The Post is to be commended for its focus on climate change issues in the past several days. Climate change is the moral issue of our times. As indicated in the July 3 news story [“Concern about climate declines”], media coverage matters. Several of the individuals interviewed cited reduced mainstream media coverage as a factor in the decline of public support for urgent action.
Therefore, The Post’s July 2 article “Scientists link monster fires, climate change” and the July 3 op-ed column by Eugene Robinson, “Hot enough for you?,” are extremely important in helping to educate the public about climate change. The Post bears a particularly high burden because of the large numbers of policymakers in the metro area. I am pleased to see the newspaper increasingly stepping up to the challenge.
Debra Jacobson, McLean
Post readers can be forgiven for not knowing a lot about last week’s major international conference in Rio de Janeiro dealing with climate change. That is because The Post didn’t send Juliet Eilperin, its fine environmental writer, to cover it and because it carried few stories [“Results of Earth Summit are far from earthshaking,” news, June 23] on the event and nothing of it on the front page.
If nothing happened, why write a lot about it? Mainly because nothing happened and because this shows that the political powers are acting with all the speed of a 5-year-old told to clean up his room. The difference is that the room eventually will get cleaned up, but the climate will keep getting worse for every bit of delay.
Because there are so few stories about our rush to a harmful way of life, there is little public outcry to do something to slow the process down. Because there is little public concern, the Republican presidential candidates felt safe in saying during their debates that climate change was a hoax.
If The Post doesn’t want to be among the villains that our children and grandchildren look back on as having done too little to prevent the world they will be living in from happening, it should start taking the problem more seriously and help counter the know-nothings who shout loudly while putting politics ahead of science.
Myron Beckenstein, University Park
Loading...
Comments