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As the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen approaches, the Untited States is at loggerheads with China and India over the developing world’s refusal to accept specific, binding targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Can there be compromise? Perhaps. Researchers at Princeton University recently suggested a method for calculating reduction targets that could get China and India to commit to them and ensure that their economies won’t be unduly burdened in the process.

The Observatory’s Sanhita Reddy compliments the few blogs and online articles that covered the proposal, arguing that a discussion of such strategies should feature more prominently in news stories leading up to Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, the once credulous coverage of the biofuels industry is exhibiting more skepticism these days. When Massachusetts-based Joule Biotechnologies announced recently that it could produce liquid fuel from little more that water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, and top-secret “photosynthetic organisms,” reporters were appropriately dubious, explaining that there are many technological and financial unknowns surrounding Joule’s process.

Still, Reddy argues, it would have nice if journalists had also included some perspective on the overall lack of progress in the biofuels industry. Such perspective is available in a comprehensive new report from the National Academies of Science on “America’s Energy Future.”

All on The Observatory, the online science desk of the Columbia Journalism Review. We hope you enjoy these stories,

The editors

The Observatory — July 31, 2009
Fuel for Thought
Once credulous, biofuels coverage grows skeptical
By Sanhita Reddy
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/fuel_for_thought.php

The Observatory—July 29, 2009
(E)mission Impossible?
Blogs, Web sites provide climate policy analysis lacking elsewhere
By Sanhita Reddy
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/emission_impossible.php

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