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The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication just released their latest national survey results on “Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes,” and a couple of the results jumped out at us.

First, the study found that “only 13 percent [of Americans] trust oil, gas and coal companies (e.g., ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy) as sources of information about global warming.” In stark contrast, 74% of Americans trust climate scientists, 47% trust President Obama, and 43% trust the mainstream news media. Overall, the fossil fuel companies came in dead last, behind car companies and consumer goods companies, in terms of who Americans trust regarding information on global warming.

Second, the level of distrust for the fossil fuel companies, at least on this subject, is intense. In fact, despite an aggressive, well-funded campaign by companies like ExxonMobil to sow doubt about climate science, the new Yale survey finds that an astounding 87 percent of Americans distrust the fossil fuel companies for information on global warming, and that a near-majority (48%) of Americans strongly distrust the fossil fuel companies.

The bottom line: despite many millions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel companies to spread disinformation, including funding of science denial groups like the Heartland Institute, on climate science, the American people simply do not trust them for information on this subject. Perhaps the fossil fuel companies might have better spent their money on promoting wind, solar, and other clean energy sources instead?

The Dutch have a great idea here: fixing ordinary consumer goods so you don’t have to throw them away.

…At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

As the article also points out, this is the opposite of “planned obsolescence” or a “just throw it away and don’t think about it” culture. Instead, this is more along the lines of a “‘cradle to cradle’ design philosophy, which posits that things should be built so that they can be taken apart and the raw materials reused.” Among other advantages to “cradle to cradle,” it takes a great deal less energy, costs a lot less, and produces a great deal less pollution to reuse or recycle something than to manufacture it from scratch.  Is there any good reason not to move in this direction?

If natural gas “fracking” is so safe, as the industry claims, then why is this necessary at all?

Wyoming’s governor persuaded the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to postpone an announcement linking hydraulic fracturing to groundwater contamination, giving state officials – whom the EPA had privately briefed on the study – time to attempt to debunk the finding before it rocked the oil and gas industry more than a month later, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

During the delay, state officials raised dozens of questions about the finding that the controversial procedure that has become essential to unlocking oil and gas deposits in Wyoming and beyond may have tainted groundwater near the gas patch community of Pavillion.

…Wyoming officials took advantage of the postponement to “take a hard line” and coordinate an “all-out press” against the EPA in the weeks leading up to the announcement Dec. 8.

Why this happened is simple, of course: money, and lots of it. According to the AP story, “the chief state regulator of oil and gas development fretted over how the finding would affect state revenue.” Meanwhile, as Rolling Stone reported in March, the natural gas fracking industry is “not only toxic – it’s driven by a right-wing billionaire” whose goal “is not to solve America’s energy problems, but to build a pipeline directly from your wallet into his.” Now, it appears that “pipeline” has taken a detour right into the state and federal governments — you know, the folks who are supposed to be looking out for the public’s health and welfare.  Wonderful.

Yesterday, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) put out a press release regarding a new report on groundwater contamination at coal-fired power plants. According to EIP:

At least 49 [coal-fired] power plants have acknowledged groundwater contamination at levels that exceed federal or state standards, according to data submitted to the USEPA Office of Water and obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request…

These pollutants include:

This is truly astounding.

Despite Ongoing Climate News, Broadcast Coverage Has Dropped Significantly. Since 2009, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate bill and a major climate conference took place in Copenhagen, the amount of climate coverage on both the Sunday shows (Fox News Sunday,NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation, and ABC’s This Week) and the nightly news (NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and ABC World News) has declined tremendously. This drop comes despite a series of newsworthy stories related to climate change in 2010 and 2011, including a debateover comprehensive climate and energy legislation in the U.S. Senate, a series of record-breakingextreme weather events, notable developments in climate science, the rise of so-called “climate skeptics” in the House of Representatives, and a deal struck at the most recent UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa.

It’s not just that broadcast coverage of climate change has fallen, even as evidence of extreme weather events possibly linked to climate change has increased. It’s also about media priorities: strikingly, in 2011, the major networks “spent more than twice as much time discussing Donald Trump than climate change.” In addition, the networks opted to have no scientists at all on their important Sunday talk shows to discuss climate science.

The problem with all this is clear: as Media Matters points out,  the broadcast networks play an “important role in public discourse” on this and other issues. Thus, when the major media decides not to cover an important subject, like climate science, the public discourse is shortchanged. This, in turn, means that dialog on important issues like climate change is ceded largely to those with the money to get their message out. In this case, that would be the fossil fuel industry, which of course has a major financial interest in delaying or preventing policies that might wean us off of carbon-based fuels.

By the way, it’s not just climate science that’s being shortchanged by the media. Back in September, Media Matters did an analysis regarding media coverage of the Solyndra story. What Media Matters found in that case was “sloppy” and “abundant” coverage of the Solyndra non-scandal, far out of proportion both to the story’s significance, and also to other important stories – e.g, “war contract waste and the MMS scandal” – breaking at the same time.

Clearly, certain stories get a great deal more attention from the “mainstream media” than others. Others get essentially no attention at all. The question is, why is this the case and what can be done about it?