RENEWABLOG

The May 10 cover features a whimsical scene by Bob Staake, called “Tilt”: a rotund little person dressed in Pilgrim garb wielding a lance sits atop a frowning whale while charging a wind turbine—a brilliantly updated version of Quixote’s tilting at windmills tailored to the NIMBY Nantucketers protesting the Cape Wind project.

The May 17 cover, titled “A Novel Approach,” by Joost Swarte, and released in perfect concert with the de-clawed American Power Act, shows a series of vignettes. A bald Tintin-ish man in glasses reads a newspaper and smokes a pipe.  His face—featuring a perpetually creased forehead—remains buried in his newspaper for most of the series. In the next frame, the man has put out his noxious pipe, but stands in front of a car trailing more pollutants than his pipe produced. A frame later, mouth agape in alarm at something he’s read, he stands in front of a semi truck spewing diesel fumes. Next, he gazes in concern at some smokestacks belching smoke, followed by a frame in which he smells the methane being released by gaseous bovines. Then, face buried again in the paper, he walks beneath a ferociously frowning sun. In the seventh frame, he looks up from his paper to see a family of forlorn penguins carrying suitcases. In the eighth frame, the man, apparently unaware of the danger, is about to be inundated by a giant wave, and in the ninth, he’s waist-deep in water and being doused by rain. Next, he’s floating in some sort of trash-infested seascape, but in this frame, he has an idea (cue lightbulb): in the penultimate frame, we see his idea brought to fruition as he dons a propeller-topped beanie, and in the final frame, he sits happily atop a cloud, still engrossed in his paper.

While the May 10 cover is satirical and hilarious, the May 17 cover conveys to me a sense of pathos as well as humor, perhaps because I can relate to the pathetic cartoon man. I often feel as though my head is buried in newspapers filled with dire warnings and gloomy prognoses, and that when I look up from the news, I find some other previously unconsidered climate threat staring me in the face. Swarte's cover mocks not only our misdirected attention, climate concerns and inertia, but also the fact that a propellor-powered beanie seems as good an idea as any we have, at the moment.

Nevertheless, it’s encouraging that climate issues have become so topical that two consecutive New Yorker covers have featured cartoons addressing the topic. And I love that I get to work for cleantech companies trying to figure out how to address the issues, despite the fact that sometimes, I'd like a beanie with a propellor, too.