantaneously respond to criticisms with his chainsaw wit. This can be a frightening place for bloggers to be.
Fortunately, his arguments and the wicked prose that describes Palin as a “leading light of science,” stand up well.
Readers of Climate Progress, an offshoot of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, are familiar with the cast of heroes and villains in Romm’s world and it should take only a few sentences for a reader of Straight Up to catch on.
There are, of course, chapters on Darth Vader Dick Cheney and ExxonMobil in Straight Up, which is being released in time for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, but Romm reserves his most ferocious scorn for the “Status Quo Media.”
This latter group, exemplified for Romm by former New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin, are worse than lazy with their “he said, she said” reporting and tendency to soften the hard science of global warming with irrelevant drama and questions of personality. (see Gore, Al.)
In his foreward, Romm writes that he seeks to emulate George Orwell in confronting “the toughest of truths” and he evinces a palpable sense of disappointment that other media cannot seem to confront those truths about global warming.
Writing that global warming is up for debate means delaying action and a continued march toward temperature increases of 5.5 degrees celsius, or 9 degrees fahrenheit, and catastrophe for the planet and humanity.
There is no such thing as a principled disagreement on these issues and Romm mocks “delayers and deniers” with the skill of a New York Post headline writer and old school Yellow journalist.
Romm reserves his most ferocious scorn for the ‘Status Quo Media.’
“Palin jumps from birther to flat earther,” Romm proclaims in one sub-headline. “America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste,” he writes in another piece. Scientific reports of skyrocketing temperatures are “stunners” and exclamation points (!!!) are deployed with stunning regularity.
His solutions to the climate crisis, if they lack the gusto of his political takedowns, are strikingly easy to follow.
The technology that can save mankind and limit warming to no more than 2 degrees celsius already exists and needs to be deployed on a massive scale at the afforable cost of 0.12 percent of global GDP per year.
It’s a waste of time to hope that a “breakthrough technology” will save us, since experience shows us that it takes an energy source 25 years from commercial introduction to gain 1 percent share of the global market.
We don’t have that much time.
Still, what’s missing from Straight Up is time: the time that Romm might have taken to research his pieces deeply instead of relying, as he does in one piece, on concentrated solar power company Ausra’s website; or the time that might have passed before Romm christened President Barack Obama “The Green FDR”.
But any man who can write, “In this post I will lay out ‘the solution’ to global warming,” is clearly in a hurry to spread his gospel.
It’s too bad his editors left that subheadline out of the book.