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Radio coverage of green jobs
I did an interview yesterday with Valarie Grant of Green 960's Labor Report about the Pew study on green-collar jobs. It's online here (click listen near the top of the page).
| June 23 2009 at 12:34 PM
Tweet, Tweet! Find Us On Twitter
A year ago this week, the SXSW Interactive festival called Twitter one of the most exciting internet applications of the year. Apparently the mainstream runs exactly a year behind the tech geeks at SXSWi:
Call us behind-the-times if you must, but The Thin Green Line has recently begun a daily Twitter feed. Find it here, or on SFGreen's new Facebook page.
And for more information on how to use Twitter to create green communities, read this reader blog post.
| March 16 2009 at 11:31 AM
Friday Food For Thought: What A Blog Is And Isn't
More and more Americans read blogs, but do most readers understand the difference between a blog post and a reported article?
It seems important to know the difference with charges of media bias flying off the lips of politicians with grudges, and with many people pointing and clicking quickly among and between different kinds of sources.
Here are some differences, in my opinion as someone who has written both:
• Reported articles are written by a reporter who has done primary research into the topic, including talking to experts and looking at reports and other documents. Anything presented as fact in an article should come from at least two sources, and an article should represent no more than half of what a reporter knows about the specific topic.
Blog posts are written by bloggers who have read several reported articles or blog posts. Good bloggers also sometimes look at reports or talk to experts. A single linked source usually serves as the basis of fact for a blog post. A good post can represent as much as 90 percent of what a blogger knows about a specific topic (solar panels, for example), though a good blog will focus on an overall topic (green, for example) on which the blogger is somewhat expert.
• Some reported articles—though generally not newspaper articles due to time constraints—also undergo the scrutiny of a fact checker, who double checks the reporter's research looking for misunderstandings or oversight. Blogs are almost never fact checked and rarely proof read by anyone other than the blogger. However, like a newspaper reporter, a paid blogger is expected to adhere to professional standards.
• Reporting an article takes anywhere from a full day to a full month or more. Writing a good blog post takes somewhere between a 45 minutes and a couple of days. The tradeoff is, by piggybacking on the time reporters have spent unearthing facts, bloggers can point readers to a wider variety of information and share their opinions and personal experiences.
• Reporters have the obligation to describe both sides of a controversy or debate—within reason. (Climate change is an example where controversy has been reported extensively and no longer needs to be included in every article about the subject.)
Bloggers are not expected to be unbiased. For example, as a green blog, the Thin Green Line generally takes a pro-green stance and devotes attention to anti-green positions only to the extent that they are surprising, or interesting. I do not make any effort to get a quote from an anti-bike group or individual when I blog on biking, for example. But if I blogged about high fines for failing to compost, say, I would analyze arguments for and against.
• Reporters are expected to approach each article with an open mind, free of preconceptions or highly personal biases. That does not mean that they will not develop an opinion while writing a particular article, or when writing article after article on a complex topic. It does mean that any opinion they form should be expressed by way of facts and expert quotations rather than "I think" statements.
Blog posts, on the other hand, should express the writer's opinions and bring his or her own interests and personality to the table. A good blog will nevertheless link to facts and expert opinions to back up the writer's opinions. A writer's opinion should not be taken for the site's or newspaper's; bloggers on the same site can and do disagree.
• In short, reported articles should break down an issue using facts; though this can sometimes verge on opinion, it should not cross the line into pure opinion. Blogs, on the other hand, are heavily based in opinion. Good blogs represent informed opinion. Bad blogs can consist of uninformed ranting.
Reading a blog post, then, is an exercise in deciding whether you think the blogger's opinion is informed enough to be worth engaging with. A reader can do that by evaluating the sources it offers and the expertise and training of the blogger. The respectability of the site (Think Progress, for example) can also help you: Anyone can start a blog on Wordpress, but paid bloggers on professional sites almost infallibly have training in their subject matter and/or in journalism (see my bio for my qualifications). If you get your news primarily from blogs, you should remember that the linked-to articles and sources are fact, whereas the post represents informed opinion.
Have I forgotten anything? Do you have questions about blogging? Let me know in the comments.
| February 06 2009 at 12:16 PM
World Class Bloggers on SFGreen
I wanted to call your attention to the heavy-hitters now blogging on this community site.
Scott Parkin, AKA Sparki, is blogging about the international movement against coal power. Scott is a world-famous activist himself—famous enough to have a documentary about him.
Jason Mark is the editor of the award-winning Earth Island Journal. His SFGreen blog is Temperature Gauge.
Kearstin Krehbiel, Program Director at a major SF nonprofit devoted to green areas, is sharing fantastic tips with us.
I hope you'll read and comment on their blogs and start your own!
| June 20 2008 at 11:50 AM
Climate Change Basics
I wrote in my introduction to this blog that climate change has pushed us in the last year and a half to begin thinking seriously about how we treat our environment.
Being green—or environmentalist or living sustainably, or whatever buzzword works for you—encompasses more than just climate change. But climate change has the potential to affect us all individually and geopolitically and to destroy many of the ecosystems that smaller-scale versions of environmentalism have sought to protect. Climate change, in other words, is a good place to start.
And let's start, as Fraulein Maria croons in The Sound of Music, at the very beginning: What does climate change mean to me? Well, the NRDC calculates that by 2100, if climate change goes unchecked, living in San Francisco will be like living in New Orleans today. Average temperatures will be 13 degrees warmer.
It will also cost the United States at least [PDF] 2 percent of its GDP (or $1.9 trillion) annually to maintain our civic infrastructure in the face of volatile weather:
| The Global Warming Price Tag in Four Impact Areas, 2025 through 2100 | |||||||
| Cost in billions of 2006 dollars | U.S. Regions Most at Risk | ||||||
| 2025 | 2050 | 2075 | 2100 | ||||
| $10 | $43 | $142 | $422 | Atlantic & Gulf Coast states | ||
| $34 | $80 | $173 | $360 | Atlantic & Gulf Coast states | ||
| $28 | $47 | $82 | $141 | Southeast & Southwest | ||
| $200 | $336 | $565 | $950 | Western states | ||
| $271 | $506 | $961 | $1,873 | ||||
Another study, conducted by Sir Nicholas Stern, concluded that, worldwide, climate change would slow GDP growth rates by 5-20 percent.
But there's good news! Cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2100 would slow GDP growth by just one percent a year, Stern concluded.
These are two working principles of this blog: We've got to do something about climate change. It won't be easy, but it's far from impossible.
| June 17 2008 at 10:29 AM
Walking the Thin Green Line
Climate change hit the mainstream in February 2007, when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report stating with 90 percent certainty that humans are causing climate change and that the results will be ugly unless we act immediately to slow carbon emissions. More Katrina-sized hurricanes. More towns moving inland to flee angry seas. Steamy summers; ruthless winter storms. Whole countries wiped off the map. And a tipping point, beyond which no one can say what would happen.
The U.N. report drew a thin green line between life as we know it and climate chaos—a line that would get thinner every day we failed to slow global greenhouse gas emissions.
Suddenly the equation changed, and caring for the environment became the reasonable thing to do. European governments began enacting policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Congress discussed, but ultimately failed to pass, a cap-and-trade carbon regimen for industry. Corporations began to embrace green rhetoric, if not green practices. And SFGate launched a new, interactive green community channel to bring together environmental coverage from various sections of the website and give you the opportunity to shape the discussion.
It's not the first such online portal, but we hope it will be the best. The Bay Area is, after all, one of the greenest regions of the greenest state, and it's pushing to get greener. The Bay Area has the will and the know-how to pioneer real changes in the way societies get, use and dispose of the resources they need—and those they just want. At least one future change-maker is probably reading this blog post right now. And there are certainly people reading with a range of perspectives on what it means to see your habitat—your planet—endangered.
As for me, an eclectic mix of things has drawn me to environmental issues. Selfishly, I don't want anything to intrude on the solitude and beauty I enjoy in wild areas. I was a teenager at the end of the Reagan years and have lived through one round of constant fear that the world would be annihilated in an abstract power struggle to control it. I'm queer, and understand what it means to be considered, like the natural world and the poor, no more than collateral damage by those in power. Mostly, preserving our habitat—which is more beautiful than the best art and more complex than the best science can understand—just seems like the logical thing to do.
In this blog, I'll be sharing my views, from the Bay Area's green frontier, on emerging personal, political, and corporate strategies for decreasing our wear and tear on the planet—and, inevitably, on "strategies" for pretending to do something while continuing to do nothing. Weigh in, and let me know what you think.
| June 17 2008 at 06:27 AM
Walking the Thin Green Line
Climate change hit the mainstream in February 2007, when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report stating with 90 percent certainty that humans are causing climate change and that the results will be ugly unless we act immediately to slow carbon emissions. More Katrina-sized hurricanes. More towns moving inland to flee angry seas. Steamy summers; ruthless winter storms. Whole countries wiped off the map. And a tipping point, beyond which no one can say what would happen.
The U.N. report drew a thin green line between life as we know it and climate chaos—a line that would get thinner every day we failed to slow global greenhouse gas emissions.
Suddenly the equation changed, and caring for the environment became the reasonable thing to do. European governments began enacting policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Congress discussed, but ultimately failed to pass, a cap-and-trade carbon regimen for industry. Corporations began to embrace green rhetoric, if not green practices. And SFGate launched a new, interactive green community channel to bring together environmental coverage from various sections of the website and give you the opportunity to shape the discussion.
It's not the first such online portal, but we hope it will be the best. The Bay Area is, after all, one of the greenest regions of the greenest state, and it's pushing to get greener. The Bay Area has the will and the know-how to pioneer real changes in the way societies get, use and dispose of the resources they need—and those they just want. At least one future change-maker is probably reading this blog post right now. And there are certainly people reading with a range of perspectives on what it means to see your habitat—your planet—endangered.
As for me, an eclectic mix of things has drawn me to environmental issues. Selfishly, I don't want anything to intrude on the solitude and beauty I enjoy in wild areas. I was a teenager at the end of the Reagan years and have lived through one round of constant fear that the world would be annihilated in an abstract power struggle to control it. I'm queer, and understand what it means to be considered, like the natural world and the poor, no more than collateral damage by those in power. Mostly, preserving our habitat—which is more beautiful than the best art and more complex than the best science can understand—just seems like the logical thing to do.
In this blog, I'll be sharing my views, from the Bay Area's green frontier, on emerging personal, political, and corporate strategies for decreasing our wear and tear on the planet—and, inevitably, on "strategies" for pretending to do something while continuing to do nothing. Weigh in, and let me know what you think.
| June 17 2008 at 06:27 AM
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