My Baltimore Sun Op-Ed Has Been Published

I encourage everyone to check it out by clicking here. According to the Baltimore Sun’s publishing rules, they maintain 30-day exclusivity rights over the piece, so I won’t be able to post it on my website until mid-January.

This opinion piece, which was months in the making, highlights the extreme lack of scientific expertise in the halls of Congress. It gives examples, lists negative impacts and demonstrates how having at least some scientists in charge would be beneficial for the entire country. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that climate change takes center stage in my argument.

Now here’s a little inside baseball. I’ve actually been pretty successful in getting my opinion pieces published in newspapers. I had my two previous letters to the editor (one on offshore drilling and the other on Keystone XL) published in the Baltimore Sun and one of those also in the NJ Star Ledger. Basically I was batting a thousand until this article.

So then a few weeks ago I submit a version through the Baltimore Sun website and hear nothing for like two weeks. Of course I’m thinking that they chose not to run it. So one morning I just decide to rewrite the entire thing. I kept certain phrases, but it was a total reorganization and shifting of the thesis. After bouncing it off some people, I resubmitted.

About three days later I get an email from the Sun’s deputy editorial page editor. She thought my first submission was interesting and well put together, but my contact info was cut off and she couldn’t respond! When I sent the second article, she recognized it as a variation of the first, got my phone number and email and we went ahead. In the end, the version you see here is a marriage of those two drafts.

I plan to extend this into a longer form article in the near future. After all, there’s a lot more than 750 words to say about this topic. I’m still trying to figure out where I can get it published (Science? Scientific American? American Physical Society News?). I’ve never done this before, so I welcome any advice.