Year 2, Month 10, Day 26: Your Lips Are Moving, But I Can’t Hear A Word You’re Saying.

Time Magazine offers Dominique Browning a chance to explain why people don’t talk too much about climate — and while her piece is reasonable enough, it largely ignores the elephant in the room:

There’s been much hand-wringing — but perhaps not enough soul-searching — among environmentalists about how climate change got to be the political third rail. The New York Times ran a lengthy piece asking “Where Did Global Warming Go?” which raised more questions than it answered.

Here is some more explicit finger-pointing, along with a few proposals. I speak as an informed, and deeply concerned, citizen; as a grumpy environmentalist fatoosted by my tribe; and as a person who has had a lifelong career in “communications.” But mainly, I’m up at night worrying about global warming because I’m a mom who hopes someday to have grandchildren. And I don’t like the terrifying mess my kids will face. (By the way, “climate change” is yesterday’s weak phrase; it doesn’t begin to convey the intensity of trouble that is now upon us. I’m going with “climate chaos.”)

{snip}

We know exactly why climate chaos has fallen off the national agenda. We’ve let it happen. And by “we” I mean everyone from environmentalists to doctors to scientists to teachers to politicians, to parents. There’s no one else to blame. We care about this issue. But we’ll be more ardent, and more focused, when the message is more urgent: we should fight global warming because our lives depend on it.

It’s a good piece, but…

Sent October 22:

Dominique Browning barely touches on the pivotal role of the corporatized news system in her attribution of causes for the decline in robust discussion of climate change in the United States. The deregulation begun under Ronald Reagan has put our media increasingly under corporate control, and the national interest has suffered dramatically thereby. Nowhere is this more telling than in the media’s handling of climate change, where false equivalency — the “balancing” of each scientifically-informed voice with a petroleum-funded one — has helped convince the public that the debate is “still open.”

With each new study (even ones funded by conservative climate denialists) confirming the planetary scientific consensus, any debate we should be having about climate change is no longer whether it’s real and dangerous, but what to do about this increasingly immediate threat. And any action on climate that ignores media reform condemns itself to ineffectuality.

Warren Senders

Aaaaaaand…………….they published it!