Joe Romm, Influential Liberal Climate Change Expert and Blogger

TOP ENERGY PLAYER

In terms of his cachet in the blogosphere, Joe Romm is something like the climate change equivalent of economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman. Romm runs his own blog, climateprogress.org. He was a deputy assistant secretary of energy in the Clinton administration. Today, he's a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, an oft-cited expert on climate change issues, and a go-to witness at congressional hearings.

Romm's positions are well defined and, in most cases, aggressively liberal. He holds that climate change is advancing more swiftly than most people think and than the mainstream media usually report. He has called for significantly ramping up government spending on clean energy technology, halting the construction of new coal plants, rapidly increasing the use of energy-efficient technologies, and imposing a cap-and-trade system to sharply limit carbon dioxide emissions.

Romm is a prolific writer and commentator. On his blog, he cuts through opposing arguments with an array of statistics, citations, cross-links, and sarcasm. One such headline: "Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your Energy Plan Is Half-Brilliant, Half-Dumb." He's also a critic of the media for failing, in his view, to adequately inform the public of the connection between current events, like the devastating wildfires in Australia, and global warming, which he says must be addressed now. "I think that the media has to make clear what the vast majority of the scientific community says," Romm says.

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