Tag Archives: Anthropocene
The Ecomodernists: A new way of thinking about climate change and human progress
Making progress on climate change and energy in an age of extremes.
Strategic philanthropy in the post cap-and-trade years: Summary of new paper on U.S. foundation funding
In a paper published this week, I review the history of U.S. philanthropic strategy relative to climate change, before assessing the important 5-year period following the defeat of the 2010 cap and trade bill and leading up to the 2016 elections. I analyze $557 million distributed across 2,502 grants by 19 major foundations, detailing the financial Continue Reading »
The gene editing conversation: Public dialogue will require major investments
In 2014 biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley awoke from a nightmare that would shift the focus of her world-class scientific career. Two years earlier, with her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, now director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, Doudna had achieved one of the most Continue Reading »
The Ecomodernists: Journalists reimagining a sustainable future
Sept. 3, 2017 — In The Planet Remade (2015), journalist Oliver Morton imagined a future scenario where the Earth’s climate has been changed by geoengineering. A collective of countries with little power in world affairs secretly agrees to a low-cost plan to cool the planet. With funding from a billionaire, the collective flies several planes Continue Reading »
Preface to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication
July 19, 2017 — Because of the complexity and urgency of climate change, efforts to understand the problem’s social, cultural, and political dimensions must stretch beyond the environmental sciences and economics to be truly multi-disciplinary. To this end, over the past two decades, a growing community of scholars have focused on the factors that influence public Continue Reading »
Models of knowledge-based journalism: Brokering knowledge, dialogue, and policy ideas
April 1, 2017— In 2013’s Informing the News, the eminent journalism scholar Thomas Patterson comprehensively reviewed the evidence in support of the well-worn criticisms of our contemporary news system. Journalists too often: give equal weight to accurate representations and faulty facts and flawed opinions, focus on conflict and strategy over substance, and favor personalities, dramatic Continue Reading »