Media Coverage Of Environmental Issues Waxes and Wanes

I just got back from a walk up to the local coffee shop, where I thought I’d read the Sunday paper and try to get some inspiration for a blog post or two.  Since I surround myself with breaking news in the cleantech/environmental space most of the week, I sometimes forget that the rest of the world isn’t as amped up about the subject as the 2GreenEnergy readers/writers and I are, and the mainstream papers aren’t littered with articles on the topic.

The closest I came was an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that pointed out the problems with our beaches here in the U.S., which included the notion that they’re disappearing (i.e., eroding) at an ever-increasing rate due to global warming.  I was surprised to see that; the Journal is pretty far to the right, and most of its coverage of the whole subject of environmentalism is quite snide and critical.  But there it was in black and white: an acknowledgement of the existence of climate change.  Hallelujah.

To be fair to the media, I need to point out a sad fact about the consumers it serves: they have short attention spans, and when they get tired of a certain subject, they look for something new.  The catastrophe with our environment is occurring over a period of decades, not days, and many people, even those who were intensely engaged at a certain point, are now busy expressing their outrage at Rolling Stone magazine, wondering when the Royal Birth will be, or getting into whatever else will happen next week.  The U.S. Congress has voted 33 times to repeal Obamacare.  Maybe they’ll be a 34th.  Who knows?