'Boiling Point': Who's to Blame for Global Warming?
By AL GORE
Published: August 15, 2004
THE blend of passionate advocacy and lucid analysis that Ross Gelbspan brings to this, his second book about global warming, is extremely readable because the author's voice is so authentic. When Gelbspan first encountered the issue as a reporter nine years ago, he writes, he had no inkling of how it would change his life. But as he put together the evidence of the global climate crisis he describes in this book, he found himself pulled inexorably to do more than simply write about it. So he now feels called to a kind of mission: to describe what is happening, to single out the specific failures and misdeeds of politicians, energy companies, environmental activists and journalists who share responsibility for our predicament, and then propose bold solutions that -- unlike more timid blueprints already on the public agenda -- would in his view actually solve the problem.
For a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the top of his game, this is a career detour requiring courage I greatly admire. Moreover, he candidly describes how, as he opened himself to the implications of what he was learning in his dogged pursuit of this story, he has undergone something of a personal transformation. He writes that it has become ''an excruciating experience to watch the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial.'' He describes how mountain glaciers around the world are melting, most of them rapidly. And he cites early examples of environmental refugees like those created in recent weeks in Bangladesh, vulnerable to catastrophic flooding as sea levels rise.
In the course of this transformation, Gelbspan has become a different kind of reporter, one who recalls the great reforming journalists of the first decade of the 20th century -- Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and others -- who not only reported on political corruption and corporate excesses but connected them to larger destructive patterns that had developed in the economy and politics of their time. They agitated for policy reforms, many of which were enacted into statutes when they became part of the progressive movement's agenda: antitrust laws, the Food and Drug Administration, railroad regulation, wage and hour laws, workmen's compensation and child labor laws, to name a few.
It is in that spirit that Gelbspan pursues solutions for climate change that can ''also begin to reverse some very discouraging and destructive political and economic dynamics as well.''
Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media's coverage of global warming for the past two decades. Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the news coverage is ''a large reason for that failure.''...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/review/15GOREL.html
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