Why No Outrage?

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Why No Outrage? From top to bottom: New York's Sub-Treasury Building in 1929; Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of mortgage lender Countrywide Financial; Unemployed men, circa 1935; Foreclosure sign, April 2008, Stockton, Calif. Strikers, 'scabs' battle, circa 1935; Bear Stearns executive arrested, June 2008; Hooverville shantytown; NYSE trader, 2008; Mary Lease

"Raise less corn and more hell," Mary Elizabeth Lease harangued Kansas farmers during America's Populist era, but no such voice cries out today. America's 21st-century financial victims make no protest against the Federal Reserve's policy of showering dollars on the people who would seem to need them least.

Long ago and far away, a brilliant man of letters floated an idea. To stop a financial panic cold, he proposed, a central bank should lend freely, though at a high rate of interest. Nonsense, countered a certain hard-headed commercial banker. Such a policy would only instigate more crises by egging on lenders and borrowers to take more risks. The commercial banker wrote clumsily, the man of letters fluently. It was no contest.

The doctrine of activist central banking owes much to its progenitor, the Victorian genius Walter Bagehot. But Bagehot might not recognize his own idea in practice today. Late in the spring of 2007, American banks paid an average of 4.35% on three-month certificates of deposit. Then came the mortgage mess, and the Fed's crash program of interest-rate therapy. Today, a three-month CD yields just 2.65%, or little more than half the measured rate of inflation. It wasn't the nation's small savers who brought down Bear Stearns, or tried to fob off subprime mortgages as "triple-A." Yet it's the savers who took a pay cut -- and the savers who, today, in the heat of a presidential election year, are holding their tongues.

Possibly, there aren't enough thrifty voters in the 50 states to constitute a respectable quorum. But what about the rest of us, the uncounted improvident? Have we, too, not suffered at the hands of what used to be called The Interests? Have the stewards of other people's money not made a hash of high finance? Did they not enrich themselves in boom times, only to pass the cup to us, the taxpayers, in the bust? Where is the people's wrath?

Getty Images

Crowds at the New York Stock Exchange in 1929.

The American people are famously slow to anger, but they are outdoing themselves in long suffering today. In the wake of the "greatest failure of ratings and risk management ever," to quote the considered judgment of the mortgage-research department of UBS, Wall Street wears a political bullseye. Yet the politicians take no pot shots.

Barack Obama, the silver-tongued herald of change, forgettably told a crowd in Madison, Wis., some months back, that he will "listen to Main Street, not just to Wall Street." John McCain, the angrier of the two presumptive presidential contenders, has staked out a principled position against greed and obscene profits but has gone no further to call the errant bankers and brokers to account.

The most blistering attack on the ancient target of American populism was served up last October by the then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, William Poole. "We are going to take it out of the hides of Wall Street," muttered Mr. Poole into an open microphone, apparently much to his own chagrin.

SCOUNDRELS ON THE STREET

 

There's a gripping story behind every financial scandal. Here's a roundup of movies that examine the money-making industry's dark side:

'Clancy in Wall Street' (1930)
Starring: Charles Murray, Lucien Littlefield, Aggie Herring and Eddie Nugent
An Irish-American plumber, Clancy (Murray), happens on some good stock-market bets , eventually making millions and elevating him in society. But once the market crashes and he's left with nothing, he returns to his roots in hopes that old friends will take him back.

'It's a Wonderful Life' (1946)
Starring: James Stewart, Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore
Generally filed away in the holiday-favorite category, this film's run-on-the-bank scene and its fallout is a classic example of financial duress on the silver screen.

'Wall Street' (1987)
Starring: Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah and Martin Sheen
Oliver Stone's classic film centers on Gordon Gekko (Douglas, pictured right), a ruthless Wall Street corporate raider who takes an ambitious young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) under his wing and exposes him to the perks and pitfalls that come with the high-stakes territory.

'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1992)
Starring: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Alan Arkin
In this film based on David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a group of tough real-estate salesmen struggle to deal with a downturning housing market -- or face the ax.

'Rogue Trader' (1999)
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Anna Friel, Yves Beneyton and Betsy Brantley
In this film, based on a true story, Ewan McGregor plays a trader working in Singapore who makes illegal trades to cover up his losses. He ends up in jail.

If by "we," Mr. Poole meant his employer, he was off the mark, for the Fed has burnished Wall Street's hide more than skinned it. The shareholders of Bear Stearns were ruined, it's true, but Wall Street called the loss a bargain in view of the risks that an insolvent Bear would have presented to the derivatives-laced financial system. To facilitate the rescue of that system, the Fed has sacrificed the quality of its own balance sheet. In June 2007, Treasury securities constituted 92% of the Fed's earning assets. Nowadays, they amount to just 54%. In their place are, among other things, loans to the nation's banks and brokerage firms, the very institutions whose share prices have been in a tailspin. Such lending has risen from no part of the Fed's assets on the eve of the crisis to 22% today. Once upon a time, economists taught that a currency draws its strength from the balance sheet of the central bank that issues it. I expect that this doctrine, which went out with the gold standard, will have its day again.

Wall Street is off the political agenda in 2008 for reasons we may only guess about. Possibly, in this time of widespread public participation in the stock market, "Wall Street" is really "Main Street." Or maybe Wall Street, its old self, owns both major political parties and their candidates. Or, possibly, the .50 gasoline price has absorbed every available erg of populist anger, or -- yet another possibility -- today's financial failures are too complex to stick in everyman's craw.

I have another theory, and that is that the old populists actually won. This is their financial system. They had demanded paper money, federally insured bank deposits and a heavy governmental hand in the distribution of credit, and now they have them. The Populist Party might have lost the elections in the hard times of the 1890s. But it won the future.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was the Great Depression of the 1880s and 1890s. Then the price level sagged and the value of the gold-backed dollar increased. Debts denominated in dollars likewise appreciated. Historians still debate the source of deflation of that era, but human progress seems the likeliest culprit. Advances in communication, transportation and productive technology had made the world a cornucopia. Abundance drove down prices, hurting some but helping many others.

The winners and losers conducted a spirited debate about the character of the dollar and the nature of the monetary system. "We want the abolition of the national banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government," Mary Lease -- "Mary Yellin" to her fans -- said. "We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us."

By and by, the lefties carried the day. They got their government-controlled money (the Federal Reserve opened for business in 1914), and their government-directed credit (Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Banks were creatures of Great Depression No. 2; Freddie Mac came along in 1970). In 1971, they got their pure paper dollar. So today, the Fed can print all the dollars it deems expedient and the unwell federal mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combine for .5 trillion in on-balance sheet mortgage assets and dominate the business of mortgage origination (in the fourth quarter of last year, private lenders garnered all of a 19% market share).

Thus, the Wall Street of the Morgans and the Astors and the bloated bondholders is today an institution of the mixed economy. It is hand-in-glove with the government, while the government is, of course -- in theory -- by and for the people. But that does not quite explain the lack of popular anger at the well-paid people who seem not to be very good at their jobs.

Since the credit crisis burst out into the open in June 2007, inflation has risen and economic growth has faltered. The dollar exchange rate has weakened, the unemployment rate has increased and commodity prices have soared. The gold price, that running straw poll of the world's confidence in paper money, has jumped. House prices have dropped, mortgage foreclosures spiked and share prices of America's biggest financial institutions tumbled.

One might infer from the lack of popular anger that the credit crisis was God's fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and the government's snoozing watchdogs. And though greed and error bear much of the blame, so, once more, does human progress. At the turn of the 21st century, just as at the close of the 19th, the global supply curve prosperously shifted. Hundreds of millions of new hands and minds made the world a cornucopia again. And, once again, prices tended to weaken. This time around, however, the Fed intervened to prop them up. In 2002 and 2003, Ben S. Bernanke, then a Fed governor under Chairman Alan Greenspan, led a campaign to make dollars more plentiful. The object, he said, was to forestall any tendency toward what Wal-Mart shoppers call everyday low prices. Rather, the Fed would engineer a decent minimum of inflation.

In that vein, the central bank pushed the interest rate it controls, the so-called federal funds rate, all the way down to 1% and held it there for the 12 months ended June 2004. House prices levitated as mortgage underwriting standards collapsed. The credit markets went into speculative orbit, and an idea took hold. Risk, the bankers and brokers and professional investors decided, was yesteryear's problem.

Now began one of the wildest chapters in the history of lending and borrowing. In flush times, our financiers seemingly compete to do the craziest deal. They borrow to the eyes and pay themselves lordly bonuses. Naturally -- eventually -- they drive themselves, and the economy, into a crisis. And to the scene of this inevitable accident rush the government's first responders -- the Fed, the Treasury or the government-sponsored enterprises -- bearing the people's money. One might suppose that such a recurrent chain of blunders would gall a politically potent segment of the population. That it has evidently failed to do so in 2008 may be the only important unreported fact of this otherwise compulsively documented election season.

Mary Yellin would spit blood at the catalogue of the misdeeds of 21st-century Wall Street: the willful pretended ignorance over the triple-A ratings lavished on the flimsy contraptions of structured mortgage finance; the subsequent foreclosure blight; the refusal of Wall Street to honor its implied obligations to the holders of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of auction-rate securities, the auctions of which have stopped in their tracks; the government's attempt to prohibit short sales of the guilty institutions; and -- not least -- Wall Street's reckless love affair with heavy borrowing.

FORUM

 

Readers, why aren't the financial scandals creating more of an uproar, particularly during an election year? Share your thoughts.

For every dollar of equity capital, a well-financed regional bank holds perhaps in loans or securities. Wall Street's biggest broker-dealers could hardly bear to look themselves in the mirror if they didn't extend themselves three times further. At the end of 2007, Goldman Sachs had of assets for every dollar of equity. Merrill Lynch had , Bear Stearns , Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers . On average, then, about in equity capital per 0 of assets. "Leverage," as the laying-on of debt is known in the trade, is the Hamburger Helper of finance. It makes a little capital go a long way, often much farther than it safely should. Managing balance sheets as highly leveraged as Wall Street's requires a keen eye and superb judgment. The rub is that human beings err.

Wall Street is usually described as an industry, but it shares precious few characteristics with the metal-fasteners business or the auto-parts trade. The big brokerage firms are not in business so much to make a product or even to earn a competitive return for their stockholders. Rather, they open their doors to pay their employees -- specifically, to maximize employee compensation in the short run. How best to do that? Why, to bear more risk by taking on more leverage.

"Wall Street is our bad example because it is so successful," charged the president of Notre Dame University, the Rev. John Cavanaugh, in the time of Mary Lease. He meant that young people, emulating J.P. Morgan or E.H. Harriman, would worship the wrong god. The more immediate risk today is that Wall Street, sweating to fill out this year's bonus pool, runs itself and the rest of the American financial system right over a cliff.

A LIBRARY OF MARKET MAYHEM

 

Some classic nonfiction and fiction on financial troubles.

'L'Argent' by Émile Zola (1891)
First published as a newspaper serial, Zola's "L'Argent" ("Money") tells of Aristide Saccard, a down-and-out financier who founds a bank. As speculation flourishes, Saccard goes to great lengths to keep the stock rising, lying to investors and covering up schemes.

'Little Dorrit' by Charles Dickens (1855-57)
The novel features Mr. Merdle, a banker whose schemes lead to financial ruin for many.

'Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds' (1841)
Scottish writer Charles Mackay's classic examines the psychology of crowds, touching on everything from the popularity of beards to witch hunts. The last three chapters look at financial manias, such as the Dutch tulip bubble of the 17th century.

'The Great Crash 1929,' by John Kenneth Galbraith (1954)
A best seller when it was first published in 1954, this book by the noted Harvard economist details the U.S.'s most famous crash and the events that precipitated it.

It's just happened, in fact, under the studiously averted gaze of the Street's risk managers. Today's bear market in financial assets is as nothing compared to the preceding crash in human judgment. Never was a disaster better advertised than the one now washing over us. House prices stopped going up in 2005, and cracks in mortgage credit started appearing in 2006. Yet the big, ostensibly sophisticated banks only pushed harder.

Bear Stearns is kaput and Lehman Brothers is reeling, but Morgan Stanley perhaps best illustrates the gluttonous ways of Wall Street. Having lost its competitive edge on account of an intramural political struggle, the firm, under Chief Executive John Mack, set out to catch up to the rest of the pack. In the spring of 2006, it unveiled a trillion-dollar balance sheet, Wall Street's first. It expanded in every faddish business line, not excluding, in August 2006, subprime-mortgage origination (the transaction, intoned a Morgan Stanley press release, "provides us with new origination capabilities in the non-prime market, which we can build upon to provide access to high-quality product flows across all market cycles"). Nor did it pull in its horns as the boom wore on but rather protruded them all the more, raising its ratio of assets to equity to the aforementioned 33 times at year-end 2007 from 26.5 times at the close of 2004. Naturally, it did not forget the help. Last year, Morgan Stanley paid out 59% of its revenues in employee compensation, up from 46% in 2004.

Huey Long, who rhetorically picked up where Lease left off, once compared John D. Rockefeller to the fat guy who ruins a good barbecue by taking too much. Wall Street habitually takes too much. It would not be so bad if the inevitable bout of indigestion were its alone to bear. The trouble is that, in a world so heavily leveraged as this one, we all get a stomach ache. Not that anyone seems to be complaining this election season.

James Grant is the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.

Climate Change: Now What?
A big beat grows more challenging and complex
www.cjr.org/feature/climate_change_now_what.php?page=all

Media coverage of climate change is at a crossroads, as it moves beyond the science of global warming into the broader arena of what governments, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens are doing about it. Consider these recent examples: a decade from now, Abu Dhabi hopes to have the first city in the world with zero carbon emissions. In a windswept stretch of desert, developers plan to build Masdar City, a livable environment for fifty thousand people that relies entirely on solar power and other renewable energy. Science correspondent Joe Palca reported from Masdar’s construction site as part of National Public Radio’s yearlong project “Climate Connections.”

The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter N. Spotts went to the Biesbosch, a small inland delta near the Netherlands’ city of Dordrecht, to research “How to Fight a Rising Sea.” In an effort that could be instructive for others, the Dutch are developing ways to protect their small country’s vulnerable coast against rising sea levels that could result from climate change.

Wang Suya lives in Japan but sends a YouTube greeting to fellow visitors at Dot Earth, the innovative blog started by Andrew C. Revkin, the New York Times environment reporter. Having traveled the globe to cover global warming, Revkin now posts and exchanges ideas on Dot Earth about climate and sustainability issues, particularly the energy, food, and water demands on a planet that may house nine billion people by mid-century.

These reporters are in the advance guard of an army of journalists around the world who are covering what Time magazine has dubbed the “War on Global Warming.” Journalists will play a key role in shaping the information that opinion leaders and the public use to judge the urgency of climate change, what needs to be done about it, when and at what costs. It is a vast, multifaceted story whose complexity does not fit well with journalism’s tendency to shy away from issues with high levels of uncertainty and a time-frame of decades, rather than days or months.

In 2009, climate-change coverage will grow in significance on a number of domestic and international fronts:

In science, the impact of global warming will be followed closely at the two poles as well as Pacific island hot spots, like the low-lying islands of Papua New Guinea, that are in the greatest danger.

In politics, after eight years of relative inaction by the Bush administration, the new U.S. president and Congress will be under pressure to pass legislation to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

Internationally, the United Nations has scheduled key conferences—in Poznan, Poland, in December 2008 and in Copenhagen in December 2009—to hammer out a new international treaty that is practically and politically feasible. Shortages and high prices are bringing the role of biofuels in the global food crisis under added scrutiny.

Meanwhile, the efforts of countries, businesses, communities, and even individuals to reduce their “carbon footprints” will increasingly be examined.

Climate change will require thoughtful leadership and coordination at news organizations. Editors will need to integrate the specialty environment, energy, and science reporters with other beats that have a piece of the story—everything from local and national politics to foreign affairs, business, technology, health, urban affairs, agriculture, transportation, law, architecture, religion, consumer news, gardening, travel, and sports. “News organizations are increasingly asking what other beats are going to be affected by climate,” says veteran environment reporter Bud Ward, who edits a respected online journalism site, The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media. He notes that even Sports Illustrated has tackled climate change and its potential impact on everything from cancelled games to baseball bats. But, Ward worries, “it will be extremely difficult to explain the policy side of the debate” in the months ahead. Unless editors push hard for it, “there’s generally not the time or space for that kind of explanatory coverage.”

To that end, Ward has organized media workshops on global warming for top editors as well as reporters. A daylong meeting last fall at Stanford University attracted heavy hitters like Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and top editors from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and metropolitan papers from Detroit to Des Moines. Eighteen news executives spent the morning with leading scientists, who emphasized the strong agreement among international experts that the earth is warming and that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are largely to blame. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year issued a widely publicized report (in four parts) that provided the most comprehensive scientific agreement to date on the causes and potentially devastating impact of global warming. Yet, recalls Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, “several editors were surprised there was so much consensus.”

In the afternoon session, the consensus dissipated when it came to a discussion of the potential economic impact of climate actions. One expert saw climate change as a profitable business opportunity; another warned that solutions would be difficult and costly: “There are no silver bullets…only silver birdshot.” Ward says that one editor later commented: “It looks like economists are going to need their own IPCC.”

Daniel P. Schrag, a climate geologist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, says, “We’re in a transition in which the climate science is no longer the primary issue. More and more it’s about how we stop it, not whether it is happening.”

And Matthew C. Nisbet, an American University communications professor, says, “We have had more science coverage on climate change than at any time in history. The next challenge is to find ways to cover the story across news beats and in ways that engage new readers.”

Here are some thoughts as to how coverage might be sharpened in the year ahead in the broad areas of science, politics, and business.

Science and Technology

The ongoing science story. After several years of stumbling, mainstream science and environmental coverage has generally adopted the scientific consensus that increases in heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels and tropical deforestation are changing the planet’s climate, causing adverse effects even more rapidly than had once been predicted.

But the devil is in the details. New findings on why, where, how fast, and with what impact climate change might occur will take time to assess, and there is a danger that the subtleties of the science, and its uncertainty, might be missed by reporters unfamiliar with the territory. The process of science often involves studies that contradict one another along the way; scientists look for consistency among several reports before concluding that something is true. Journalists should avoid “yo-yo” coverage with each new study and try to put the latest findings in context.

Scientists are debating, for example, how global warming may affect hurricanes, with an “ongoing tempest among meteorologists and climatologists spouting off at one another on whether hurricane activity in the Atlantic is up due to a warming ocean,” noted Charles Petit in the MIT Knight Science Journalism Tracker. He cited a recent computer simulation of late twenty-first-century hurricane patterns by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists that predicted fewer tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic. Experienced journalists reported the findings cautiously, noting that some studies have suggested more and more powerful hurricanes due to global warming. Jim Loney, a Reuters reporter, concluded his story with a scientist’s caveat: “We don’t regard this as the last word on this topic.”

You can’t see climate change out the window. “Weather is what you get; climate is what you expect,” says Stanford’s Schneider. “Weather is the day-to-day fluctuations; climate is the long-term averages, the patterns and probability of extremes.” The basic difference is time: weather equals short-term, climate the long haul. Ward uses a clothes analogy—weather helps us decide what to wear each day; climate influences the wardrobe we buy.

“The earth is getting hotter,” says John P. Holdren, a Harvard scientist and international climate-policy leader who has addressed the UN—and been on the Late Show with David Letterman. He cites climate patterns showing that twenty-three out of twenty-four of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1980. The thirteen hottest all have occurred since 1990, with 2005 the hottest ever recorded. But “the heating is not uniform geographically,” cautioned Holdren, who uses the term “global climate disruption” because some regions may experience more extreme—and less predictable—environmental changes than others.

This message was echoed in a landmark Agriculture Department report, released in late May and signed by three Cabinet secretaries, that Juliet Eilperin, the national environment and politics reporter for The Washington Post, called the “most detailed look in nearly eight years at how climate change is reshaping the American landscape.” It concluded that the West is already vulnerable to forest fires, reduced snow pack, and drought.

It is a good rule of thumb to avoid attributing any specific weather event directly to climate change. A single summer heat wave may or may not be part of a long-term climate trend. A cold winter in New England does not mean that global warming is not happening.

Environmental forces may also interact in ways that can be hard to explain. German researchers, writing recently in Nature, used a new climate model to suggest that natural variation in ocean circulation might “temporarily offset” temperature increases from human-caused global warming in Europe and North America over the next decade. Some misleading media reports turned the preliminary forecast into a definitive statement that, as a British Telegraph reporter put it, “global warming will stop until at least 2015.”

Watch out for techno-optimism. Proponents of new energy technologies often hype the potential benefits—without knowing the effectiveness, cost, time frame (always longer than expected), risks, or potential impact on the larger energy picture. It’s a reporter’s duty to explain the potential downside as well as conflicts of interests.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal, have garnered enthusiastic publicity. But it will take time for them to make a dent in the overall U.S. energy marketplace because of higher costs, lower scale, and public opposition to sitings of wind farms and solar grids. Nuclear power is popular in France but still largely radioactive in the American public’s mind. Another area for further media follow-up is the touted technology for carbon capture and storage at coal-burning power plants, which has stalled in the U.S. because of political squabbling and unexpected cost overruns.

In a related vein, beware the law of unintended consequences. The biofuel ethanol was ballyhooed as a big win for U.S. energy security, farmers, and the environment, but a funny thing happened on the way to the fuel tank. A February 2008 study in Science magazine concluded that producing ethanol from corn may exceed or match the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

More recently, of course, ethanol has been blamed for contributing to the world food crisis, since farm acreage previously used for food is now devoted to lucrative fuel-producing corn. Suddenly many elected officials want to cut back on congressional mandates to produce far more ethanol. Once again, the public is left wondering what happened. An excellent April 30 front-page piece from Charles City, Iowa, by Washington Post energy reporter Steven Mufson, explored the links between “food and fuel prices.” But where were the skeptical scientists, politicians, and journalists earlier, when ethanol was first being promoted in Congress?

Choose your experts carefully. Experts are always a minefield, so the Times’s Revkin has a simple rule: when writing about climate science, seek comments from respected scientific experts who have published in major journals in the field, not the experts offered by various policy think tanks and interest groups with axes to grind.

The era of “equal time” for skeptics who argue that global warming is just a result of natural variation and not human intervention seems to be largely over—except on talk radio, cable, and local television. Last year, a meteorologist at CBS’s Chicago station did a special report entitled “The Truth about Global Warming.” It featured local scientists discussing the hazards of global warming in one segment, well-known national skeptics in another, and ended with a cop-out: “What is the truth about global warming?…It depends on who you talk to.” Not helpful, and not good reporting.

As the climate issue moves further into public policy, journalists will face new challenges in sorting out the political and economic interests of experts with a dizzying array of opinions about the costs and benefits of combating global warming. The he-said, she-said reporting just won’t do. The public needs a guide to the policy, not just the politics.

Politics and Policy

After the horse race. A Gallup election poll in early February about what issues would influence Americans’ votes put the economy, Iraq, education, health care, and gas prices in the top five considered “extremely or very important.” Environment and global warming weighed in at number thirteen.

Politicians pay attention to public opinion, of course. In the 2008 presidential race, Obama and McCain both favor mandatory caps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—though McCain’s plan is not as strict on this—and both candidates push nuclear power, though McCain pushes it more aggressively and with fewer caveats.

In Congress, a groundbreaking cap-and-trade “climate security” bill to reduce key greenhouse gas emissions by about 70 percent by 2050 came to the Senate floor for the first time in June. GOP critics argued that it would raise energy costs further, and the bill was blocked. The debate foreshadowed the difficulties such measures may face in the next Congress.

Think China. Estimates suggest China has passed the U.S. for the dubious distinction as the world’s leader in total greenhouse gas emissions. Its rising emissions are fueled by coal-burning power plants—on average, about one new one fires up each week—to meet the energy demands of a growing middle class. But the Pew Center on Global Climate Change said that, on a per-capita basis, U.S. carbon emissions are still about five times greater than those of China, whose enormous 1.3 billion population dwarfs America’s three-hundred million.

Neither the U.S. nor China has agreed to international restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. While the conventional wisdom is that China will wait for the U.S. to act first, a recent opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle predicted that “China just might surprise the U.S. on climate change” because of growing domestic concerns about pollution, droughts, flooding, and other environmental hazards. The University of California authors predicted that China could also take the lead in the development of clean-energy technology—a good area for journalists to track, in addition to coal and cars.

Business and Commerce

Costs and benefits. Evaluating economic forecasts is even tougher than evaluating the science and precipitates fierce debate. A seven-hundred-page report for the British government in 2006 by economist Nicholas Stern said the costs of enacting global measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could amount to about 1 percent of world economic output annually. But not doing so, he said, might ultimately lead to a massive global “market failure,” ranging from five to more than twenty times that amount. It drew international coverage for its methods and both praise and criticism from fellow economists. Yale economist William D. Nordhaus’s new book concludes that the Stern approach is too “ambitious” in requiring “extreme immediate action” and is therefore not cost-effective. He favors global carbon taxes that ramp up more gradually.

Many players are weighing in on the how-to-fix-it political issue. A May Reuters story, that ran before the Senate floor debate on cap-and-trade legislation, cited environmental groups as saying “the cost of doing nothing would be far higher” than taking action, while Washington Post columnist George Will called the bill a “radical government grab for control of the American economy.” A New York Times editorial noted that despite Bush administration contentions that “mandatory cuts in carbon dioxide would bankrupt the country,” every “serious study” has found that a market-based program “could yield positive economic gains” and that the “costs of inaction will dwarf the costs of acting now.”

Times science writer Cornelia Dean wrote last year about the Interface Corporation, a Georgia carpet tile manufacturer that went on a full-court sustainability press by cutting waste, recycling, lowering energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions—and saved money in doing so. “We have made the point in everybody’s mind that the cost of reducing carbon emissions will be painful,” Dean noted. But “it can also work to your advantage.”

Track “green” promises. In the absence of federal action, more than 850 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to reduce local carbon emissions by using goals set by signatories to the international Kyoto Protocol. States like California and regional efforts in New England have also led in climate-change initiatives. Some corporations, too, have set ambitious goals for reducing their carbon footprints. Reporters need to hold private and public enterprises accountable by analyzing and comparing how well all of these bodies are doing in carrying out their bold promises.

In the meantime, there’s a great risk of green fatigue in the media. The number of articles in U.S. newspapers mentioning “going green” in the first quarter of 2008 was about twelve times greater than the comparable period in 2005, according to LexisNexis. Worse, it is also the darling of the advertising business, and the mixing of news and commercial messages is starting to give the phrase a sour green-apple taste.

Still, the trend does give reporters an opportunity to expose examples of “green-washing” that promise eco-friendliness but don’t deliver.

As climate change encompasses virtually all aspects of contemporary life, reporters need to tell the story on their watch. A number of Web sites provide helpful information (see the list posted with this article). In the meantime, here is a starter set of possible stories for reporters to consider and readers to request:

In the realm of science, what is the stability of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, and how will this affect rising sea-level estimates? What plants and animals are at most risk of extinction, and what can be done about that?

What about adaptation to climate change, both here and abroad? Regardless of new control efforts, greenhouse gas emissions already in the pipeline will continue to have warming-related impacts for decades to come. How will Americans cope with changing conditions?

In land use and transportation, what efforts are under way to push auto makers to improve gas mileage? What can drivers do today? Hint: it’s not just what you drive, it’s how often and how far (eco-driving anyone?). How does air travel compare? How can city planners encourage compact living to reduce a community’s carbon footprint? What else can consumers do?

In technology, what are the R&D prospects for biofuel alternatives like cellulosic ethanol, made from grass, wood chips, and other inedible plants? What about futuristic ideas like genetically engineered carbon-eating trees?

In policy, what lessons does the European Union’s experience have for the U.S. about possible carbon cap-and-trade schemes? How are the world’s countries doing at meeting their Kyoto Protocol targets, which expire in 2012, and how do they compare to the U.S.?

In economics, what can be done to make tough emission caps in the U.S. more cost-efficient? How can developing countries balance economic growth and better living conditions against rising greenhouse gases?

Internationally, what is being done to slow deforestation in the tropics, from Indonesia to the Amazon, which is estimated to cause almost one-fifth of human-induced global carbon emissions? What about population growth and the increasing number of environmental refugees forced to flee because of flooding, drought, or other problems? How will global health be affected by climate change?

How will climate negotiations affect the geopolitics of energy, and what does “energy security” really mean?

There are countless such questions for reporters to tackle on a story that is only going to get bigger and more complicated in the decades (yes, decades) ahead.

And there is some urgency. Despite increased coverage of climate change, it is still not at the top of the media or public priority list. “If you don’t have climate change as a headline in the press,” says Nisbet, who writes the blog Framing Science, “it’s unlikely to be a top-tier issue in the public or among policy makers.” A 2007 ranking by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that among all media, environmental coverage ranked nineteenth, at 1.7 percent of the newshole—just behind sports and celebrity coverage.

A Gallup report last November found that only about four in ten Americans believes that immediate, drastic action is needed to deal with global warming, and just one in four says there will be “extreme” effects of global warming in fifty years if efforts are not increased. Is this a failure of the experts and politicians to communicate the situation or a failure of journalists to dig and report?

Yet journalists should not be cheerleaders. As climate change moves further into the policy and political arena, the traditional wall between analytical reporting and advocacy is in danger. The issue is coming to the fore at a time of major change in mainstream journalism and the growth of opinionated Web sites and blogs that have helped to blur the old lines.

Nisbet, for one, sees a dramatic shift in media rhetoric on climate change. In the spring of 2006, fear was at the heart of Al Gore’s documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which jump-started media coverage of global warming after years on the back burner. Suddenly, climate change—that term is gaining ground over global warming, by the way—was on front pages and magazine covers, including Time’s iconic image of a lone polar bear and the warning, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”

Today, says Nisbet, “the underlying appeal is a moral message: ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s a moral call to arms.” Gore’s new 0-million “We” media campaign seeks to cross the partisan divide with the optimistic motto: “We Can Solve It.” The cover of Time’s Spring 2008 environment issue, bordered in green instead of Time’s customary red, took the famous World War II photo of Marines raising a U.S. flag on Iwo Jima and substituted a tree to illustrate its bold headline: “How to Win the War on Global Warming.”

Did Time cross the line into environmental cheerleading? It would seem so, perhaps reflecting the magazine’s more general shift into opinion and away from pure news. Managing editor Richard Stengel called the cover story “our call to arms to make this challenge—perhaps the most important one facing the planet—a true national priority.”

Others are feeling their way more carefully. “Sure, I care about the environment,” says Steve Curwood, host of “Living on Earth,” a weekly environmental show on more than three hundred public radio stations. “But it’s not our job to decide what should be done. It’s our job to inform the citizenry. Right now we have an alarmed citizenry, but still not a very well-informed one,” he said at a recent journalism forum.

“We don’t set policy, we tell stories,” says David Ledford, executive editor of The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, and president of The Associated Press Managing Editors. “But it’s important to not just throw out that the earth is on fire without giving a sense of what they can do.”

“It’s very simple. The job of a professional journalist is to give the audience information that is a good thing for them to know,” says seasoned ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore, who has led the network’s new multiplatform approach to global warming. Yet he finds that the momentous nature of the climate-change story carries even more of a responsibility and psychological burden than the dozen wars he has covered. “The unprecedented nature of this story,” says Blakemore, “is quite grave.”

CJR

01.喜欢阳光吗？
喜欢。但不要太多。 

02.你怎么知道自己喜欢一个人？  
看不到她的时候，就想知道她在哪里，在做什么。

03.你喜欢的人不喜欢你怎么办?
那是她的事。

04.当生命中遇到爱情和面包两者必须二者选一的时候，你会怎么选择？为什么？ 
爱情。

05.如果能给自己的葬礼选择音乐，你会挑哪一首？
现在不知道

06.会不会有一首歌让你想起一个人，甚至想哭？
不止一首，有两首。《城里的月光》和《只要有你》。 

07.你会为了别人改变自己吗？
会。始终在改变。有时会不甘心。

08.上帝告诉你天要塌了，你会怎么办？ 
我就对上帝说：你他妈说谎。

09.你希望自己未来的家该是什么样的?
幸福的家大都相同。

10.当有人伤害你的时候，怎么办? 
看情况。

11.怎么才能让自己最快地放松下来？
看《武林外传》。

12.你最喜欢的事情?
回忆过去。

13.如果算命的人让你改名字，你会改吗？ 
不改。

14.如果你有一种魔力可以实现一件事，你希望是什么?   
时光倒流。

15.这辈子到目前为止有没有认为做的最错让你最后悔的事情？ 
有。

16.如果可以，你会继续按现在的方式生活吗? 
应该有更好的方式。比如不用工作。

17.今后想做什么职业？ 
还是记者。

18.如果有一天我们无法再联络，你想起我时，会记得我什么时候的样子？
想起和这个人最难忘时候的样子。

19.你认为分手后还能做朋友吗? 
有的能。 

20.你下一个最想去的国家是哪里？ 
希腊。

• 我右手提着个电饭锅，满屋子溜达。很帅。
• 看《奋斗》的时候，有很多次我都想流泪。可是，我忍住了。
• 不久之前的很多个晚上，我躺上床闭上眼睛准备睡觉的时候，经常会有一两滴眼泪不由自主的从眼角滑落，滴在枕头上。可是下半年以来，尤其是7月份以来，这样的情形好像很少了。为什么呢？我，也，不，知，道。
• 10月份以来，几乎没读书。这是大错。
• 我还在想着谁？谁还在想着你？
• 有些事情，一去，就不能让它复返。
• 我喜欢过单纯宁静的生活。因为生活的本质，就在平凡中。
• 等到失去以后才懂得珍惜的事情一直在发生。因为新生的人类总是不愿明白这个真理。
• 因为上一条，所以我觉得，《奋斗》里的陆涛不应该辜负米莱，而向南放弃瑶瑶和晓芸复婚是对的。
• “我们要去工作，去谈恋爱，去奋斗！”
• 有些事情，我不想多想。
• 我把我的全部忧伤和崇高藏了起来，不再提及，不让人知。于是，我就变得世俗了。
•  updated on 2007-12-6