Public

 By BILL DAWSON

Lisa Margonelli is an Oakland, Calif.-based freelance journalist, a fellow of the NewAmerica Foundation, and the author of Oil on the Brain, a book that describes "petroleum's long, strange trip to your tank."

Margonelli has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover and Jane. She was a recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and an excellence in journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.

Edited By MIKE MANSUR

Jim Handman and Pat Senson, producers with CBC Radio's weekly science progra, "Quirks & Quarks," have won the 2007 ScienceWritingAward from the American Institute of Physics. It is the second time the team from Q&Q has won the prestigious prize. The program has been a runner-up in the SEJ Awards three times.

By BILL KOVARIK

In 2006, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth dominated The New York Times best seller list. But in 2007, Glenn Beck's swaggering rebuttal, An Inconvenient Book, topped the same list with the idea that climate change is "the greatest scam in history."

While Beck's book has little chance of outselling Gore's book over the long run, the paradox illustrates a larger problem in the environmental publishing industry: serious science is a hard sell.

By TIM WHEELER

Have the news media become bored with global warming already? It was one of the top news stories of 2007, thanks in large part to the Nobel-winning labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore. But as presidential contenders slogged through the snowy caucuses and primaries in their quest for the White House, the topic barely registered in news coverage of the campaigns. It almost never came up in televised debates.

 By BUD  WARD

The hard truth of the matter is that few of the reporters most likely to read this column will be in a good position to ask the presidential election front runners or nominees penetrating questions about environmental policy.

Few of them may have the opportunity, even briefly along a rope line, to probe a candidate's familiarity with "cap and trade" versus carbon taxes, wetlands restoration versus coastal development, nuclear energy versus coal versus biofuels versus conservation.

By DAVID POULSON

New story-telling forms are the big buzz in journalism. Seconds after you suggest an idea, chances are an editor demands that you grab a quick video interview for theWeb.

Maybe your art department inserts information that pops up on a graphic at the touch of a mouse. Perhaps you're narrating slideshows.

   The new SEJ book award, along with plans for an increased emphasis on environmental books at this year's SEJ annual conference in Roanoke, VA, are reflections of an increasing interest in environmental book publishing among SEJ members.  Yet trends in the national marketplace of ideas seem paradoxical.

Two environmental books have topped the bestseller list in recent years—Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Book. (See page 11). That both would rise to the top of the market may seem to be a bit of a paradox.