new york times

DeSmogBlog was referenced today in a New York Times article on the battle over coal power in the US. 

Having sped past the U.S. as the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, China has become a despoiler on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion, plundering smaller nations to fuel its own rising tide of consumption.

A New York Times article just after the UN climate-change conference in Indonesia identified China as the pivotal determinant on global warming. Now, the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine has drawn a scathing portrait of a nation that not only leads the world in coal consumption, but also uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations – the U.S., Russia and India – combined, with ominous implications for the planet.

China says that as a poor nation of 1.3-billion people, it is entitled to pollute and spew greenhouse emissions to alleviate poverty. But with its middle class projected to leap from less than 100 million to 700 million by 2020, and with sales of Porsches, Ferraris and Maseratis flourishing in Beijing, that argument is rapidly losing its edge.

Check out the New York Times today. 

Science writer Andrew Revkin mentions our 100 Year Letter Project here.

And if that wasn't enough, he also wrote a more in-depth piece on his new Dot Earth blog.  

If you haven't written your entry for the 100 Year Letter Project, please do. In fact, we've decided that the best letters every month will receive a DeSmogBlog swag bag, including the much-coveted DeSmog t-shirt.

We have quite a few already and will start posting them over the next week.

Could the US collective head finally be coming out of the sand? We're always a little skeptical of polling numbers, but let's hope this trend continues:

Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climateH/T to Josh Zaharoff at the Common Blog.