Something happened today that, chances are, you know little about yet care about very deeply. It helps pay for the lovely farmers market you frequent every weekend. It’s behind all those corn-syrupy soft drinks you’ve been taught to avoid. It’s the reason you started hiking to that one artisanal shop for grass-fed beef after you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It helps feed America’s hungry, because it authorizes the federal food-stamp program, which feeds 46 million people. It’s the farm bill, usually the concern of only the corn, wheat, cotton, peanut, and soy-bean lobby, but it really should be called the food bill, and it has to be reauthorized every five years.
In October 2008, Michael Pollan, a food writer and critic of American agriculture policy, wrote a letter in The New York Times Magazine addressed to the president-elect, whom everyone then assumed would be Barack Obama, on how to make our food more healthful. Obama wouldn’t win the election for another month, but the lithe, urbane candidate had earned a reputation for eating well on the campaign trail; he eschewed hot dogs for salmon, arugula, and Honest Tea. Food policy had not been at the forefront of the campaign, Pollan argued, but was key to a number of policy goals Obama had raised: “Unless you [reform the food system], you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.
If you're a Republican presidential candidate, chances are that a few years ago you supported cap-and-trade as a market-based means of reducing carbon emissions to deal with climate change, but today you have to say that that approach was misconceived. But just how far do you have to go on this? One approach is to say that, sure, climate change is happening, but we just shouldn't bother to do anything about it.
There's a new survey out from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication that demonstrates the success climate deniers have had in convincing people not just that we can't be certain that climate change is happening, but that even scientists themselves are divided and confused. Before we go any further, just to be clear: They aren't. The proportion of climate scientists who believe that climate change is occurring is around 99 percent. But that's not what the public thinks.
At the meeting of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group in Brazil, city leaders are trumpeting their efforts to fight climate change. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who's a C40 chair, released a report yesterday on the carbon emissions of some of the world's largest cities and took the opportunity to give his "you can't start solving a problem until you've got data" spiel.
Freakonomics and now SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner may still be denyingclaims that they are climate-change skeptics, but Dave Weigeltalked to some self-proclaimed skeptics who beg to differ:
