(Earth Matters is a weekly series featuring climate and other environmental stories.)
Two years ago, spurred by what they called “climate silence” in the media, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope at The Nation introduced “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” a project of The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, and WYNC. The idea was to encourage more coverage of climate matters throughout the media and give journalists tools and connections to make this job easier. They pointed out:
[A]t a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the U.S. news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time. Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.
Activists and other followers of the climate crisis have, of course, long been aware of the inadequacies of climate journalism. Not that there haven’t always been many terrific journalists devoting their talents to enlightening people about our planet’s climatic situation and other environmental issues. But, many of these were freelancers with plenty of story possibilities to dig into but few venues genuinely interested in presenting their work to the public. These journalists were often lucky to get paid enough for their stories to cover the research expenses needed to write them.
Meanwhile, at the larger venues, much media coverage of climate failed via bothsiderism by giving equal weight to the views of the vast majority of climate scientists and disinformation feeders, many of them bought and paid for by fossil fuel interests. This lazy, reckless coverage contributed to the smearing of scientists like Michael Mann by amplifying “skeptical” views on climate change that often were outright lies.
As you may have noticed in the past couple of years, more and better reporting on climate change is now commonplace in the print media and, though to a lesser extent, the broadcast and cablecast media.
At the beginning of this month, in a story spotlighting the growing success of Covering Climate Now, which now has 460 partners worldwide, Hertsgaard and Pope wrote:
How far we have come. Today, it’s not unusual to see a climate story every day or two on the front page of The Washington Post or The New York Times, where Sarah Kaplan, Somini Sengupta, and Hiroko Tabuchi, among others, do exceptional reporting. TV networks, long the laggards in climate reporting, are also joining in, especially in their morning newscasts, where weather experts Al Roker at NBC, Jeff Berardelli at CBS, and Ginger Zee at ABC talk often about what they don’t hesitate to call “the climate crisis” or even “the climate emergency.” CNN, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and other major outlets are hiring reporters, editors, producers, and more to staff new or expanding climate units.
It’s not just US newsrooms that are increasing their climate coverage. “Media attention to climate change or global warming in August 2021 was the highest level of coverage [in] nearly 12 years,” reported the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado, which has long monitored the climate coverage of scores of leading print, digital, radio, and television outlets around the world.
Is this coverage enough? Not yet, not even close.
Improvement is nonetheless improvement.
But will it last? Given that the impacts of the climate crisis and Earthlings’ efforts to take effective action against them are not going away, one would think so. This was, however, also what many people thought three decades ago.
In 1988, climatologist James Hansen gave his warning testimony about climate change to Congress. In 1989, Bill McKibben’s first of many environmental books—The End of Nature—was published. In 1990, several leaders of the first Earth Day in 1970 decided to reinvigorate it on its 20th anniversary.
As a consequence of all this, several major newspapers assigned a reporter or two full time to cover environmental issues, including climate. Others added a daily or weekly page or an entire section to such coverage. This was highly encouraging.
I had begun a mid-level editing job at the Los Angeles Times just six months previously, and the proposal I made for creating a weekly package of environmental stories to be sold to the U.S. and foreign newspapers was initially met by the powers-that-be with the typical deep skepticism accorded any noob with a plan. After some intense go-rounds with my boss’s bosses, however, the idea—considerably tweaked—was approved. It was named Earth Matters, with me adding its editorship along with my other duties. Over the next 10 years, more than 100 newspapers and magazines subscribed to the package.
Unfortunately, interest waned, and the economics of newspapers began a deep descent that is still going on. Magazines and newspapers folded. Others saw their staff eviscerated by new owners after mergers. Those environmental sections and pages and reporters slowly disappeared, the latter let go or reassigned to other beats. And when the Times was bought by Tribune Media in 2000, Earth Matters was axed along with the editor I had reassigned to handle its operations several years before. Media climate coverage overall collapsed.
Crossing my fingers that this time climate silence will not return.
At least now the internet provides a platform for other journalistic venues to take on the climate crisis, sometimes exclusively, sometimes as just one element of their coverage—for instance, Inside Climate News, Environment News Service, E-The Environmental Magazine, the subscription service E&E News, and Pro-Publica. Other outlets, while rigorous in their reporting, are more advocacy-oriented, like DeSmog and Yale Environment 360.
While these and many other such operations are welcome additions that often break important stories, the major newspapers and television operations reach far larger audiences, and their climate reporting is an essential element in the challenge with which the crisis confronts us. It would be sad and infuriating if they again retreated on their climate coverage.
SHORT TAKES
Indigenous activists to meet in D.C. to push restoration of gray wolf protections: They will lobby for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to “implement an emergency ESA relisting” of the wolf’s Northern Rocky Mountains population. Gray wolves are under new pressure in Idaho and Montana, both of which changed their laws this year to allow more hunting of the animals. The Idaho laws call for the elimination of 90% of the estimated 1,500 wolves that now inhabit the state since reintroduction in 1995. Michael Doyle at Greenwire reports that filmmaker and executive director of the Global Indigenous Council Rain—whose traditional name is Náhkȯxho’óxeóó’ėstse—said he and five other activists have been told they will get at least 60 minutes with Interior officials Friday morning. “We must not let state, provincial, and federal governments continue to define issues as ‘environmental’ or ‘wildlife’ when they are cultural,” Rain said in an email to E&E News Wednesday. “These are social justice issues. What is happening to the wolf is a social justice issue for tribal people.” Included in the meeting will be William Snell, an Apsáalooke Nation citizen and executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, and Tehassi Hill, chair of the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin. Said Casey Camp-Horinek, an activist and elder of the Ponca Nation, “The wolf has a vital role in so many of our cultures, in our clans, our songs, our ceremonies. Yet, our voices are ignored.”
TSU, historically Black university, gets $5.5 million in environmental justice funding: In March, President Joe Biden appointed Robert Bullard to the Environmental Justice Advisory Council. The council’s job is to provide guidance on dealing with past environmental injustices. Bullard is also charged with contributing to the administration’s Justice40, which is designed to provide disadvantaged communities with at least 40% of benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy. Bullard is well-suited for the task. He’s a pioneer in the study of environmental racism and long engaged as a scholar and activist in environmental justice, a subject which, despite the suffering these injustices cause, scarcely anyone was paying attention to when he first took it up four decades ago. An example among hundreds can be found in a recent equity report on the nation’s 100 largest metro areas put together by ABC-owned television stations. Researchers found that Latino and Black residents make up the largest share of people who live in neighborhoods the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have evaluated to have the highest risk from hazardous facilities.
Bullard was generally brushed off in the early days of his work. Though ignored and sometimes sneered at, he steadily built a solid reputation with his scholarship and activism.
Now widely referenced as the “father of environmental justice” and with a vast string of accomplishments—including receiving the U.N. Champion of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020—Bullard recently told the Houston Chronicle, “Most Americans do not live in a flood plain. Most Americans don’t live where a highway might have torn through and disrupted their lives. Most American kids don’t go to a school across from a chemical plant, but there are many communities where that is a reality.”
That reality has finally produced a reckoning and money. The Houston Endowment last year provided $1.25 million to create the Robert D. Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. This year, the center received another $250,000 from J.P. Morgan Chase and $4 million from the Bezos Earth Fund. Said Bullard of the latter: “This grant will enhance the Bullard Center and our partners’ capacity to develop ‘roadmaps’ for directing much-needed Justice40 and infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities that historically have been left behind. It will also create a rapid response team of experts and professionals to perform ‘quick-strike’ support to our most vulnerable and marginalized communities where structural inequality and systemic racism pose equal access challenges to Justice40 benefits, funding, and investments.”
Meanwhile, new studies say diesel emissions disproportionately harm communities of color: Diesel vehicles made up only 5% of traffic through major urban areas, but they emitted as much as half of all nitrogen dioxide pollution. A solution? Electrify freight trucks, school buses, and other heavy-duty vehicles. Such vehicles with diesel engines emit nitrogen oxides, which are associated with health harms such as heart and lung diseases that can lead to premature death. Using satellites to measure emissions in 52 major U.S. cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Newark, one study found there was an average of 28% more nitrogen dioxide pollution in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color than in higher-income and majority-white neighborhoods. Kristopher Tigue reports:
That air quality disparity exists, in part, because of historically racist practices such as redlining and the placement of the nation’s highways, which often cut through Black and Brown neighborhoods that didn’t have the political or financial power to stop the projects.
Said Regan Patterson, a transportation and public health expert at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, “For me, it’s a great study because it does get further evidence of diesel traffic being this dominant source of disparities. We now have the data to support what communities have been saying for a long time.”
$200 million wind turbine blade facility to be built in Virginia: Spain-headquartered Siemens Gamesa, the world’s second largest wind turbine maker, has announced plans to build the first U.S. offshore wind turbine blade plant at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal. This is a very big deal for the state as it seeks to become a center for the nascent U.S. offshore wind energy industry. The announcement at the terminal was attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. The blade-making facility is slated to create 200 manufacturing jobs and 50 jobs to service its 2.6 gigawatt, 180-turbine Virginia Coastal Offshore Wind project 27 miles off Virginia Beach. When completed, it will provide electricity to 660,000 homes. For comparison, the total U.S. generating capacity from all sources is slightly over 1,100 gigawatts.
To put it mildly, the United States dramatically trails Europe in offshore wind. In the U.K., for instance, 10.2 gigawatts of the nation’s 24.6 gigawatts of wind power capacity is provided by 2,313 offshore turbines at 42 wind farms. The U.S. has just five shore turbines off Rhode Island and two off Virginia, with a total capacity of 42 megawatts. In May, the Vineyard Wind project to be built in federal waters off Massachusetts was approved. It plans to install 62 turbines with a capacity of 800 megawatts.
The Biden-Harris administration has big plans for more. In March, the White House announced a target of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030. That, the administration asserts, will generate $12 billion a year in capital investment, “create tens of thousands of good-paying, union jobs, with more than 44,000 workers employed in offshore wind by 2030 and nearly 33,000 additional jobs in communities supported by offshore wind activity.” Developers are currently working on numerous offshore wind projects that would provide 9.1 gigawatts of new generating capacity, although not all of those may actually be built.
WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO
A HALF DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ
A Climate-Conscious Fox Weather Could Leave Audiences Confused: NPR’s David Folkenflik speaks with climate reporter Geoff Dembicki about the launch of the Fox Weather streaming service. Given that some of Fox’s leading stars have made widely debunked challenges to the findings of climate science, one must wonder whether this will be just another disinformation platform.
The Coming Age of Climate Trauma: Three years after the devastating wildfire that killed 86, the California community of Paradise faces another crisis: PTSD. Is what’s happening there a warning to the rest of us? By Andrea Stanley
Analysis: COP Chair Alok Sharma Predicts Modest Glasgow Climate Result: “If you’ve been counting on a world-beating way to solve the climate crisis emerging from the U.N. conference, COP26, then relax. Just hope it doesn’t make things any worse. Alok Sharma, the British politician who is president of the 2021 U.N. climate conference, is the man of the moment, or at least he very soon will be—as soon as it opens in the Scottish city of Glasgow this Sunday. For the next two weeks, without exaggeration, he will hold the fate of millions in his hands as he seeks to steer the world towards a workable climate agreement.” By Alex Kirby
Deb Haaland, A Living Testament. The path to becoming the nation’s first Native Interior Department secretary: “Almost everyone calls Debra Anne Haaland’ Deb.’ Native millennials go further—to them she is ‘Auntie Deb.’ Becoming ‘Madam Secretary’ has catapulted her to the status of an Indigenous icon. She’s a meme. She’s a GIF. She’s some artist’s latest beadwork. Across social media, one of her most famous lines is now hashtagged on a regular basis: ‘Be fierce.’” By Jenni Monet
Gardening for Wildlife Enhances Bird diversity Beyond Your Own Backyard: Across the United States, bird populations are declining because of decreased habitat. Recently, a team of scientists explored the value of the biggest chunk of green space found in cities—residential yards—as wildlife habitat. By Science Daily
Meet the Virginia Conservationist Trying to Turn Old Coalfields into Solar Farms: Brad Kreps directs the Nature Conservancy’s Clinch Valley Program, which is working to make the vision of developing solar energy projects on former coalfields a reality in central Appalachia. By Elizabeth McGowan
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