mad cow: Climate Progress

“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine

Climate Progress is dedicated to providing the progressive perspective on climate science, climate solutions, and climate politics. It is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

For any first time visitors here because of Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday New York Times, “Mother Nature’s Dow,” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress. [I will blog later Sunday about the column itself.] Tom described me in an earlier column as

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

U.S. News & World Report features me in their April issue as one of five “key players” who are “Driving Public Policy in Washington,” writing:

In terms of his cachet in the blogosphere, Joe Romm is something like the climate change equivalent of economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman.

Rolling Stone has a list of 100 Agents of Change of which I’m #88. The RS tagline for me is “America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger lets it rip.”

And in 2008, TIME magazine named Climate Progress one of the “Top 15 Green Websites.”

I am a Senior Fellow at the Washington, DC think-and-act tank run by John Podesta, the Center for American Progress, whose Action Fund sponsors this blog. You can read a longer bio here.

I try to inform and entertain here — and be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants the inside view on climate science, solutions, and politics. A key goal is to save readers’ time, save you from wading through the sea of irrelevant information — or outright disinformation — on climate and energy that pervades the media and blogosphere.

I write from what I call a climate realist perspective — the emerging scientific view that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path we will will destroy the livability of the climate for 1,000 years. Two posts that lay out that case are:

I also spend a lot of time describing the solution(s), having run the federal program that helps develop and deploy virtually all of the key technologies. Fundamentally we have most of the needed technology now (or soon will), and avoiding catastrophe requires only a very small fraction of the nation’s and world’s wealth — one tenth of a penny on the dollar:

And I also spend a lot of time keeping readers up on the politics of energy and climate action:

And then there is the offbeat stuff:

Oh, and peak oil stuff:

And the media criticism:

And here’s my best written recent post: