Ledes

[Stand-alone versions here and here.]
Science establishes trustworthy information about the workings of the natural world. Rhetoric, skillfully and honorably applied, persuades people to pay attention to trustworthy information. Skillful rhetoric gives the findings of science a chance to matter widely in the world.
Nobody is required to read the pieces in the newspaper. These pieces have to tempt a reader to take an interest and to remain interested. Consider a few examples. (Journalists call the opening of a piece the lede.)
1) Here is the first sentence of a recent op-ed or opinion essay in a prominent U. S. newspaper. Are you tempted to read on? Why or why not?
  Humanity’s love of eating animals should worry you, even if humans are the only animals you care about. [link]
2) Are you more or less tempted to read on after reading the first sentence below, from a U. S. periodical, than you were by the one above? Why or why not?
  Cultured or in vitro meat, also called “clean meat” by its supporters, is meat produced in a laboratory using bioengineering techniques. [link]
3) How about this first sentence? More or less tempting for you to read further than with the other two? Why or why not?
  At the 2019 Milken Global Conference, which brings together business and public policy leaders to explore how market-based solutions could help social problems, a cohort of speakers suggested revamping our food system could be key to intervening in climate change. [link]
4) And this first sentence? More or less tempting for you to read further than with the others? Why or why not?
  Cultured meat is a meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. [link]
Perhaps pause here, review your reactions to the four first sentences above, and sketch a guideline for yourself for writing a strong opening for an opinion piece to be published in a periodical for a general (non-specialist or non-scientist) audience.
Here are a couple of longer introductions to op-ed style pieces. Can you use these to add to your guideline for writing a potent lede?
5) A nationally recognized reporter wrote this two-paragraph lede. Would you read further? Why or why not?
  On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, three-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.
  Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40 percent full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop. [link]
8) The governor of the state of Oregon wrote this three-paragraph lede. Would it tempt you to read on? Why or why not?
  SALEM, Ore. — If you are on the East Coast, the sunrises you saw last week were probably tinged with a bit of red. That haze was the smoke from the fires scorching the West, including the 400,000-acre-plus Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, the largest in the country at the moment and the latest in a string of climate-related natural disasters to befall my state.
  We are no strangers to forest fires in the West. About half of Oregon, some 30 million acres, is forestland. But in the past decade, as our summers have grown longer, hotter and drier, our lush forests have turned into tinderboxes.
  I have declared drought emergencies in 22 of our 36 counties already this year, as rivers and reservoirs run low because of insufficient snowpack and the lack of rainfall. Last summer, Oregon experienced its most devastating fire season in many years, when more than 2,000 fires burned 1.2 million acres. We lost at least nine lives and more than 5,000 homes and commercial structures. Fires burned in Clackamas County outside the Portland metro area, causing the area to have some of the world’s worst air quality for several days, and through Santiam Canyon, on the outskirts of Salem, our state capital. [link]