Heartland threatens to sue those who comment on the leaked documents and Peter Gleick comes clean as the source of the leak. There will be lawyers and the public debate seems about to move further away from the science of climate change. But perhaps this incident will spark a long overdue interest by journalists and others to look deeper into the inner workings of Heartland and other ‘think tanks’, because it is well past time they received real scrutiny.

On truth and the media

Emails, regardless of what they might say, do not have the capability to overturn decades of climate science done by thousands of individual scientists. Only more scientific research has that capability.

As the approval of Keystone XL pipeline stalls expect to hear the pro tar sand lobby use every trick they have to promote the dirty oil, including the argument that the tar sands somehow represent ethical oil. However the very notion than the oil from the tar sands is ethical is absurd and deeply hypocritical.

It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick. The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

If it were up to the author, the major slogan of the OWS movement would be something along these lines: ‘Infinite growth is not possible on a finite world. Please replace the dominant economic concept’. This one demand could unify the Occupy Wall Street movement, without excluding anyone, without diminishing the importance of individual grievances.

Protests over the Tar Sands seem to have disappeared as the news is increasingly dominated by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement. Is this a parallel movement? A broader one that contributes to or distracts from climate issues? Or something entirely new.

The future of this website is not written either. Some provocative questions have come our way. How would you address them?

You cannot solve a problem if you only treat the symptoms, and you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that caused the problem… A society that can be sustained in the long term, will most probably be healthier and more just for everyone involved, not just for the small group who can afford it. Last but not least, a problem can only be solved if it is understood completely.

One company’s failure is not reason to pull back on federal investment of alternative energies. Instead, it’s incentive to double down on research toward new innovations to stay competitive and find new solutions that boost the American economy.