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Articles by Ross Gelbspan

Ross Gelbspan was an editor and reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is the author of The Heat Is On and Boiling Point and maintains the website heatisonline.org

Featured Article

Joe Romm is pissed off — and I’m delighted.

His latest book, Straight Up, takes on the oil and coal companies, the skeptics, and the press. His unfailing sense of priorities shines through his startlingly thoughtful and brutally blunt writing.

I have one problem with his book — but more about that later.   

As an assistant secretary of energy during the Clinton administration, Romm developed expertise in the area of renewable energy technologies. As a climate blogger, his even greater asset is his intelligence.  

Straight Up is a compilation of posts from Romm’s popular blog Climate Progress. And while one wishes Romm would have stitched the blog posts together into a more coherent narrative — and omitted a few that addressed transitory, fleeting events — his book is absolutely on point in its insistence that climate change long ago ceased to be a scientific issue and, instead, is most clearly a political one.

Take the climate bills pending in Congress. Even though all the proposals on the legislative table are pitifully inadequate to the catastrophic threat of accelerating climate change, Romm... Read more

All Articles

  • A plan to jumpstart the global economy, defuse terrorism, and restore America’s world standing

    America has lost its stature as a moral leader in today’s world. The global financial system continues to unravel with devastating consequences. The escalating threat of terrorism, driven by persistent inequity between the world’s rich and poor, seems immune to military solutions.  The global climate stands at the threshold of runaway changes.         What […]

  • It’s too late to stop climate change, argues Ross Gelbspan — so what do we do now?

    As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

    The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

    We can't.

    We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally -- or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

    Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

    -----

    Start with the climate activists, who are telling us only a partial truth.

  • Do you know where your candidates stand on climate change?

    With growing numbers of scientists declaring that the global climate crisis is approaching a point of no return, there is a huge and bewildering disconnect between our physical world and our political environment. Our government’s response to the prospect of runaway climate impacts is one of paralysis. The negligence of the Bush administration is understandable. […]

  • Join a people’s campaign to ratify the Kyoto Protocol

    The much-discussed Kyoto Protocol takes effect today, Feb. 16. In the face of the United States’ continuing refusal to ratify the international agreement, a group of progressive activists is launching a drive to gather millions of signatures from U.S. citizens for a “People’s Ratification of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty.” Ross Gelbspan, a Grist contributor […]