23 Aug Global Warming; Tar Sands Featured in 2 Major Mags

Bill McKibben wrote a really good article on global warming last month — in ROLLING STONE magazine.

And this month, there's an in-depth article on the Tar Sands project — in ESQUIRE magazine.

When major mainstream magazines run feature articles about serious environmental topics, it's a big deal. Esquire has a circulation of over 700,000, and Rolling Stone reaches almost 1.5 million.

For us greenies, coverage of these issues in mainstream media is like a giant helping hand from the universe. Makes it a lot easier to bring up these subjects at the office water-cooler; at the dinner table; at parties. (Of course, we may never win any popularity contests by talking about global warming at parties. But at least coverage in well-known magazines makes it easier to broach the topics. And hey, when's the last time an environmentalist won a popularity contest anyway?) 

In the Rolling Stone article (titled "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math), climate awareness leader Bill McKibben breaks global warming down into three simple benchmark numbers, and explains what those numbers mean in real life. Here's the first paragraph:

"If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe." Read more

The Esquire article is prefaced: "Whether to build the international pipeline, designed to convey the Tar-sands oil from the massive deposits in Western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining, has not only become an explosive issue in this year's presidential election, it has become central to the debate over the future habitability of planet earth. A special report."

And from the very first paragraph, we're drawn right in to the frontlines of Tar Sands extraction:

"When you arrive at night in Fort McMurray, the little Canadian town that might just destroy the world, the tiny airport looks smaller because of the snow and all the Explorers and Rangers and four-wheel drives in the parking lot. An ambitious ramp enters a highway so wide the shoulders must be in different time zones, and trucks the size of dinosaurs roar by belching clouds of steam and snow. The smaller trucks have buggy whips that hoist flags high above them so the giant trucks will notice their insignificant speck existence and avoid running over them." Read more

Both the Rolling Stone and the Esquire article offer substantive, multi-dimensional treatment of these issues, which some of us view as being make-or-break for human life as we know it. Being available online, both articles are of course easy to SHARE with your social networks.