Climate of opinion: blogger Joe Romm drives the global warming debate in Washington. But has he left the rest of the country behind?

• Author: McKibben, Bill
• Position: On political books - Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions - Book review

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Straight Up: America's Fiercest

Climate Blogger Takes on the

Status Quo Media, Politicians,

and Clean Energy Solutions

by Joseph J. Romm

Island Press, 248 pp.

Blogging is still a new enough art that we're only now learning the various possible styles--only now figuring out what makes a truly talented blogger. There are inspired generalists like Andrew Sullivan, who each day write about a wide range of issues with an exhilarating all-in brio. And there are inspired specialists, like Joe Romm, who earns the sobriquet he gives himself in the subtitle of this book. He is fierce--fierce with opponents and fierce in general, driven to use the Internet as a weapon in the very specific fight to wring a climate bill out of the U.S. Congress. As a result, this book--a collection of some of his thousands of blog posts--is a good way to think not only about climate but about the uses of the Web. (Full disclosure: Romm has reprinted several of my pieces on his Web site.)

Climate first. Romm, a former Department of Energy appointee in the Clinton administration, knows his climate science, um, cold. Trained as a physicist, he is unintimidated by scholarly work, and is able to synthesize huge amounts of complex data. He has been a persuasive voice for the most important truth about global warming: that it is a far worse problem than either politicians or the general public understand. In his posts and in his previous book Hell and High Water Romm has made the stakes clear. "If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path," he writes, the century will bring "staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land ... [and] sea level fires of some five feet. Dust bowls will cover the southwestern United States and many other heavily populated regions around the globe. Massive species loss will occur on land and sea--affecting 50 percent or more of all life."

These changes may sound remarkable to most journalists who have been covering climate as a "he said, she said" ideological debate for two decades, but in fact they are relatively uncontroversial middle-of-the-road projections. (If you want your hair properly curled, Google "James Lovelock" and "global warming.") But it has been Romm's willingness to repeat these concerns, over and over, that has been essential in emboldening a few opinion writers--Tom Friedman, for instance--to keep this message in the mainstream media.

Romm has been consistent in insisting that we have much...