Al Gore Reviews Ross Gelbspan's Latest Book - Good Read! NYT

[hatrack]

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"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.

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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.'' At a time when prominent journalists are writing mea culpas for allowing themselves to be too easily misled in their coverage of the case for war in Iraq, Gelbspan presents a devastating analysis of how the media have been duped and intimidated by an aggressive and persistent campaign organized and financed by coal and oil companies. He recounts, for example, a conversation with a top television network editor who was reluctant to run stories about global warming because a previous story had ''triggered a barrage of complaints from the Global Climate Coalition'' -- a fossil fuel industry lobbying group -- ''to our top executives at the network.''

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Gelbspan also criticizes the current administration, documenting its efforts to ''demolish the diplomatic foundations'' of the international agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol, and describing its approach to energy and environmental policy as ''corruption disguised as conservatism.'' Again, he backs up his charge with impressive research. Moreover, his critique is far from partisan. He takes on environmental groups for doing way too little and for focusing on their own institutional agendas rather than the central challenges."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/review/15GOREL.html