Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 It’s the 2024 Election Season. Where’s the Climate Story?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-election-media/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeFeb 7, 2024

Despite the threats to all of humanity, news outlets around the world are largely sidelining the climate conversation

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Environment / February 7, 2024

It’s the 2024 Election Season. Where’s the Climate Story?

Despite the threats to all of humanity, news outlets around the world are largely sidelining the climate conversation

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
A man holds a placard reading "Change politics, not the climate" prior Germany's Social Democratic (SPD) party's final campaign meeting for the Bremen State elections in Bremen, northwestern Germany, on May 12, 2023.
A demonstration prior to Germany’s Social Democratic party’s final campaign meeting for the Bremen state elections in Bremen, northwestern Germany, on May 12, 2023. (Carmen Jaspersen / AFP via Getty Images)

Fact one: More voters face national elections in 2024 than ever before—about 4 billion people, nearly half the human population.

Fact two: Last year was the hottest in recorded history—and scientists warn that oil, gas, and coal burning must be rapidly phased out if we are to preserve a livable planet.

Fact three: Journalists too often don’t connect one fact with the other.

By any reasonable journalistic standard, 2024 should be the year of the climate election. Countries around the world face critical questions about leaving fossil fuels behind; adapting our transportation infrastructure, housing stock, and farming practices to increasingly harsh weather; and protecting the people most at risk. Reporters should be asking candidates where they stand on all of this, so voters are equipped with accurate information to hold their elected officials to account at the ballot box.

Unfortunately, this is mostly not happening. Despite the moment of peril we are living through—a moment felt especially acutely by young people looking to their futures—news outlets around the world are largely sidelining the climate conversation, contributing to the sense among young people that journalism isn’t covering the issues they most care about.

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It is a particular problem in the United States—the largest emitter of climate pollution in history and the second-largest annual emitter, behind China. Already, the country is under assault by damaging—and expensive—climate impacts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in January that 2023 was the worst year yet, with 28 climate-related disasters in the US claiming 492 lives and causing at least $92.9 billion in damages. Scientists are clear: Climate extremes will continue to worsen until humans stop pumping carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

So far, however, the political press is covering the 2024 campaign as if climate weren’t on the ballot. Whether it’s the presidential, congressional, or state and local races being covered, climate questions are relegated to afterthoughts in candidate debates and interviews, if they’re asked at all.

And when the climate crisis does come up, it’s often framed as a simplistic, either-or question that implies that the science remains unsettled: Do you, or don’t you, believe man-made climate change is real? That question was settled long ago; the scientific consensus around the climate crisis is approaching the consensus around gravity.

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But there’s an easy shift to make: Ask candidates what they’re going to do about the climate crisis; specifically, what is their plan to rapidly phase out oil, gas, and coal, as science says is imperative. Journalists can also ask candidates whether they take money from the fossil-fuel industry, the main driver of the climate crisis; and ask candidates what solutions they have for constituents who are suffering from deadly heat and other weather extremes.

We don’t think political reporters and their editors are intentionally burying the climate election story. But they are creatures of habit, reverting to a mode of coverage that has plagued campaign reporting for decades. As Margaret Sullivan, Jay Rosen, and other observers have been lamenting for years, political reporting continues to operate in an unhelpful time warp.

Polls still dominate elections coverage more than they should. Reporting on polling is easy, quick and responsive to the news cycle. The ins-and-outs of campaign strategy—coverage of the horse race—are still an obsession. This is a topic endlessly interesting to campaign reporters, but irrelevant to most voters. And a lack of journalistic judgment still means news outlets give the microphone to the loudest, most incendiary voices, regardless of whether they are addressing the issues voters care about.

We believe that more and better coverage of the climate crisis could help solve the media’s campaign-coverage problem. All over the world, decisive majorities of the public say they are concerned about the climate crisis. In the United States, 56 percent of people questioned are either “concerned” or outright “alarmed” by it. If a candidate won an election with 56 percent of the vote, political reporters would call that a landslide. Yet that landslide of public opinion is not seeing the climate story reflected on their TV screens or news feeds.

The climate crisis is a story that is important, fresh, and rich with both solutions and drama. Let’s try seeing it as the beginning of a new way to cover politics in this most critical of election seasons.

At Covering Climate Now, the global collaboration of 500-plus news outlets we co-founded in 2019, our partners are doing their part. This week, CCNow is launching the Climate Elections project, a nonpartisan series of efforts aimed at helping journalists and newsrooms center climate crisis in their 2024 elections coverage.

Our hope is that reporters everywhere—but especially campaign and politics reporters—will make the climate crisis part of their reporting on the many elections, local as well as national, taking place around the world this year, reminding their audiences that, among everything else at stake, the future of the planet is also on the ballot.

The Climate Elections project kicks off with a weekly newsletter aimed at helping reporters incorporate climate, where appropriate, into their campaign coverage. Called Climate on the Ballot, the newsletter will highlight a new topic every week and suggest ways to make the climate connection to campaign coverage.

This week, we highlight what may be surprising news to many politics reporters and editors: The American public actually wants more climate information, with some 80 percent of Americans polled saying they “want to learn more” about the climate crisis, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Each week, the newsletter will propose story ideas, spotlight examples of elections coverage that makes the climate connection and offer journalists resources to inform their reporting.

In coming weeks, we’ll roll out additional resources, including a calendar of cross-referenced elections and climate events, a tool to help identify and debunk climate-related disinformation, a handbook for getting started as a campaign climate reporter, and events such as a webinar with Margaret Sullivan and Ben Tracy next Tuesday called “Beyond the Stump Speech: Integrating Climate in Elections Reporting.”

Scientists emphasize that the climate crisis is solvable: Humanity has the necessary technologies to “transition away from fossil fuels,” as the world’s governments agreed at the COP28 climate summit in December 2023. What’s often lacking are political leaders willing and able to implement those technologies and leave fossil fuels behind.

Which makes elections crucial to addressing the climate crisis. But for voters to do their part, they first have to be informed, and journalism remains a singularly powerful tool for providing the information they need.

So much is at stake this election season, in the US and around the world. Journalism will be judged by how it responds. Our hope is that 2024 is the year in which reporters focus on what matters most to people and how they live; not on what insiders obsess about or what’s easiest to produce and seems to be driving clicks in the moment.

At this make-or-break moment in the climate crisis, it’s hard to think of a more important issue facing voters. Journalism should cover it that way.



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Jane Fonda’s Last Crusade https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jane-fonda-climate-change/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardOct 4, 2023

The activist and Hollywood legend is “having a ball” electing climate champions across the US.

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Covering Climate Now / October 4, 2023

Jane Fonda’s Last Crusade

The activist and Hollywood legend is “having a ball” electing climate champions across the US.

Mark Hertsgaard

Actress Jane Fonda is arrested during the “Fire Drill Friday” Climate Change Protest on October 25, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

(John Lamparski / Getty Images)

The chemo sometimes fogs her brain, but not her mind. Addressing a roomful of women in the book-lined annex of a midtown hotel during last month’s Climate Week NYC, Jane Fonda suddenly forgot what question the moderator asked her. “I had cancer,” she confided.

Recovering in true movie-star style, Fonda leaned toward the crowd and said, “Here’s a good joke that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.” She then told a risqué story about one of her famous ex-husbands that somehow rebounds to his credit even as it provoked gasps and guffaws of knowing laughter from the women who’d been hanging on her every word for the last 20 minutes.

Fonda, 85, was raising money for what she said is the last mission of her life as an activist, the cause that she said she will be working on for as many years as she has left: the climate emergency. “It’s fun,” she said. “I’m having a ball!”

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The women loved her, admired her, called her their “shero.” They were women of wealth, brought together by Nia Impact Capital, one of the very few asset management firms in the United States led by women. Kristin Hull, the firm’s founder and CEO, explained while introducing Fonda that only 0.7 percent of the $80 trillion in private wealth in the US seeking investment opportunities is managed by women-led firms.

“We get the economy we invest in, and we get the political leadership we invest in,” said Hull, who along with half a dozen Nia colleagues in New York had joined the March to End Fossil Fuels a few days earlier. “Let’s all just imagine how different our world would be with women at the decision-making tables.”

From its inception in 2007, Nia ruled out investing its clients’ money in fossil fuels. Nia claims to be the first US asset management firm to “invest at the intersection of environmental sustainability and social justice.” One goal of the event with Fonda was to convince more women of wealth to do likewise.

The women Fonda and Hull addressed ranged in age from their 20s to their 70s. Virtually all were white. Many were mothers who dread the climate future their children are inheriting.

But are these women ready to have the fights that likely will be necessary to shift their wealth away from the oil, gas, and coal that are roasting the planet?

“A lot of women want to align their investments with their values,” Hull ventured, “but when they go to their investment adviser, oftentimes it’s a man….”

“Divorce!” Fonda blurted out before Hull completed the question. The crowd erupted in laughter. “Fossil fuels are worth getting divorced over,” Fonda added. “I wouldn’t want to stay married with someone invested in fossil fuels.” She paused, then added: “I wouldn’t sleep with anyone invested in fossil fuels.”

The laughter built, and Fonda went further.

“We should do what they did during the Vietnam War,” she said. “Joan Baez started it, I think. Let’s not sleep with anybody who has money invested in fossil fuels.”

Shouts, applause, and whoops filled the room.

“You’ll be attacked” if you speak out, Fonda told the women. “So what! Women have such a tendency to want to be loved by everybody. I spent 60 years of my life wanting to be popular. It’s not good.”

“We have to make fossil fuels as bad as tobacco,” she continued, “the kind of thing you’d never put money into, never want anybody to know you have money in. But we still have all these political leaders taking money from fossil fuel interests.”

To tackle that problem, Fonda and Annie Leonard, the former CEO of Greenpeace USA, recently established the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, a political action committee dedicated to electing “climate warriors” to public office across the United States. One iron-clad requirement: The PAC only assists candidates who refuse to accept money from fossil fuel companies and their allies. Fonda’s PAC says that fossil fuel interests poured $139 million into the 2020 elections and that this money deterred Congress from passing such climate solutions as the Green New Deal and ending billions in annual subsidies to Big Oil.

To date, Fonda’s PAC has focused on down-ballot races: state legislatures, city county commissioners, mayors. In these less-costly races, she said, “every dollar really matters…. [These candidates] don’t get a lot of volunteers or media coverage. But we come along, and we can triple [the money] they’re raising and bring in the media and get volunteers and really make a difference.”

Of the 60 candidates the Jane Fonda Climate PAC has supported over the past year, 42 won their general elections—a better than two-out-of-three success rate. All of those candidates were Democrats, “because Republicans can’t be moved,” Fonda explained.

Most of the endorsed candidates were women, and many were women of color. Lina Hildago, for example, became chief executive of Harris County, Tex., which contains the oil-and-gas industry hub of Houston and is the third-most- populous county in the country. Fonda’s PAC also supported Brandon Johnson, a former public-school teacher and union organizer, in his successful campaign to become mayor of Chicago.

The Jane Fonda Climate PAC raised $1,897,427 for the 2022 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that documents the role of money in US politics. Fonda told the crowd that she’s aiming much higher: “We’re going to become a $100 million PAC, I swear it.”

Reflecting on her five decades of political activism, dating back to the anti–Vietnam War, women’s liberation, and anti-nuclear movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Fonda said that “two things are necessary” for such movements to succeed. One is “unprecedented numbers of people in the streets. Many, many, many millions of people in the streets [and] getting arrested, but nonviolently. This is what changes history.” Second, “we have to change the people on the inside. That’s what my PAC does…. We want to electoralize people’s climate angst.”

Working with Black and Indigenous leaders in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police made Fonda realize that “if there was no racism, if there was no patriarchy, there would be no climate crisis.” The climate crisis, she argued, stems from “a mindset that creates hierarchies of people who are worth more than other people. And Nature is at the very bottom.”

Hull’s final question to her shero was to “talk about building power,” especially the importance of women building power.

“Women are far more concerned about the climate crisis than men are,” Fonda replied. “Women tend to be afraid of power. But if what we do isn’t moving us close to power, then we’re doing the wrong thing.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jane-fonda-climate-change/
Making Climate the Everything Storyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-news-coverage-conference/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeSep 19, 2023

The news media needs to stop treating climate change as a niche topic—and start treating it as the most important story of our time.

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Activism / September 19, 2023

Making Climate the Everything Story

The news media needs to stop treating climate change as a niche topic—and start treating it as the most important story of our time.

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
Activists lie down during a 'Rally for Climate Sanity' outside Calgary's Town Hall in opposition to the 24th World Petroleum Congress Opening Ceremony, on September 17, 2023, in Calgary, Canada.

Activists lie down during a “Rally for Climate Sanity” outside the Town Hall of Calgary, Canada, on September 17, 2023, in opposition to the 24th World Petroleum Congress Opening Ceremony.

(Stringer / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The climate crisis has become inescapable in much of what we see, hear, and read. Don’t Look Up spent weeks as the most-streamed movie ever on Netflix. Pop star Billie Eilish sings about hills burning in California. At the bookstore, climate fiction has become a genre of its own, while Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, a harrowing nonfiction account of what life on a warming planet will mean, is entering its second month on the New York Times bestseller list.

And where is journalism in all of this? Despite living through the hottest summer in history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms, and rapidly warming oceans, the news media continues to be outdone by popular culture when it comes to telling the most urgent story of our time. Inexplicably, climate change remains a niche concern for most mainstream news outlets. Most American TV coverage of this summer’s hellish weather did not even mention the words “climate change,” much less explain that the burning of oil, gas, and coal is what’s driving that hellish weather. Too many newsrooms continue to see climate as a siloed beat of specialists.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. The Guardian, for example, has long delivered abundant science-based, comprehensive coverage of the climate crisis as well as its solutions, as have other big global outlets such as the AFP news agency and Al Jazeera. But those outlets, as excellent as they often are, are among the outliers; much of the rest of media—particularly television, which, even in today’s digital era, remains the leading source of news globally for the largest number of people—struggle to find their climate footing.

We wish it were otherwise. As founders of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration formed to break the “climate silence” that long prevailed in the media, we’ve been working to help our colleagues throughout the news business amp up their coverage of the climate story.

In 2019, the media’s climate silence began to break, and in the past four years, we’ve seen encouraging successes: In the United States, major outlets including The Washington Post now treat climate change as a subject to cover every day and not solely as a weather story. Telemundo 51, a Spanish-language TV station in Miami, is pursuing an “all of newsroom” approach that encourages reporters on every beat to talk about climate change, including its solutions. Overseas, France Télévisions (France’s counterpart to Britain’s BBC) has jettisoned traditional weathercasts in favor of a daily “weather-climate bulletin,” where viewers can track global warming in real time as an eight-digit electronic counter shows how much today’s temperatures exceed the preindustrial average. (As of September 12, the number was 1.19829708 degrees Celsius.)

These mold-breaking innovations are notable, but they remain exceptions. Dramatic changes in climate have made increased news coverage of extreme weather unavoidable. But explaining the climate connection to extreme weather is a different task. News coverage needs to start systematically pointing out the links between changes in the weather and the decisions being made by industry, and government, that have overheated the planet.

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As journalists, we have to do better. The broad, general public needs to understand what is happening, why it matters, and, above all, that they can help fix it—for example, by voting, by not buying unsustainable products, and by talking to friends and family about doing the same.

Journalism is at its best when it effectively explains and connects the dots between seemingly disparate events. That means, for instance, learning lessons from how the media covered Covid—also a sprawling, complicated story dictated by science. Nobody in the media debated the need to dedicate resources to helping audiences understand Covid and then playing the story big. Most outlets ran multiple Covid stories every day, which helped even casual news consumers understand that something important was happening. Journalists grounded our coverage in science, but we didn’t silo it on the science desk: We covered Covid as a health story, a politics story, a business, education, and a lifestyle story. And we talked not only about the problem but also about its solutions (e.g., masking, social distancing, vaccinations).

Climate coverage could take the same approach. Every newsroom in every community needs to think about climate change not as a beat but as a through line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is exempt—not business or culture, not sports or city hall.

On the national level, journalism has to figure out how to make climate change central to our politics coverage. Next year will bring elections in the US, the UK, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Egypt that will have profound effects on the prospects for global climate action. Can politics reporters and editors scale back their fixation on horse-race coverage and instead provide the kind of coverage that voters need to make informed choices? Election coverage should help audiences understand what the candidates will do about the climate crisis if elected, not just what they say. It should hold candidates accountable not by asking them (as Fox did at the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate change but rather, “What is your plan to deal with the climate crisis?”

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Overall, we also need much more and better coverage of climate solutions. Our colleagues at the Solutions Journalism Network have rightly criticized news coverage that talks only about what’s wrong. Understanding a problem is important, of course, but telling the whole story also requires examining how that problem might be fixed.

What else does “more and better” climate coverage mean? We expect some answers to emerge this week at “Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation,” a conference at the Columbia Journalism School in New York cosponsored by Covering Climate Now; our founders, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation; our lead media partner, The Guardian; and the Solutions Journalism Network. Reporters and editors from news outlets worldwide—large and small, commercial and nonprofit—will chart a course for how journalists everywhere can tackle the climate story in ways that drive attention and impact and highlight solutions and justice. The assembled journalists will draw lessons and inspiration from some of the best climate coverage of the past year, as exemplified by winners of the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards, which were just announced. (The conference will be livestreamed and recordings will remain available.)

With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Only when the general public understands what is happening, why, and what needs to be done can enough people compel governments and corporations to change course. Many news outlets have made significant progress in recent years. But the news industry as a whole is still not matching the scale of the crisis with the kind of coverage that’s required. Until that happens, journalism is letting down our readers, viewers, and listeners—and letting Netflix and Billie Eilish handle a job that’s ours to do.



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A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-music-soundtrack/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardDec 15, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of “Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

he climate emergency deserves its own soundtrack. Social movements throughout history have used music to inspire activists to persevere in the face of apparently long odds. Music also offers solace for the losses that accompany struggles to build a better world, and it can wake up the unaware or apathetic, propelling them to join the fight. A stunning new cover of the 1960s protest anthem “Eve of Destruction,” produced by the South African nonprofit news site the Daily Maverick, delivers on all counts.

The original “Eve of Destruction,” released in 1965, protested America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Written by P.F. Sloan and recorded by pop singer Barry McGuire, the song became an instant hit thanks to its octave-jumping hook—“And you tell me, over and over and over again, my friend, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction”—and an infectious groove supplied by drummer Hal Blaine of the Wrecking Crew, a renowned Los Angeles session band. The verses, penned by Sloane at age 19, channeled the growing fear and anger of American youth as more and more of their generation were sent to fight, kill, and die in Vietnam.

The Daily Maverick’s journalistic chops shine in the music video for the new “Eve of Destruction,” a relentless stream of images from the onrushing climate emergency: gray smoke and yellow flames billowing from refineries and petrochemical plants, vultures feasting on drought-desiccated cattle, the swirling eye of a hurricane seen from space, an oil-soaked seabird attempting to free itself from the muck, and a bulldozer crane tossing around logs in a recently leveled rainforest.

The melding of such images with the haunting vocals of South African singer Anneli Kampfer triggers goosebumps. In the video, her eyes are closed, as if she can’t bear to watch the stupidity and suffering that she’s describing, and she sings in a tone at once baffled and confrontational. The lyrics of this cover were tweaked to shift the song’s emphasis from being anti-war to being anti-climate catastrophe. The original lyrics observed that the soldiers being sent to Vietnam were “old enough to kill, but not for votin’” before adding, “You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?” The new lyrics put more onus on the listener: “You’re bad enough to scream, but your throat is choking / You don’t believe in oil, but it’s your car that’s smoking.”

Writing in 2020, journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis listed 10 other songs that referenced climate change, though less overtly. She began with “All Star,” which the band Smash Mouth released in 1999. Featured two years later on the soundtrack for the movie Shrek, the song’s upbeat tempo and generally can-do lyrics contrasted with the verse’s closing lines: “The ice we skate is getting pretty thin / The water’s getting warm so you might as well swim / My world’s on fire, how about yours?” Next on Pierre-Louis’s list: “All the Good Girls Go To Hell,” released in 2019. In the music video, pop phenom Billie Eilish poses as an angel fallen from heaven, mocking humans for making “hills burn in California … [as] the water starts to rise” before snarking, “Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” And in “New World Water,” rapper Mos Def was already singing in 1999 about how, “New world water make the tide rise high / Come inland and make your house go ‘bye.’”

A more explicit reference to climate change came from jazz giant Sonny Rollins with his 1999 album, Global Warming. In addition to its eponymous instrumental track, Rollins wrote a poem, printed on the album’s inner sleeve, that reads, “We got to stop assumin’ / We can just go on consumin’,” before concluding, “Not that much time left neither.” Going back to 1971, Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology),” didn’t name global warming—a term that wouldn’t enter mass consciousness until the late 1980s—but Gaye did nail how reckless pollution was creating an unprecedented new reality: “Oh, things ain’t what they used to be.” Joni Mitchell offered a similar caution in 1970 in “Big Yellow Taxi”: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” And in 1965, the same year the original version of “Eve of Destruction” was released, Bobby Hebb recorded the imperishable, “Sunny.” A love song with no overt political message, “Sunny” was singled out in 2021 by author and activist Bill McKibben, who cited its title and especially its lyric—“Now the dark days are done, and the bright days are here”—to hail “Sunny” as “an ode to our nearest star and to our collective hope for an easier time ahead.”

There’s room, and need, to add still more songs to the climate emergency soundtrack. Smash Mouth guitarist Greg Camp, who wrote “All Star,” told Pierre-Louis in 2020, “I’m hoping that the generation that’s writing songs now will speak to their generation, because it may be the last generation that can actually stop this tipping point.”

Certainly the activists among today’s generation have stepped up. Globally, young people lead the fight against the climate emergency, most visibly with massive street protests that foreground climate justice. In the United States, young climate activists turned out the Generation Z vote in record numbers in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 national elections. A “youth wave” of voters in the 2022 midterms prevented climate-denying Republicans from gaining control of both houses of Congress.

Bringing history full circle, today’s college students might not be eligible to vote in the first place if it hadn’t been for the original “Eve of Destruction.” When Barry McGuire’s version was released in 1965, the voting age in the US was 21. As more and more people heard the song (even though some radio stations banned it), growing numbers sided with young organizers who were demanding that 18-year-olds be able to vote. In 1971, Congress passed and president Richard M. Nixon signed the 26th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote to all Americans age 18 and older.

Years later, McGuire proudly claimed that the lyrics of “Eve of Destruction” were written into the text of the 26th Amendment. While that’s not quite true, visit the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum website that describes passage of the 26th Amendment and the social impact of “Eve of Destruction” is clear: The lyric “old enough to kill but not for votin’” sits above a photograph of US Marines blasting a 90-millimeter gun into a Vietnam jungle.

Which suggests a final song for the climate emergency soundtrack: “Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up.” Although composed almost 50 years ago, the song’s closing lines capture today’s political moment, when, after decades of lies and stalling by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies, more and more people finally recognize the truth and are rising up to say they won’t take it anymore:

You can fool some people sometimes
But you can’t fool all the people all the time
So now we see the light
We gonna stand up for our rights!

The Climate Soundtrack

Anneli Kampfer, Eve of Destruction

Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction

Billie Eilish, all the good girls go to hell

Mos Def, New World Water

Sonny Rollins, Global Warming

Marvin Gaye, Mercy, Mercy Me

Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

Bobby Hebb, Sunny


Bob Marley, Get Up Stand Up



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Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats?https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/gen-z-youth-vote-election-democrats/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 7, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

he message coming from America’s mainstream media has been consistent for months: The Democrats are going down. One news story after another projects that Tuesday’s midterm elections will give Republicans control of at least the House of Representatives and probably the Senate as well, rendering President Joe Biden all but powerless. Not only will he be unable to pass major legislation for the rest of his term, but he, his family, and his top aides will be harassed by congressional Republican investigations and even calls for impeachment.

Not so fast, say young organizers from the climate, gun violence, and other progressive social movements. At a press briefing Sunday morning, 48 hours before Election Day polls open on the East Coast, leaders from the grassroots groups March for Our Lives, Sunrise Movement, and Gen Z for Change predicted that a youth wave of voters will upend the conventional narrative. These groups have been working on the ground for months in battleground states, educating and urging young people to vote. They contend that the polling and reporting done by most news outlets is missing the growing engagement by people ages 18 to 29. That demographic cohort, they say, is motivated by three main issues—gun violence, abortion, and climate change—and favors Democrats over Republicans by a roughly two-to-one margin.

“There’s a lot of polls that are conducted over the phone and by voluntary digital polling. Young people are very rarely [included] in those polls, so they’re underrepresented,” said Olivia Julianna, the 19-year-old director of politics and government affairs for Gen Z for Change, which began as a coalition of TikTok creators using digital media to organize young people against former president Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, mainstream news coverage echoes outdated assumptions about younger voters held by political insiders in Washington. “Even if there are all these boomer pundits out there saying young people aren’t going to turn out…the data show that is not the case for our generation,” said David Hogg, 22, who cofounded the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the Parkland High School shooting that killed 17 of his schoolmates and wounded 17 more in 2018. “In 2018, we saw one of the highest youth turnouts of any non-presidential midterm in American history. In 2020, we saw the highest youth voter turnout in American history. And young people aren’t stopping…. Over the past several weeks, March for Our Lives has contacted several hundred thousand voters to help turn out the vote.”

Hogg cited a poll conducted in late September by the Institute for Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School, which has been “pretty accurately” measuring young people’s electoral involvement and preferences for 20 years. The new poll found that “40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds state that they will ‘definitely’ vote in the November 8 midterm elections, on track to match or potentially exceed the record-breaking 2018 youth turnout in a midterm election.” The same poll found that 57 percent of young voters prefer Democratic control of Congress, while 31 percent favor Republican control. By contrast, the US electorate as a whole is split more or less equally: 45 percent prefer Democratic control of Congress, and 43 percent favor Republican control.

Early voting in some battleground states is matching or exceeding these pro-Democrat trends, said Julianna. In Michigan, “Democratic youth voter turnout is higher right now than it was in 2020 by about 8 percent,” she said. “Nationally, it’s 7.3 percent higher.” She argued that the upsurge is driven partly by recent events that have put more focus on the issues important to young voters, such as the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion and the relentless string of extreme heat waves and storms fueled by climate change.

The early voting data suggests something extraordinary, Julianna added. Historically, turnout by all demographic groups is much lower for midterm elections than it is for presidential elections. But the 2022 midterms could “have higher youth turnout than we did in the 2020 presidential election.”

“In the past, many young people prior to us felt they had the luxury of not voting, because they didn’t see how [voting] could affect them,” Hogg said. Today, “gun violence is literally the leading cause of death for young people in our country. The combination of the Parkland shooting, climate change, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and especially, frankly, the election of Donald Trump showed our generation how politics is tangible to us.”

Instead of basing their reporting on dubious polls, journalists should look at real-world results, Julianna said. “We’ve seen three major elections happen this year where it was supposed to be this big, right-leaning blowout,” she said, citing Kansas, where voters decided by an 18 percent margin to keep abortion legal; Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola defeated right-wing darling Sarah Palin for a congressional seat; and New York’s 19th Congressional District, where Democrat Pat Ryan beat Republican Marc Molinaro despite trailing badly in polling and fundraising. “None of those races were supposed to be competitive,” said Julianna, “and they ended up with Democratic victories. We can talk about polling data all we want, but since the Dobbs decision, young people have been turning out to vote for candidates they ideologically align with.”

“The truth is that young people are the most progressive generation in the history of this country,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on November 4 while urging young people to vote in Eau Claire, Wis. A leading example of that progressive energy is the Sunrise Movement, which arose after the 2018 midterms to push Democrats to adopt much stronger climate policies, including the Green New Deal championed by the newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ellen Sciales, a Sunrise Movement organizer, joined the press briefing from the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, where she had “been talking to students all morning.” Sciales said that the Sunshine Movement has contacted 3 million young people this year about voting. In Wisconsin, she added, Sunrise Movement organizers have been active on every University of Wisconsin campus in the state, and she herself has spoken to thousands of students one-on-one.

Many students, she found, lack basic information about elections and their right to participate. Others are skeptical that things will change even if they do vote. “But explaining things like student loan debt, climate policy, and gun prevention policy have helped these people see that government can work and that we have to pass more [of those policies],” she said.

One 18-year-old freshman told Sciales that she was sorry, but she couldn’t vote—she had missed the deadline for registering. Sciales informed the student that, in fact, Wisconsin permits same-day voter registration. The young woman was so glad to hear this, Sciales added, that she not only promised to vote herself but volunteered to help Sunrise encourage others to vote as well.

“Young people proved in 2020 that we are and could be the bedrock of the Democratic Party,” said Sciales, “as long as our leaders invest in us.”

Whether enough young people vote Democratic in Tuesday’s midterms to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress remains to be seen, but Gen Z voters are clearly a force to be reckoned with. “I’m not sure if we will see a red wave or blue wave on November 8—but we will see a Gen Z wave,” said John Della Volpe, the polling director at the Institute for Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Youth today vote at levels that far exceed millennials, Gen X, and baby boomers when they were under 30.” And Gen Z will only become a bigger share of the general electorate in the years ahead. The kids who were in middle school and high school at the time of Parkland shooting are now reaching voting age, noted Hogg, who added, “Our voting bloc is growing literally every single day.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/gen-z-youth-vote-election-democrats/
Journalism Turns a Corner on Climate Changehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-journalism-burning-questions/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeOct 25, 2022Watch the Covering Climate Now TV special Burning Questions tonight on public television’s WORLD channel.]]>

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

hree years ago, we started Covering Climate Now in hopes of closing the gap that existed between the enormity of the climate crisis and the efforts of journalism to cover it. We are, finally, starting to see progress.

The improvement is, in part, a result of the persistence and diligence of thousands of journalists around the world, many of them our partners and some of them recipients of this year’s second-annual Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. You can see some of their excellent work in Burning Questions, a one-hour TV special Covering Climate Now produced, which broadcasts and begins streaming tonight, October 25, at 8 pm US Eastern Time/5 pm Pacific on public television’s WORLD channel.

Frankly, though, the journalism about climate change is also getting better, because everyday people can look out the window and see for themselves that something is deeply wrong. The relentless severity of the unfolding climate crisis has become impossible to ignore. Audiences have started paying closer attention, spurring the best newsrooms to supply more reporting that meets the urgency of the moment.

That coverage is resonating with audiences partly because it is focusing on human beings more than on abstract science—and it is human beings, everywhere, who are enduring worsening heat, drought, flooding, and other manifestations of the rapidly overheating planet. The effects are felt disproportionately among marginalized communities and people of color around the world. But it’s happening to everybody. Nobody is exempt.

More newsrooms are finally recognizing that. Through our work at Covering Climate Now, and through the work of our colleagues who have won this year’s awards, we have seen journalists find really creative and poignant ways to shine the spotlight on who’s affected by this onrushing crisis.

We saw videos of kids who live—actually, used to live—on a farm in Iowa where year after year of erratic weather made it economically infeasible to continue and the family moved away. We heard songs from people living alongside a river in India, people who had been displaced by worsening floods and were memorializing their grief in song. We saw photographs from Iraq of marsh-dwelling people in the (once-)Fertile Crescent, where incomprehensible heat waves (125 degrees Fahrenheit) have made normal life impossible. The effects of climate change can be unspeakably sad, but they can also yield unforgettable journalism.

For too long, newsrooms were silent about the climate crisis. They bogged themselves down in fake debates and dubious science. There was a wariness of the climate story, grounded in fears that it was depressing, would trigger nasty e-mails from ideologues, and besides, hadn’t audiences heard it all before? For too long, too many simply gave up on the story, even as the earth hurtled toward disaster.

More journalists are now saying that we’ve got to figure out a way to tell the climate story that gets beyond those outdated presumptions. It is our profession’s good fortune that this shift to more human-focused climate coverage plays to our strengths. We’re storytellers. And now, finally, more of our profession is bringing determination and creativity to our telling of this unavoidably human story.

Where does the climate story go next? The narrative needs to move toward solutions. And there is good reason to think that audiences are primed for this shift.

Covering Climate Now is working to develop guidance on how to do climate solutions reporting with journalistic rigor and integrity. A core principle is that good solutions reporting does not cheerlead for this or that approach; it interrogates those approaches and informs the public and policy-makers about which ones work and which don’t.

There is one specific climate solution for which journalism is uniquely well-suited. “One of the most important things anyone can do about climate change is to talk about it,” said Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy and an acclaimed climate communicator. “And no one talks to more people than you [in the media] do,” she added. Running more climate stories signals to the public that climate change matters, and running more solutions stories signals that something can be done about it. Which helps explain why Covering Climate Now calls better journalism an essential climate solution: because it can help educate large numbers of people about what’s going on—and how to turn things around before it’s too late.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-journalism-burning-questions/
The White House Wants a Climate Denier Out as World Bank Presidenthttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/david-malpass-climate-denier/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardSep 22, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

ohn Kerry, the United States special presidential envoy for climate, signaled Tuesday that the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to remove the president of the World Bank, Trump appointee David Malpass. Kerry’s comments came hours after Al Gore, the former US vice president and longtime climate activist, called Malpass “a climate denier” and called on President Joe Biden “to get rid of” him and “put new leadership in” at the world’s largest development bank.

Kerry and Gore were speaking at an event hosted by The New York Times as part of Climate Week NYC, an annual series of public events coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly that aims to galvanize climate action. Malpass, appearing separately from Kerry and Gore at the event, called Gore’s call for his removal “very odd.” On stage, Malpass was asked three times whether he “accepted the scientific consensus that the man-made burning of fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet.” Each time, the World Bank president declined to answer before finally saying, “I don’t even know, and I’m not a scientist.”

“We need to get a new head of the World Bank, for god’s sake,” Gore said before a live audience while answering questions from Somini Sengupta, the Times’ international climate correspondent. In a heated tone, Gore said that “it’s ridiculous to have a climate denier at the head of the World Bank” at a time when poorer countries need affordable loans to install solar and wind facilities rather than burning more coal and other fossil fuels.

“If you’re in Nigeria and you want to privately finance a new solar farm,” Gore explained, “you have to pay an interest rate seven times higher than what the OECD [i.e, wealthy] countries pay. If you want to build a wind farm in Brazil, you have to pay interest three times higher than what the US pays.” With 90 percent of future heat-trapping emissions projected to come from developing countries, such unaffordable interest rates imperil the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as scientists say is imperative to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Providing loans at more favorable interest rates is “the job of the World Bank, and they’re simply not doing it,” Gore said. “We need to get rid of that leadership and put new leadership in, and I hope President Biden will take that initial step.”

“We will hear from the World Bank president later [today],” Sengupta said.

“Good! Tell him I said hello,” Gore replied, provoking chuckles from the audience.

“Actually, tell him I said goodbye,” Gore added as the chuckles turned into laughter.

Appearing hours later on the same stage, Kerry made it clear the Biden administration shares Gore’s displeasure with Malpass, whom Trump nominated to head the World Bank in 2019. Formerly the chief economist at Bear Stearns, an investment bank that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, Malpass was an economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later served as President Trump’s undersecretary for international affairs at the Treasury.

Posing a question from the audience, this reporter told Kerry that his former Senate colleague Gore had called on the Biden administration to get Malpass removed before asking Kerry, “Does the administration have confidence in David Malpass as the head of the World Bank?”

“I can’t comment on what the status is of an individual, that is the president’s decision,” Kerry replied. “I will tell you this, though. I have been pushing for months, along with others in the administration, and it’s an open door, not pushing against a shut door…. Earlier today in a meeting we had with a big group of nations talking about development, we made it crystal clear that we need to have major reform and a major restructuring with respect to the multinational development banks.”

Kerry added that the African Development Bank now allocates about 67 percent of its lending to climate, and that the Asia Development Bank is “doing pretty well,” as is the European Development Bank. Notably missing from his list was the World Bank, an absence Kerry alluded to when he added, “If I keep going, you will get a feel for where I am.” Again, laughter rippled through the crowd.

The United States cannot unilaterally remove Malpass; the World Bank’s governing board has the sole authority to select and remove the bank’s president. But Kerry pointed out that the US is the World Bank’s “largest shareholder,” and historically the US has exercised decisive influence over the governing board’s decisions. Citing “the Europeans, our friends, the Germans, the French, the Brits,” Kerry said, “It is up to us to pull people together and get that reform. And [there is] a lot of discussion about doing that right now.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/david-malpass-climate-denier/
Does the Climate Bill Throw Environmental Justice Under the Bus?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/environmental-justice-inflation-reduction-act/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardAug 11, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

  1. Is the new climate bill as big a deal as they say?

    Yes.

  2. Is it big enough to save us?

    No, not by itself.

  3. Does it throw environmental justice under the bus?

    Yes, as usual, but Manchin might be in for a surprise.

  4. Will Republicans keep getting a pass on climate?

    We’ll see between now and the November midterms.

he first of the above four questions is the easiest call. The bill Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin secretly negotiated—the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, as the reconciliation bill was wisely renamed—will be the biggest positive step the US government has ever taken on climate change. When our sweltering planet is literally on fire—a new Guardian analysis estimates that excessive heat has killed millions of people over the last 30 years—strong action from the world’s leading climate superpower is indeed a big deal.

If passed by the House of Representatives later this week, the Inflation Reduction Act will invest $369 billion to hasten the US economy’s transition to carbon-free energy. That’s almost three times larger (adjusted for inflation) than the $90 billion for clean energy included in the 2009 federal stimulus bill. That $90 billion helped dramatically drop the price of solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources over the past decade. The vastly larger spending in this bill should accelerate and spread that progress to more parts of the economy.

“It makes clean energy cheap, that’s the bottom line,” said Jesse Jenkins, an engineering professor at Princeton who conducted independent modeling of the spending. New federal money, often in the form of tax credits, will subsidize consumers who switch to electric vehicles or install heat pumps and other energy efficient household technologies. It will incentivize electric utility companies to shift from gas to renewables and oil and gas companies to minimize leaks of methane, an exceptionally potent greenhouse gas. It will pay to clean up America’s ports, a concentrated source of emissions that not only overheats the planet but poisons nearby communities, which tend to be disproportionately poor and people of color. By doing all this and more, the Inflation Reduction Act will create 9 million jobs over the next decade in clean energy, clean manufacturing, and natural infrastructure (e.g., forests and parks), according to the Blue Green Alliance.

The bill’s backers further assert that it will reduce annual US emissions by 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, a claim supported by three independent analyses that is further examined below. If achieved, that reduction would approach the 50 to 52 percent reduction that scientists say is needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

That’s another reason this bill is a big deal: It gives the United States much-needed credibility to urge other countries to slash their own emissions. The US has taken many big steps on climate over the years, just mostly in the wrong direction. Instead of cutting emissions, it boosted them through subsidies and lax regulations. It has repeatedly cast doubt on whether there is even a problem, with the last president calling climate change “a hoax” to applause from fellow Republicans. At international conferences dating back to the Earth Summit in 1992, the same script has played out again and again: Other big emitters that don’t want to cut back hide behind the US refusal to do so. If the Inflation Reduction Act becomes law, that dodge will no longer be credible.

On to question 2: Is this bill enough to save us?

ot at all. Even the bill’s backers say that at best it will cut emissions by 40 percent. That would be a major step toward the 1.5º C target, but much more is needed.

Some self-styled realists suggest accepting that 1.5º C is unreachable and focusing on keeping the overshoot as small as possible. But look around. Record heat, drought, fire, and flooding are killing people and devastating communities all over the world, especially among the poor who did nothing to cause this crisis. “I can’t even express how frustrating and terrifying it is to be a young activist witnessing this!” wrote Jordan Mulinzi, a 15-year-old in Uganda tweeting that half a million people across his homeland are starving because of extreme drought.

These horrors are unfolding after a temperature rise of “only” 1.2º C. To give up on 1.5º C would be shameful, a betrayal of the tens of millions of people who live in highly vulnerable locations worldwide. It would also be a gamble for the economically comfortable global minority., for the further temperatures rise above 1.5º C, the more likely that tipping points such as “dieback” of the Amazon rainforest will trigger larger, irreversible effects.

All of which helps explain why scientists, activists, and newspaper editorials have urged President Joe Biden to declare a national climate emergency, no matter what Congress does. Citing a report by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Los Angeles Times editorial board said that such a declaration would enable Biden to take additional steps, including a ban on crude oil exports and directing “the Federal Emergency Management Agency to build climate-ready infrastructure in low-income communities of color that are hit hardest by disasters.”

Meanwhile, big chunks of the new bill’s spending go to technologies that are far from proven and may actually make the crisis worse. An estimated 23 percent of the money targeting the electricity sector is earmarked for “carbon capture and storage,” a process intended to capture carbon dioxide after fossil fuel is burned and store it away from where it can heat the atmosphere.

In theory, CCS enables power plants to keep burning fossil fuel without worsening global warming. But years of research and demonstration projects have not brought CCS close to economic competitiveness. Nevertheless, both the IRA bill and the three independent analyses assume that CCS will soon capture upward of 90 percent of the CO2 generated by a given facility.

But the possibility that this bill will not achieve all it promises does not invalidate point one above. A law can be a historic achievement and scientifically insufficient at the same time, especially when veto power resides with a politician like Manchin, who has made millions of dollars from coal investments and since 2020 has received more than $331,000 in campaign contributions from pipeline companies, three times more than any other member of Congress. In a petro-state like the US, phasing out oil, gas, and coal was never going to be easy.

Which brings us to question 3: Does this bill throw environmental justice under the bus?

ertainly, many advocates see it that way. Some go so far as to say the bill should be defeated. They assume that the bill will increase oil drilling, pipeline construction, and other fossil fuel projects that will burden surrounding communities, where residents often are poor or people of color. Manchin likewise assumes that he is spurring fossil fuel production; he demanded that the bill open 60 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to development, and further that it stipulate that wind projects cannot advance on federal land unless auctions are held for fossil fuel projects on those 60 million acres.

But this core assumption, shared by both Manchin and the advocates, is open to question, as the senator may be disappointed to discover. Independent experts point out that the auctions and permits Manchin inserted into the bill will not necessarily translate into actual fossil fuel production. Companies first would have to invest in such projects, which is far from a sure thing.

Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University regarded as the grandfather of environmental justice in the US, said that the Inflation Reduction Act “has some good things in it that are greatly needed by low-income, people of color and environmental justice communities—such as incentives for clean energy technologies, electric vehicles, school buses and transit; helping families who are energy insecure with their electric bills; retrofits and tax credits to assist with making homes more energy efficient; and targeted investments to address legacy pollution and environmental ‘hot-spots’ created by racial redlining.” Bullard added, however, that the bill’s flaws mean that historically abused “communities once again appear to be placed in a precarious position of having to accept risky CCS technologies, more pollution, and unfair health ‘trade-offs’ in order to get environmental and climate benefits.”

“People who look like me have been on Congress’s expendables list for long enough,” said Ebony Martin, a Black woman who is a co–executive director of Greenpeace USA. Martin called the bill “a much-needed investment in renewable energy, and a down payment on the union jobs we need to propel a green economy. But it is a slap in the face to the frontline communities, grassroots groups, and activists that made this legislation possible.”

For instance, the Climate Justice Alliance, a network of urban and rural community organizations, is opposing the bill, saying, “The Inflation Reduction Act is not a climate justice bill.”

Schumer and most progressive Democrats argue that including the auction and permit provisions was the only way to secure Manchin’s approval—essential, given the opposition of all 50 Republican senators. A side bill, also demanded by Manchin, would streamline the permitting process by weakening core environmental laws. The trade-offs, Schumer and many progressives believe, are worth it. After all, Democrats are not obliged to support the side bill, just to put it to a vote. Above all, they cite Energy Innovation, one of the three independent analysts of the bill, which estimates that the main bill’s clean energy measures will yield 24 times more emissions reductions than its fossil fuel provisions will increase emissions.

That 24-to-1 ratio hints at why the bill’s environmental justice impacts might be less destructive than predicted. The fundamental strategy behind this bill is to make clean energy dramatically cheaper—so much cheaper that fossil fuels are squeezed out of existence, not by government fiat but by the workings of the marketplace.

The federal government can run as many auctions and offer as many permits as Manchin’s heart desires, but that won’t stop renewable energy from getting dramatically cheaper. And it bears repeating: More auctions and permits do not necessarily translate into more drilling and pipelines. It depends on whether investors think those projects are likely to yield an attractive profit.

In recent years, that hasn’t been the case, because oil prices until 2022 were relatively low and the legal, political, and reputational risks were high (in no small part because of grassroots resistance to such projects). What’s more, the most profitable fossil fuel sites went into production long ago, industry observers note, and long-term oil prices are projected to remain sluggish as the global transition to clean energy advances. (This piece is a good explainer.)

This is where the Inflation Reduction Act’s massive clean energy subsidies could deliver a fossil fuel kill shot. If electric vehicles push their gasoline counterparts aside—as auto manufacturers worldwide are already working toward and this bill will accelerate—then demand for oil should fall substantially, further depressing oil prices. In that case, investors will likely shun the new auctions and permits, sparing frontline communities from further exploitation.

Of course, there’s no guarantee the future will turn out that way. “Only time will tell if the huge bet we just put on renewable energy pays off,” said Erich Pica, the executive director of Friends of the Earth. “In the meantime, this wager is being backed at the cost of Black, brown, and Indigenous folks that…have endured the ravages of a fossil fuel economy so ‘the rest of the world’ can live our lives.”

For all the game-changing potential of the Inflation Reduction Act to transform the American and therefore the global effort to defuse the climate emergency, the bill has also laid bare a long-simmering rift within the US climate movement between its environmental justice wing, where race, class, and gender solidarity is demanded, and its more mainstream wing, where those values are embraced, often sincerely, but are clustered with competing objectives, such as making whatever progress is achievable within the system as it currently exists.

“It would be a gift to the fossil fuel industry if we came out of this process with a fractured climate movement,” said one veteran activist who asked not to be identified for fear of further stoking divisions. Whether such a fracturing occurs will depend partly on what happens going forward. Will both wings of the climate movement unite to oppose Manchin’s permitting bill? And if investors do try to realize Manchin’s goal of expanding fossil fuel production, will the vastly better funded mainstream groups live up to the stated commitment of Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters, to “keep fighting against more drilling, leasing, pipelines and other dangerous measures that perpetuate environmental racism and the climate crisis”?

And this raises a final question: How much longer will the Republican Party be given a pass on its climate wrecking?

ntil Manchin’s surprise announcement that he was ready to support a climate bill after all, both wings of the movement, along with 99 percent of press coverage, was giving him all the blame for blocking climate progress on Capitol Hill. This was understandable, but bizarre given that his vote only mattered because Republican senators have been in lockstep opposition to climate action since, well, forever.

Republicans in Washington have opposed real climate action for more than 30 years, dating back to the first President Bush. Yet they never pay a political price for it. News coverage and political adversaries treat the GOP’s opposition as unchangeable as gravity. Thus Republicans get away with scorning Democrats’ ideas for combating the climate crisis, even as they offer no credible plans of their own. Our planetary house is on fire, and the GOP position is, “Do nothing.”

Perhaps it’s time to dub Republicans the Do Nothing Party. Just as the Know Nothing Party that arose prior to the Civil War was anti-immigrant, so today’s GOP is anti–climate survival. Meanwhile, the fast-approaching midterm elections could test how long Republicans can sustain this stance. During the 90-odd days between now and Election Day, GOP candidates should be asked over and over—by reporters covering their campaigns, by Democrats running against them, by activists turning out the vote, by constituents deciding whether to vote for them—why anyone who wants to preserve a livable climate (which happens to be the majority of Americans) would want a Republican Congress in charge when the planet is on fire.

The GOP position is that we can’t afford to put out the fire; we have to let it burn. It’s past time for Republicans to own that position. They can persist with it—although it’d be immeasurably better for humanity, not to mention their own children, if they didn’t—or they can change it. But no more hiding behind a free pass. Make it clear one way or the other, and let voters decide accordingly.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/environmental-justice-inflation-reduction-act/
Republicans Shouldn’t Get a Pass on Climatehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/republicans-climate-media/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJul 27, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

e have a choice: collective action or collective suicide,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said last week as vast swaths of the planet baked in record-breaking heat that has killed thousands of people so far in Europe alone, with the numbers expected to rise, and sparked wildfires that imperil countless more. “To tackle the climate emergency,” Guterres added, we need a “decade of decisive climate action.”

But Republican officials decided against climate action decades ago, and have long refused to accept that humans are causing climate change, much less that it threatens all of civilization. Despite mountains of scientific findings and heartbreaking real-world evidence, GOP leaders, including (but certainly not limited to) Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Steve Scalise, have demonized the very idea that climate action is important. Above all, congressional Republicans have opposed every major piece of legislation intended to tackle the onrushing crisis.

Which is why President Joe Biden found himself giving a speech on July 20 announcing executive actions to deal with what he called the “climate emergency”—even as he stopped short of declaring an official national emergency—including more wind power and helping low-income households pay for air-conditioning.

Biden hinted that more executive actions may follow, and those might help, but the unfortunate truth is that executive action is a poor substitute for actual legislation. Lawsuits—which affected industries would surely file—can delay and blunt the impact of executive orders, and the next president can immediately undo them. But Biden has little recourse now that his Build Back Better climate bill is dead.

Who killed Build Back Better? Judging from news coverage and outraged statements by Democrats and climate activists, it’s not Republicans who are to blame. The villain is one man and one man only: Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.

Manchin’s announcement last week that he would not support more federal climate spending triggered a gusher of denunciation. Manchin “just torpedoed Democrats’ climate agenda,” read a CNN headline. He “intentionally sabotaged” Biden’s climate program, Senator Bernie Sanders thundered on ABC News. Alluding to the millions of dollars of coal company stock that Manchin owns, Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann told The Guardian that Manchin is “willing to see the world burn as long as it benefits his near-term investment portfolio.”

The singular focus on Manchin is nothing new. Ever since the Build Back Better bill was introduced in Congress last year, political commentary, news coverage, and climate activists have portrayed Manchin as the US government’s climate decider in chief. “Now it’s up to Joe Manchin,” a Mother Jones headline announced after the House of Representatives passed Build Back Better in November. A month later, after Manchin announced—on Fox News, no less—that he could not support the legislation, a New Yorker headline declared, “Joe Manchin Kills Build Back Better.”

Manchin deserves all this condemnation and more, but it is bizarre that his Republican counterparts haven’t faced this intensity of criticism, even though they are at least as culpable. Search the news stories and public statements cited above, and countless others from the same time frame, and you’ll find that Republicans’ role in blocking Build Back Better is rarely even mentioned—and certainly not identified as the principal reason climate legislation routinely dies on Capitol Hill.

Manchin is only one senator. His opposition to Build Back Better mattered only because all 50 Republican senators stood in lockstep against climate action, just as their party has done for 30 years.

And yet, today’s Republicans pay no political price for torching the planet. In a democracy, elected officials are free to vote for or against whatever they please, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for their choices. But most political observers, journalists, and even political adversaries simply accept the GOP’s climate obstructionism as an immutable fact of life, not worth calling out or wasting energy on.

This means Republicans get a pass on their climate wrecking. They don’t have to endure the kind of nasty headlines directed at Manchin. They aren’t subjected to the very public pressure he has encountered in his day-to-day life, such as when young climate activists staked out his houseboat and demanded to know why he was dooming them to a hellish future. Instead, Republicans get to please their climate-denying voter base as well as their fossil-fuel-industry donors—and never have to explain themselves to the broader electorate, which, as it happens, favors climate action. Manchin gets nearly all the blame.

As a journalist, I’m puzzled and dismayed that many of my colleagues let politicians off the hook like this. After all, it’s easy enough to state the relevant facts, as Nexus Media News did in a welcome exception to most coverage. The Build Back Better bill failed, Nexus reported, “after coal millionaire Sen. Joe Manchin III joined the entire Republican party in opposing action on climate change.”

There’s still time for a course correction before the fast-approaching midterm elections. This November, Americans will be voting on, to paraphrase Guterres, climate action versus climate suicide. But most Americans don’t know that. According to opinion polls, they think that they are voting on inflation and the state of the economy. But transcending each of those issues, vital as they are, is the question of whether the world’s biggest economy and most powerful nation will do its share to halt humanity’s race toward climate apocalypse.

In the weeks ahead, Biden, Democratic candidates, and climate activists can help voters understand the stakes and learn which politicians do and don’t favor climate suicide. Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, has urged fellow activists to “grieve” the defeat of Build Back Better, but only briefly. Then, Tidwell continued, activists must rouse themselves and work “super-hard to elect more pro-climate US senators…. so Joe Manchin’s dirty-energy agenda is permanently left behind.”

We in the press also have a role to play. It is our civic responsibility to hold all electoral candidates accountable and to inform voters about the choices facing them. It’s sad but true that one of America’s two main political parties has repeatedly demonstrated that it opposes strong climate action. Educating voters on that indisputable fact is neither activism nor partisanship. It is telling the truth.

Like an umpire calling balls and strikes, it is the press’s job to report the news fairly and accurately, not to worry if the players don’t like the results. It’s not the press’s fault that Republicans have chosen to embrace climate denial and delay. They are free to choose differently at any time, and if they do, the press should report their change of heart just as plainly. But the days of giving any politician a pass on climate action versus climate suicide must be over, or suicide it will surely be.



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After the G7 Summit, Germany’s Climate Envoy Says Rich Countries Are Still Falling Shorthttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-g7-jennifer-morgan-germany/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJul 1, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

ennifer Morgan is diplomatic but candid about this week’s G7 summit: It did not do enough to halt the climate emergency or address the horrifying spike in world hunger.

As the German government’s special envoy for international climate action, Morgan is the German equivalent to John Kerry, the Biden administration’s chief climate diplomat. But she came to her post in March after heading Greenpeace International for five years, and she knows full well how much needs to change—and how fast—to preserve a livable, equitable planet.

Some progress was made at the annual gathering of leaders of the world’s seven richest economies (excluding China), Morgan said in an interview with The Nation and the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now, but “clearly, in this moment of time, I think we all know that more action is needed across the board.”

When the G7 leaders met on June 26 to 28, the German hosts were determined to keep advancing climate action despite the “horrific” war in Ukraine, Morgan said. Germany also wanted a strengthened response to the doubling during the past two years of the number of people on the brink of starvation to an estimated 323 million, many of them women and children. The G7’s decisions, as reflected in the summit’s final communiqué, fell short on both counts.

Putting the best face on the situation, Morgan said it is “really important” that every G7 country committed to “strengthen” the emission reduction targets announced at the COP26 climate summit last November. The power sector, for instance, in each G7 economy will be “climate-neutral by 2035.” The G7 also pledged to mobilize $600 billion in public and private funds for Just Energy Transition Partnerships to help India, Indonesia, and other low-income countries leave coal behind in favor of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

More than once, however, Morgan declined to endorse what G7 leaders had decided.

“As someone who lives and breathes climate, that’s not a decision that I would have made,” she said regarding one of the summit’s most criticized decisions: allowing more liquid natural gas terminals and other fossil fuel infrastructure to be built. Such new infrastructure was justified as necessary for offsetting European countries’ phase-out of gas imports from Russia. Climate activists countered that deploying heat pumps and boosting energy efficiency is a better approach. Morgan herself noted that building fossil fuel infrastructure is incompatible with limiting temperature rise to 1.5 C, according to the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency.

Yet Morgan emphasized that under the G7’s updated plan any new fossil fuel infrastructure will only be allowed under very limited conditions: It must be compatible with the 1.5º C goal, and it cannot “lock in” long-term emissions. Asked how the latter condition can be met without making such infrastructure a stranded asset, Morgan replied that that is a challenge any potential investors must “figure out.” Many won’t bother, she suggested. Investors see that the world “is moving into renewables and energy efficiency,” she argued, and are unlikely to risk massive investments in fossil fuel infrastructure that can only yield a profit after decades of operation.

“It’s hard” being in government, Morgan said, but she has no regrets about leaving her activist past. “When you’re in government, you have to make decisions that balance many different things. What we’re trying to do is make sure that climate is a top thing, a top priority. But that’s different than advocating from the outside, where you don’t have to take into account those other factors.”

Her erstwhile civil society colleagues were especially critical of the G7’s decision to allocate only $4.5 billion to help starving people.

“Faced with the worst hunger crisis in a generation, the G7 have simply failed to take the action that is needed,” said Max Lawson, the head of inequality policy at Oxfam International. “Many millions will face terrible hunger and starvation as a result…. The G7 say themselves that 323 million people are on the brink of starvation, because of the current crisis, a new record high. Nearly a billion people, 950 million, are projected to be hungry in 2022. We need at least $28.5 billion more from the G7 to finance food and agriculture investments to end hunger and fill the huge gap in UN humanitarian appeals. The $4.5 billion announced is a fraction of what is needed.”

Oxfam’s statement also criticized the G7’s refusal to offer debt relief to poor countries—“For every dollar in aid given, poor countries have to pay back $2 dollars to their creditors, often banks in New York or London making huge profits”—as well as its failure to provide the $100 billion a year in climate aid to poor countries that is rich countries’ legal obligation under the Paris Agreement.

“I can completely understand the criticism, the frustration of countries, especially the most vulnerable countries on earth that are facing these [climate] impacts faster and harder than scientists thought they were going to occur,” Morgan said. “And I think it’s quite clear that the G7 and all developed countries have a real commitment to meet that goal.” She added, “Germany is doing everything we can to be supporting financially through the World Food Program and to working very actively to get the grain out of Ukraine forward into countries, so they have that. That is a top priority of my minister right now.”

An American by birth and education, Morgan emphasized that limiting temperature rise to 1.5º C will be impossible if the United States does not sharply limit its own emissions and provide the financial help developing countries need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Speaking a day before the US Supreme Court’s gutting of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, Morgan added that Germany is taking strong action because climate survival requires it, but also because “our companies see a real competitive advantage” in getting out front on the emerging green economy.

“US players are going to lose out,” Morgan warned, adding that the US also will be less able to exert leadership on the global stage if it doesn’t have a credible climate agenda. “For all those reasons, I hope that the United States steps into this space.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-g7-jennifer-morgan-germany/
“Act or Die”: Earth Day, Still a Question of Survivalhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/earth-day-climate-media-democracy/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeApr 21, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story originated in Columbia Journalism Review and is part of “Climate & Democracy,” a series from the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

n the first Earth Day, in 1970, America’s TV networks were not shy about taking a position on the news of the day. CBS News produced a special titled “Earth Day, A Question of Survival,” which opened its flagship evening broadcast showing biologist Barry Commoner telling a crowd, “This planet is threatened with destruction…. We are in a crisis of survival.” Anchorman Walter Cronkite then reiterated the theme, declaring this a “unique day in American history, dedicated to mankind seeking its own survival.” ABC News titled its own special report “Earth Day: An SOS for Survival.” Anchorman Frank Reynolds’s first sentence congratulated activists for speaking out, crediting “millions of Americans” with taking “the first step to survival.”

CBS and ABC devoted virtually their entire broadcasts to the Earth Day story, with correspondents emphasizing the scourges of air and water pollution in reports from New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Albuquerque, and St. Louis. NBC’s coverage was less extensive but featured one item that, viewed today, seems eerily prescient. Anchorman Frank Blair reported that “a government scientist” had told colleagues at the American Geophysical Union that “over-pollution, unless checked, could so warm the earth in 200 years as to create a greenhouse effect, melting the Arctic ice cap and flooding vast areas of the world.”

At the time, network television was approaching the height of its power to influence public opinion. So when the evening newscasts lavished so much attention on Earth Day, and made their support for tackling pollution so clear, the effects were profound. Richard Nixon, not yet halfway through his first term as US president, took the hint. Memoirs of top White House aides later revealed that the outpouring of public sentiment on Earth Day—some accounts estimated that 20 million people took part, a collective that drew supporters from all parts of society, not just long-haired radicals—convinced Nixon that his reelection chances in 1972 required taking the environment issue away from his opponents. Before long, Nixon had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other legislation that to this day rank among the strongest environmental laws on earth.

Which brings us to this Earth Day. By all scientific accounts, the environmental crisis that activists highlighted more than half a century ago is much more dire today, and the need for far-reaching action more urgent. And yet those network news anchors from 1970, dismissed as anachronisms in our digital era, were in many ways ahead of where journalists are now. Just imagine each of America’s big three networks leading their broadcasts with the recent UN climate report, packaged under headlines like “A Question of Survival,” and then spending the entire program explaining the problem and exploring solutions.

It is tragic that, until very recently, the media’s treatment of the environment story has gone backward from 50 years ago in every conceivable metric: less urgency, less space, fewer minutes on the air. The fact that journalism is finally beginning to give the story the attention it deserves probably says more about the state of the weather than it does about a newfound media commitment to chronicle what’s happening. As US Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said in an interview published this week by members of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now, “If we were smarter as an animal, humans would be working on nothing other than climate change.”

A big part of the problem has been the sense among journalists—again, until very recently—that aggressive coverage of the climate story is somehow activism, and that covering the activists pushing for change is a partisan act. But when you go back and watch the coverage from 1970, you see none of that hesitancy from the very sober, very straitlaced anchors of the day. “Act or die,” was how Cronkite summarized the message of that first Earth Day. Imagine reading the same headline today in the news pages of The New York Times.

Those inaugural Earth Day reports illustrate an enduring journalistic truism: All news coverage has a point of view. Every news story, every home page, every TV or radio program reflects a point of view, if only implicitly. That point of view is defined by which subjects get covered and which do not; which facts are reported and which are not; which voices are quoted and which are not. Accuracy and fairness remain essential to honest journalism, but there is no escaping a point of view. “In a battle for facts, in a battle for truth, journalism is activism,” said Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, winner of a Nobel Prize, who has been repeatedly targeted and arrested for her decision to report truthfully about her homeland.

Reporting with a point of view has a storied place in journalistic history. The reporters in Vietnam chronicling the lies about how many people were dying in the war were reporting with a point of view, as were the TV cameras documenting the civil rights movement. More recently, coverage of the war in Ukraine has portrayed Russia’s invasion as a brutal and unwarranted act that has criminally targeted civilians. Coverage of Covid-19 likewise portrayed the pandemic as a public health emergency requiring vaccines, face masks, and physical distancing.

This Earth Day, newsrooms everywhere should resolve to apply this same kind of journalistic attention and judgment to the climate crisis. If a point of view is inevitable in journalism, let ours be one that favors defusing this catastrophic threat to our planetary home. That should not be a difficult choice to make, for journalists or anyone else.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/earth-day-climate-media-democracy/
Extreme Drought Is Crashing Food Production Whether Russia Invades or Nothttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ukraine-climate-change-conflict-russia/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardFeb 17, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s executive director and co-founder.

ast Friday, as speculation that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine mounted, ABC News reported that “the specter of a military confrontation” was “pumping fresh life into the debate over whether president Joe Biden’s climate agenda is brushing up against difficult geopolitical realities.” The story, which was produced by the network’s newly formed climate unit and ABC’s investigative team, was perhaps the first in the US media to examine the climate angle of the Ukraine conflict. It should not be the last. Even as newsrooms provide steady updates on the most immediate elements concerning Ukraine, from military maneuvers to diplomatic negotiations, they must help audiences understand the Ukraine conflict in its broader context.

Energy—especially the supply and price of methane gas—is an intrinsic part of the international tensions at the Ukrainian border. Russia has long supplied much of the gas used to heat homes and power factories in Europe, especially in Germany. There has been abundant coverage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs between Russia and Germany and could double the former’s gas exports to Europe, and which Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Schulz have pledged to block if Russia does invade Ukraine. However, such coverage has rarely explored the climate issues at hand.

Military officials and security analysts in numerous countries have been incorporating climate change into their planning and proposals for decades. Even under former US President George W. Bush, who downplayed climate science and shunned climate action, the Pentagon was studying how drought and other forms of extreme weather might trigger military conflict, including nuclear war, between India and Pakistan. Journalists need to catch up.

ABC’s February 11 story by Lucien Bruggeman admirably pulled together both the energy and climate dimensions of the Ukraine conflict. Bruggeman briefly touched on recent arguments from “oil interests and Republican lawmakers,” including an American Petroleum Institute spokesman and US Senator Lisa Murkowski, that President Biden had inadvertently strengthened Russia’s hand in the Ukraine conflict by cutting US fossil-fuel production in the name of combating climate change, but it then brought in comments from experts across the ideological spectrum to call out that red herring. Erin Sikorsky, a former intelligence official who directs the Center for Climate and Security, advised administration critics and conflict spectators not to conflate “the short-term crisis and the long-term strategy.” The global economy is increasingly leaving fossil fuels behind in favor of renewable energy. The United States should hasten that transition, experts reasoned, precisely to avoid the dependence on imported gas that makes Europe vulnerable to Russian pressure in the current crisis.

Ukraine, a major grain exporter, has also been walloped by droughts in recent years—another climate story with international consequences that has been relatively under-covered. The country has long ranked among the most productive agricultural areas on Earth—under the old Soviet Union, it was the nation’s breadbasket—but climate change is dramatically decreasing output and, by extension, threatening the stability of food prices around the world. A report from the Atlantic Council last year emphasized the impacts of drought on Ukraine’s grain exports, noting that they had “fallen sharply year-on-year during the current season due to smaller harvests caused by severe drought conditions.” When an agricultural power as important as Ukraine suddenly starts producing and exporting much less food, it is a recipe for social dislocation, human suffering, and political unrest, both inside the country and beyond. Less production translates into higher prices. The price of food is something people everywhere care about, which makes it something journalists need to be talking about.

In 2013, Thomas Friedman reported for The New York Times on how a severe drought fueled by climate change helped trigger the popular uprising that evolved into one of the most vicious civil wars of modern times. Samir Aita, a Syrian economist, told Friedman that, while the drought did not directly bring about the war, the failure of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to support the people imperiled by the drought politicized “a lot of very simple farmers and their kids.” A subsequent report from the Center for American Progress, the Center for Climate and Security, and the Stimson Center likewise argued that drought had hastened the Arab Spring uprisings. The Middle East and North Africa were “already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions,” Scientific American wrote, drawing on that report. “The 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge.”

“Drought is the overriding danger as climate change intensifies,” I wrote in my book HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. “Floods may attract more media coverage, but historically droughts have killed far more people.” A peer-reviewed article published in Nature this week concluded that the extreme drought gripping the Southwestern United States has made for the driest two decades the region has seen for the last 1,300 years. With heat-trapping emissions and global temperatures both continuing to rise, drought is bound to keep afflicting the US, Ukraine, and many other regions of the world. The consequences—for food production, social stability, and war and peace—are immense. News coverage should treat them accordingly.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ukraine-climate-change-conflict-russia/
Defusing the Global Climate Emergency Depends on Defusing the Democracy Emergencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/january-6-insurrection-climate-emergency-democracy/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJan 6, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

year ago today, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the US Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy, the House minority leader, fruitlessly implored the president to call off the mob. Senate majority leader McConnell later called the rioters “terrorists” and said Trump was “morally responsible” for the violence.

But McConnell and McCarthy soon slunk back to enabling Trump’s assaults on democracy. They were quiet while Trump insisted that the 2020 election was stolen and that anyone who disagreed must be purged from public office. They stayed mute as Trump supporters threatened violence against election officials and Republican-dominated state legislatures rewrote laws and procedures to prevent fair voting.

McConnell and McCarthy have shamelessly put party ahead of country and ambition ahead of duty, setting up alarming ramifications for the future. Scientists have said for years that humanity faces a climate emergency and that only rapid, far-reaching action can preserve a livable planet. On the first anniversary of the January 6 attack, it’s clear that the United States also faces a democracy emergency. Only rapid, far-reaching action can preserve a government that is of, by, and for the people.

The democracy emergency is closely linked to the climate crisis. Each is grounded in a big lie—that climate science is a hoax, that Trump won in 2020—pushed by the same right-wing politicians and propaganda “news” outlets and embraced with cult-like devotion by Trump’s followers. Left untreated, each threatens disaster. If Trump’s forces do change enough electoral rules and personnel to guarantee victory in 2022 and beyond, there is zero chance the US government will take the strong climate action needed to avert global catastrophe.

Defusing the global climate emergency therefore depends on protecting democracy. To be sure, the United States is not the only country where anti-democratic trends hamper climate progress. Most of the worst laggards at November’s Cop26 climate summit were countries where authoritarianism is either entrenched or on the rise: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, the US. But the collapse of US democracy would carry especially damaging climate consequences. Slashing global emissions in half by 2030, as science says is imperative, would be impossible if the world’s biggest economy and leading historical carbon emitter refuses to help.

How to defuse the democracy emergency is too big a question to answer briefly. President Biden and the Democrats surely must do more; Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has promised a vote by January 17 on reforming the filibuster to pass fair voting laws. A mobilized civil society is also vital. With Trump’s followers trying to install partisans on voting boards across the land, The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman notes that democracy activists can likewise work at the local and state levels to block such skulduggery and ensure fair elections.

A free press is foundational to democracy, and journalism must also rise to the occasion with outspoken coverage. Monika Bauerlein, chief executive of Mother Jones, urges the media to treat “the war on democracy” as the “big story” of 2022. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin says political reporters should “stop…concealing that only one party is launching a campaign to suppress votes” and “demand that Republican [officials] defend their participation in the big lie of a stolen election”—and if Republicans try to dodge, keep asking the question.

Aside from Trump himself, no one deserves such journalistic grilling more than McConnell and McCarthy. As the senior Republicans in Congress, they have the stature to oppose Trump’s campaign for one-party rule. Twin profiles in cowardice, they have instead betrayed their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

McConnell and McCarthy want the world to forget that a year ago today Trump’s mob was hunting them down, leading each man to stand up, briefly, for democracy. But the world must not forget. The press in particular must not allow McConnell, McCarthy, and most other Republicans to obscure that they are enabling the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War—and, by so doing, encouraging a hellish climate future.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/january-6-insurrection-climate-emergency-democracy/
The COP26 President Fights Back Tears as the Summit Comes to a Closehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-glasgow-deal-pact/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 15, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s co-founder and executive director.

Glasgow, Scotland—COP26 president Alok Sharma held back tears as he accepted India’s last-minute motion to weaken the summit’s pledge to “phase out” coal. Sharma had been saying for months that he wanted COP26 to “consign coal to history.” And until India insisted otherwise at the 11th hour, it looked like the summit might achieve that scientifically imperative task.

But United Nations climate negotiations operate by consensus: Each of the 197 participating nations can veto the majority. In effect, India—with China’s support—had threatened to block the agreement entirely if the goal were not softened from a “phase-out” to a “phasedown” of coal.

Moments after Sharma gaveled the Glasgow Climate summit to a close on Saturday, this reporter asked if he had tried to talk India out of its explosive last-second demand to weaken the summit’s pledge. Did Sharma, as the summit’s presiding officer, try to dissuade India from this hostage-taking?

A plainly weary Sharma declined to divulge his conversations with the delegations, but said, “Anyone watching the footage can make up their own minds about how I felt.”

“It is emotional,” he added. “I have visited frontline communities around the world who are experiencing the effects of climate change. I’m disappointed we couldn’t get that language across the line.” Still, the COP26 president said, this was the first time in the history of UN climate negotiations that a coal phaseout was even mentioned in the agreements that governments signed.

It’s impossible to be happy about COP26’s outcome—virtually every country said the Glasgow Climate Pact was less than what it wanted, and island nations in particular were furious over India’s last-second intervention—but the pact was not an irredeemable failure. Sharma’s claim that COP26 had “kept 1.5 alive” is plausible, if barely.

One reason is that the pact obliges the world’s governments to come back next year and try again—and bring stronger action plans with them. A second reason pertains to a recent climate model that remains little-known among the public, the press, and even many policy-makers and that could fundamentally shift our thinking about what’s possible: Contrary to widespread belief, there is far less additional temperature rise irrevocably “baked in” to the climate system than the three to four decades that was previously believed. Fast, dramatic emissions cuts can therefore still make a big difference.

The provision urging countries to develop more aggressive climate action plans before COP27 markedly accelerates the schedule that existed prior to COP26, when the world’s governments were not due to update action plans until 2025.

“Scientists have found that governments’ current action plans would cause global temperatures to increase to 2.4 [degrees] C, which would bring absolute devastation to hundreds of millions of people and ecosystems around the world,” Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, said in an interview at COP26. “So waiting five years to come back to the table is not an option.”

What’s more, next year’s updated climate action plans must outline what governments will achieve during the 2020s—the so-called “decisive decade” when global emissions must be cut in half to limit temperature rise to 1.5ºC—rather than by 2050, the date referenced by many government “net zero” pledges. And United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres went further, urging that action plans be updated “every year” throughout the 2020s while also “raising ambition.”

Requiring annual updates could encourage stronger action around the world, said Guterres and other civil society leaders. Annual updates would expose developed countries, fossil fuel states, and other foot-draggers to more frequent and sustained pressure from developing countries, which generally want more climate action, as well as from the media, activists, Indigenous peoples, religious leaders, and other elements of civil society.

Sending “a message of hope and resolve to…all those leading the climate action army,” Guterres said after COP26 ended that “I know many of you are disappointed.” The secretary-general added, “We won’t reach our destination in one day or one conference. But I know we can get there…. Never give up. Never retreat. Keep pushing forward. I will be with you all the way. COP27 starts now.”

Pushing forward with the ambition of capping average global temperature rise to 1.5ºC need not be an exercise in futility in light of scientists’ updated understanding of the climate system.

For decades, scientists thought that even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped overnight, the inertia of the climate system—in particular, carbon dioxide’s long-life span in the atmosphere—would nevertheless keep driving global temperatures higher for at least 30 more years. But Scientific American recently explained that this is “an old idea” that scientists have discarded. “As soon as CO2 emissions stop rising,” the magazine explained, “the atmospheric concentration of CO2 levels off and starts to slowly fall because the oceans, soils and vegetation keep absorbing CO2, as they always do. Temperature doesn’t rise further. It also doesn’t drop, because atmospheric and ocean interactions adjust and balance out.”

Kevin Anderson, a professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester, affirmed the Scientific American analysis.

“It’s now well-established in the scientific community that if we stopped all emissions today, we would stop almost all of the temperature rise and most of the resulting impacts,” Anderson said.

The problem is that governments at COP26 were not acting on what science says, Anderson added.

“Science tells them, if we want to hold to 1.5 [degrees] C, what we need is rapid, deep cuts in emissions,” he said. “But there is absolutely no sign of that from the negotiators here. So, they are explicitly choosing to fail poor people today, who suffer the worst impacts of the climate emergency, as well as the young people who have to live with this in the future.”

“The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees [C] is a death sentence for us,” Aminath Shauna, the Maldives’ minister of environment, climate change and technology, told the summit after India insisted on weakening the coal phaseout pledge. India had justified its position as a balanced and pragmatic approach that recognized that some developing countries still relied heavily on fossil fuels. Shauna responded, “What is balanced and pragmatic to other parties will not help the Maldives adapt in time. It will be too late.”

Meanwhile, Jennifer Morgan of Greenpeace vowed that she and fellow climate justice activists around the world “will be back in the streets starting Monday.”

“We will be pushing governments to phase out not just coal but all fossil fuels and be much more ambitious in general,” Morgan said. “So when governments come back to these negotiations next year, they’ll bring climate action plans that actually match the climate emergency.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-glasgow-deal-pact/
Fossil Fuel Companies Owe Reparations to Countries They Are Destroyinghttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-fossil-fuel-loss-damage/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 12, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of “Climate Crimes,” a special series by The Guardian and Covering Climate Now. Mark Hertsgaard is Covering Climate Now’s executive director.

Glasgow, Scotland—Mohammed Nasheed made global headlines in 2009 by convening the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. As president of the Maldives, a nation of 1,138 low-lying islands southwest of India, Nasheed donned scuba gear and descended beneath the waves with 13 government ministers. The officials used waterproof pencils to sign a document urging the world to slash carbon dioxide emissions so the Maldives would not disappear beneath rising seas.

“If the Maldives cannot be saved today, we do not feel that there is much of a chance for the rest of the world,” Nasheed told reporters.

Today, Nasheed is the speaker of parliament in the Maldives and the Global South’s ambassador to the COP26 climate conference. He continues to warn that anything more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming “is a death sentence” for his country and other low-lying regions around the world. To illustrate what the last 12 years of rising temperatures have brought, he recalls the lagoon where he held that famous underwater cabinet meeting.

“If you go to the same spot [today], you will see the reef is far more dead, bleached, than it was,” Nasheed said in Glasgow this week. Dead reefs lead to coastal erosion, which wipes out homes and schools, and contaminates freshwater sources; the Maldives now spends 30 percent of its government budget adapting to climate change, including vast sums to desalinate water, he added.

These are some of the human realities behind “loss and damage,” a phrase suddenly in vogue at this week’s COP26 United Nations climate conference. It refers to irreversible harms that result from the higher global temperatures caused by burning fossil fuels and related human activities. The dead reefs of the Maldives, for example, will never come back to life as long as oceans are so hot; they will remain bleached for decades to come, even if countries manage to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.

It’s scandalous that it’s taken so long for global climate negotiations to acknowledge the reality of “loss and damage.” Worse yet, even now COP26 proceedings are not calling on the main authors of the climate emergency—ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other fossil fuel companies—to pay for the immense human suffering and economic harm they have caused.

“The principle is easy enough: These companies have to admit they are responsible for loss and damage, and they should pay for it,” said Saleemul Huq, the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh.

The formal absence of calls for compensation from fossil fuel companies is not surprising at COP26; a first draft of the conference’s agreement did not even include the words “fossil fuels” (though a later draft does reference the need to phase out coal and subsidies for fossil fuels). Instead, COP26’s discussion assumes governments of wealthy countries will cover the costs. Here, too, the reasoning is straightforward: Rich countries have emitted the vast majority of the gases overheating the planet, so they should pay for the resulting harm.

Paying for loss and damage, however, is not a proposition most rich country governments have embraced. Scotland is a shining exception: Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, announced on Thursday that Scotland will provide £3 million for loss and damage, an example she urged other nations to follow. Meanwhile, rich countries are still lagging on a related obligation they have accepted: providing poorer countries $100 billion a year to shift to clean energy and adapt to worsening impacts.

But adaptation is distinct from loss and damage. “Adaptation is what people do to protect themselves,” for example, desalinating water, said Simon Anderson of the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Loss and damage is what happens to people, with or without adaptation.”

As the Climate Vulnerable Forum’s ambassador to COP26, Nasheed says loss and damage could determine the conference’s success or failure. “I call on the companies to pay for the damage that’s been done, and for governments to make them pay,” he said of the fossil fuel industry. “Unless they do that, it will be tough to get the confidence of vulnerable countries that these talks are meaningful.”

In a just world, the executives of fossil fuel companies would have to change places with people in the Maldives and experience how it feels to lose the reefs that protect their homes, schools, fresh water, and what Nasheed called “2,000 years of culture.” Short of that, doesn’t simple morality demand that the companies pay for the massive loss and damage they have wrought?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-fossil-fuel-loss-damage/
Who Is the World’s Greatest Climate Champion?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-glasgow-pelosi/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 9, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s cofounder and executive director.

Glasgow, Scotland—It’s an article of faith in US political and media circles that American leadership is essential to global climate progress.That message was repeated Tuesday at the United Nations climate conference COP26 as Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and a delegation of 16 fellow congressional Democrats congratulated themselves and US president Joe Biden for the “Build Back Better” climate legislation they are trying to pass in the United States Congress.

Never mind that the United States, under Democrats and Republicans alike, has arguably been the single biggest obstacle to global climate action since the 1992 Earth Summit that set in motion the negotiations whose latest installment is now unfolding in Glasgow. Former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement is only the most obvious recent example of that obstructionism. Indeed, the main reason the Paris Agreement, which was signed under President Barack Obama, is only an agreement rather than a treaty regarded as legally binding is that then–Secretary of State John Kerry and his international counterparts knew full well that the US Senate would never ratify a treaty that committed countries to keeping global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. The United States was even more hostile to climate action during George W. Bush’s eight years in the White House. And in 1997, when the world’s governments approved the Kyoto Protocol, Bill Clinton’s administration did not bother submitting it to the Senate because, according to then–Vice President Al Gore, not even 10 senators were likely to approve it.

But American exceptionalism is a sturdy beast, as journalists in Glasgow witnessed Tuesday afternoon.

“Led by our delegation, the United States Congress is showing the world true climate leadership,” Pelosi boasted at a press conference that featured more speech-making than exchanges with reporters. When Pelosi introduced each member of Congress by name and urged them to applaud themselves, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez notably did not join the clapping. Pelosi went on to extoll the $250 billion that the Build Back Better budget bill allocates to “clean energy tax credits” and its $222 billion for “environmental justice.” She praised the bill’s $150 billion for “climate-smart agriculture and nature-based climate solutions.” She emphasized the hundreds of billions of dollars for family medical leave, universal pre-K, and other social welfare programs that will “enable everyone to participate in the economic prosperity that will flow from this” bill—because, she added, “this is all about the children, leaving them a world where they can be healthy and more secure.”

By the time the speaker had invited the chairs of the Foreign Affairs, Science and Technology, Natural Resources, and other committees to speak, and they had finished thanking Pelosi for her leadership and claiming that the Build Back Better Act would put the US on track to limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there was time for only two questions from reporters.

The first asked whether Pelosi still intended the House to pass the Build Back Better Act the week of November 15. The speaker confirmed that she did. The second question was rather less predictable. After saying, “I want a woman,” a nod to a panel discussion earlier in the day about gender equality, Pelosi got a question from Abby Martin of The Empire Files.

“Speaker Pelosi, you just presided over a large increase in the Pentagon budget,” Martin said. Pointing out that the Pentagon budget “is already massive” and “the Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined,” Martin asked Pelosi, “How can we possibly talk about net zero if there is this bipartisan consensus to constantly expand this large contributor to climate change?”

Veteran politicians are skilled at not answering questions they don’t want to answer. Pelosi invited John Pallone, chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, to respond. He said the military knows that climate change is a national security issue, “so I don’t see…increasing the defense budget as being something that’s inconsistent with climate action.” Likewise avoiding the subject of the Pentagon’s bountiful budget, Pelosi added that reducing the military’s use of fossil fuels would help “stop” climate change, so “that is something we’re very focused on.”

And then it was time to conclude. The conference organizers, Pelosi explained, “are telling us it’s time to clean the room.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-glasgow-pelosi/
“We’re Here to Call for Climate Justice,” Say the Glasgow Protestershttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/glasgow-cop26-climate-protest/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 8, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s co-founder and executive director.

Glasgow, Scotland—“I’d feel ridiculous if I weren’t here,” said Tom Birch, a teacher from Edinburg, as he carried a sign reading “Soon Humanity Will Be Net-Zero.” Birch was among the many tens of thousands of marchers who filled the streets of Glasgow, host of the United Nations COP26 climate conference, on Saturday as part of a Global Day for Climate Justice. “You get lifted up seeing all these people who care, who aren’t just sitting at home in our silos complaining,” he added. “This is the moment to make our voices heard. It’s our last chance.”

“Pledges are not action,” read the back of Birch’s sign, summarizing many activists’ critique of the net-zero emissions pledges that governments and corporations have made at COP26. Eva Wewgorski, a librarian from Edinburgh who created the sign, said, “World leaders are acting like these pledges will solve the problem. But there’ve been countless pledges over the decades that haven’t been kept, so why should we believe them now?”

Coming at the midway point of the two-week COP26 conference, the Global Day for Climate Justice also featured demonstrations in London, Paris, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The Guardian reported that there were more than 300 protests worldwide, with 100 in the United Kingdom alone.

Although the Glasgow march included representatives of Indigenous peoples from South America and youth activists such as Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, most of the crowd were locals judging from the paucity of umbrellas, despite bursts of heavy rain and gusty winds. “We’re used to the rain,” a local soccer coach and shopkeeper who gave only his first name, Niall, said with a grin.

Wearing uniforms of sparkling gold lamé, a dozen musicians with a local brass band called Brass, Aye? got marchers dancing with pulsing renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and other New Orleans standards. “We’re here to call for climate justice and bring a bit of joy and vibrancy to this march,” said Scott, a blond trombone player who directed the group.

A second group of street artists dressed head to toe in blood red, with faces painted white and set in grim expressions, stayed completely silent as they marched through Nelson Mandela Place in the heart of the city on their way to the march’s terminus on the Glasgow Green.

“Inside that conference of polluters, the climate criminals are hiding behind barbed wire and fences and lines of police,” Asad Rehman of the COP26 Coalition of activist groups, told the crowd on Glasgow Green. “We’re not going to accept their suicide pact.”

Police officers in yellow vests were especially noticeable around an office building of Scottish Power, the electric utility, at the intersection of St. Vincent and North streets. Positioned 10 paces apart behind metal barriers that confined the marchers to the middle of the street, the officers stood with hands folded across their waists, watchful but not aggressive. As the crowd passed by at 2 pm, a rainbow briefly illuminated the northern sky, leading a mother pushing a toddler in a stroller to remark, “That’s a nice omen, isn’t it?”

“The right to protest is a cornerstone of democracy; it’s a direct way to speak to your leaders without having to wait for an election,” said Danielle, 19, a Glasgow resident marching with a contingent from Tear Fund, a Christian NGO working to alleviate poverty in the Global South through advancing social justice rather than conventional foreign aid. “Movements develop over time,” she added. “Generations of people have been doing this kind of witnessing for years, and world leaders are starting to listen because of that. Eventually, you reach a watershed moment, and that’s what’s happening now.”

Carrying signs quoting a verse from the Old Testament book of Micah—“Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly,” Danielle and three other young women with Tear Fund set off from a muddy hillside in Kelvingrove Park where long strips of yellow cloth spelled out: “Amazonia For Life: Protect 80% by 2025.”

“Countries in the Global South are paying more to service their debt than the $100 billion a year in climate reparations they’re supposed to get at COP,” said Mollie Somerville, a grandmother marching with a group whose yellow vests read, “Cancel the Debt for Climate Justice.” “That debt is owed mostly to private banks that are making huge profits and don’t need that money,” she said. “No, I haven’t heard COP leaders talk about this issue yet, but there’s still time, so I’m hoping that this march will put pressure on them.”

“Protests like this, it gives people a feeling of solidarity, knowing that we’re not alone,” added Somerville, who said she was “extremely worried” about the future awaiting her three grandchildren and a fourth expected next week. “I think government and business leaders see that these protests are getting bigger and the time for action is now. Standing here in the cold and the rain, that’s why we do this. At times, it feels like we’re drops in the ocean. But eventually, those drops add up to something big.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/glasgow-cop26-climate-protest/
We Can’t Defuse the Climate Crisis Without Tougher, Louder News Coveragehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-summit-media-analysis/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 5, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The author is CCNow’s co-founder and executive director.

ome of the best news out of Glasgow so far is that the US media is finally paying serious attention to the climate crisis. We’ll see if it lasts, now that US president Joe Biden and other world leaders have left for home. Indeed, by Wednesday, the third day of the UN COP26 climate conference, US mainstream news coverage was starting to diminish. But it’s usually during the second, closing week of these conferences that the key agreements are or are not reached, so the true test is what comes next.

But for the first 48 hours of COP26, some of the biggest voices in US media were treating climate change as a big deal. They did many stories about what world leaders said they would do to defuse the crisis, and they gave those stories high visibility, running them at or near the top of homepages and broadcasts. The coverage wasn’t perfect—breaking news coverage rarely is—but anyone following the news couldn’t miss it, and that alone is huge.

As a journalist myself, I’ve covered UN climate conferences since the 1992 Earth Summit, the gathering that put in motion the processes that have governed every such conference since, including the breakthrough 2015 summit that yielded the Paris Agreement and the current deliberations in Glasgow. Never have US news organizations devoted as many newsroom resources, produced the sheer volume of coverage, or given the story such big play as they did in the opening days of COP26.

The Washington Post in particular went big, splashing the story across the home page and providing one smart take after another about a range of issues—from a tough-minded curtain-raiser the day before the summit to a revealing report on how Brietbart and the Russian television network RT are leading spreaders of climate disinformation online. The Guardian, long the gold standard for climate coverage, continues to lead the pack. Its COP26 live updates are indispensable, and the depth of the paper’s climate expertise was evident in one of the most encouraging COP26 stories yet, a report on a scientific study finding that if countries carry out the emissions reductions pledged at this summit, global temperatures will rise by only 1.9 degrees Celsius, the first time the 2 degrees C threshold has been met. The New York Times’ coverage included an astonishing piece about climate change’s emergence as a theme in contemporary theater, film, and television. Climate change led NPR’s Morning Edition, signaling to the audience: Listen up, something important is happening.

Television lagged, as it often does, but US networks by no means ignored Glasgow. Most remarkable has been ABC News, which last week joined the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now (which, disclosure, I direct) as part of an expanded commitment to the climate story. Rightly grounding her reporting in the latest science, ABC News White House correspondent MaryAlice Parks emphasized that Biden’s climate commitments in Glasgow, impressive as they sounded, were actually “the bare minimum of what some of the climate scientists say is required” to stave off the most catastrophic climate scenarios. The big cable networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—also stepped up, airing “over four hours of combined coverage on the opening day” of COP26, with CNN leading the way, an analysis by the nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters found.

There’s no single reason why the US media is suddenly trumpeting the most important story of our time. But surely some of the credit belongs to whoever decided to schedule the G20 meeting literally the day before—and a two-hour plane ride away from—the opening day of COP26.

Biden and other leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies—with the exceptions of Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, who were also shamefully absent from COP26 (one prerogative of dictatorship is no fear of bad press coverage)—were all but certain to attend the G20 summit in Rome. Which made adding a stop in Glasgow for COP26 relatively easy. A president’s overseas trips are like catnip for big news organizations, so they were going to be in Glasgow no matter what, which more or less obliged them to do the climate story.

Not all the coverage has been great, to put it mildly. Fox, as usual, has been a hothouse of anti-science nonsense and right-wing talking points. And CNN’s ample coverage aired mainly outside of the evening hours when viewership is the highest.

What matters most, though, is that climate change was a big part of the daily news. The climate silence that much of the US media practiced the past three decades began to break two years ago when the mass movement Greta Thunberg inspired put millions of climate protesters in the streets, but most newsrooms have still been pretty climate-quiet. As COP26 began, they started to get louder, at least for a couple days.

Getting loud matters. Staying quiet all those years left the public not only uninformed but misinformed. Industry propaganda and right-wing disinformation filled the void, blunting pressure for climate action.

Perhaps we are witnessing the dawn of a new day. Like a rising sun kills trolls, plainspoken news coverage disarms climate denial and dissolves public passivity. Professor Katharine Hayhoe, head scientist at the Nature Conservancy, says that the most important thing to do about climate change is talk about it. The facts are clear, and most people, whatever their political allegiances, want a livable planet.

News organizations have some of the largest megaphones on Earth. Monday and Tuesday’s coverage were good moments for journalism, for public engagement with the climate crisis, and for humanity’s chances of stepping back from what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called “the verge of the abyss.” Now, will journalists keep it up?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/cop26-summit-media-analysis/
Congress Has Oil Executives Cornered. But Will They Lie Under Oath?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/big-oil-oversight-hearing-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardOct 28, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of “Climate Crimes,” a special series by The Guardian and Covering Climate Now focused on investigating how the fossil fuel industry contributed to the climate crisis and lied to the American public. Mark Hertsgaard is Covering Climate Now’s executive director.

oday is a day of history-making climate drama in Washington. At the Capitol Hill end of Pennsylvania Avenue, an unprecedented event: The CEOs of four of the world’s biggest private oil companies are summoned to testify under oath to Congress about their companies’ decades of lying about the lethal dangers their products pose.

There’s no mystery about who the villains are in this drama, only about how Big Oil will play this pivotal moment in the climate emergency: Will these executives finally admit their companies’ lies and take responsibility for the havoc they’ve caused? Or will they keep lying, if only by proclaiming that they are now climate champions working to solve the crisis engulfing humanity?

Oil company executives have dodged previous requests to testify before Congress on these issues, and one can easily understand why. The case against them, drawn from their own files, is detailed, plentiful, and damning.

As voluminous investigative reporting dating back to 2015 has documented, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron have known since the 1980s at the latest that burning oil, gas, and coal would overheat the planet and imperil civilization; their own scientists told them so. They did it anyway.

The companies not only hid their knowledge about what was coming; they spent millions of dollars telling the public that global warming wasn’t real. Indeed, 31 percent of Americans still don’t accept that climate change is happening, according to a new poll commissioned by The Guardian, Vice News, and Covering Climate Now. Which helps explain why the Republican Party can stand in lockstep opposition to President Joe Biden’s climate agenda and pay no apparent political price.

Big Oil’s history of deception and obstruction has yielded hundreds of billions of dollars in profits, salaries, and stock options for the executives scheduled to testify today. But it has also put humanity on track to a “catastrophic” future of scorching heat, ruinous drought and storms, and relentless sea level rise—just as Big Oil’s scientists projected decades ago.

Today, the witness docket at the House Committee on Oversight and Reform includes the Big Oil 4: Darren Woods of ExxonMobil, Michael Wirth of Chevron, David Lawler of BP, and Gretchen Watkins of Shell Oil. Scheduled to join them are the CEOs of two oil industry trade associations: Mike Sommers of the American Petroleum Institute and Suzanne Clark of the US Chamber of Commerce.

These executives will have the chance to earn their multimillion-dollar paychecks at today’s hearing. Facing questions from such ace interrogators as Representatives Katie Porter of California and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, they will somehow have to explain why their companies kept their knowledge of fossil fuels’ deadly effects secret for so long.

The CEOs would seem to have two options. They can fess up to their companies’ sordid history and pledge to make amends. Or they can deflect, stonewall, and continue lying, with the extra twist that now they’d be lying about the decades of lies they’ve already told.

But lying under oath is perilous, especially when those lies are refuted by your own documents. The stakes double when your companies face dozens of lawsuits citing those lies and seeking billions of dollars in damages. The attorneys general offices in Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and other jurisdictions presumably will be watching today’s hearing closely, keen to seize upon any false statements they can introduce as evidence in their own cases.

Still, lying is what these companies know. ExxonMobil, for example, has insisted that it never deceived anyone, citing studies its experts published in scientific journals—a defense that conveniently ignores the company’s abundant public messaging that cast doubt on climate science. Similar lying persists today with oil companies’ gauzy ads celebrating all the wonderful technologies they’re developing to be part of the solution to climate change, a theme the CEOs surely will stress in their opening statements.

Meanwhile, some of the victims of Big Oil’s lies are offering their own eloquent testimony at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Outside the White House, five young climate activists, ages 18 to 26, have entered the ninth day of a hunger strike in a desperate plea that their government avert the hellish future awaiting them.

These young people are afraid, and angry, and they have every right to be. The companies that put them in this position owe them, and all of us, a profound apology, as well as restitution for the horrific damage they have done.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/big-oil-oversight-hearing-climate/
Big Tobacco Got Caught in a Lie by Congress. Now It’s the Oil Industry’s Turnhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/house-oversight-oil-executives/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardOct 14, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen climate coverage.

wo weeks from today, Darren Woods will face a potential doomsday moment before the US Congress.

As the CEO of ExxonMobil, Woods was paid $15.6 million last year to run the richest, most powerful private oil company in history. But his earnings and influence will be on the line when he appears before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on October 28. His testimony could mark the beginning of the end of Big Oil’s escaping legal and financial responsibility for the climate crisis.

Joining Woods, assuming that they all show up without being compelled by subpoenas, will be the heads of three other giant oil companies: Michael Wirth of Chevron, David Lawler of BP, and Gretchen Watkins of Shell Oil. The Big Oil 4, let’s call them, will be questioned about what members of Congress call a “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.”

For the Big Oil 4 and their public relations advisers, the nightmare scenario is that October 28 will mirror the infamous congressional hearing that led to the downfall of Big Tobacco. On April 14, 1994, the top executives of the seven biggest tobacco companies in the United States appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, chaired by Henry Waxman of California. Each executive solemnly testified that, no, they did not think that nicotine is addictive.

CNN and C-Span carried the hearing live, and Big Tobacco became a national laughingstock—and legal target—overnight. A photo of the CEOs of Phillip Morris, R J Reynolds, and their counterparts, right hands raised as they were sworn in, ran on the front page of the next day’s New York Times, sparking further media coverage.

Here’s the part that today’s Big Oil chieftains particularly don’t want to see repeated: Five weeks after that hearing, the first lawsuit was filed in what became an avalanche of litigation that resulted in a $206 billion judgment against Big Tobacco and a permanent sullying of its public image.

The parallels with Big Oil today are uncanny. The Big Tobacco lawsuit was “premised on a simple notion,” said Mike Moore, the attorney general of Mississippi, who initiated the case: “You caused the health crisis—you pay for it” by reimbursing states for the extra costs that smoking imposed on their public health systems. Replace “the health crisis” with “the climate crisis” and you have the very same argument that New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and dozens of other state and local governments have made in their pending lawsuits against oil companies.

And just as tobacco companies lied for 40 years about the dangers of smoking, so too have the oil companies lied for decades about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. They saw today’s climate crisis coming—their own scientists repeatedly warned top executives about it—and decided, bring it on.

Given the stakes, it’s odd that the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell aren’t better known. As much as anyone, they are driving the earth’s climate into chaos, yet most of us don’t even know their names. The climate conversation usually focuses on governments and the politicians who run them, while the companies whose products cause the problem—and the executives who get paid astronomical sums for doing it—remain in the background. Which is doubtless how they like it.

So let’s remember the names of the Big Oil 4—Darren Woods of ExxonMobil, Michael Wirth of Chevron, David Lawler of BP, and Gretchen Watkins of Shell Oil—and pay heed to what they say, or don’t say, at the October 28 hearing.

If we’re lucky, C-Span and other cable networks will carry the hearing live. Watching the Big Oil 4 twist themselves into knots to avoid a repeat of Big Tobacco’s debacle would be high entertainment, not to mention a bracing lesson in how elected officials can hold amoral corporations accountable.

The Big Tobacco hearing made history with one simple question: Do you think that nicotine is addictive? Here’s the question for the Big Oil 4: Will you apologize, here today, for your company’s decades of lying about climate change?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/house-oversight-oil-executives/
Greta Thunberg Is “Open” to Meeting Biden at the UN Climate Summithttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/greta-thunberg-biden-cop26/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardOct 12, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Nation and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global media collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The interview with Greta Thunberg was conducted by CCNow partners NBC News, Reuters, and The Nation.

reta Thunberg is “open” to meeting with United States President Joe Biden at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, though the young Swedish activist does not expect much from either the US leader or the make-or-break summit that runs October 31 to November 12.

In an interview with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now last Wednesday, Thunberg expressed surprise at the idea that Biden, or any world leader, might want to sit down with her at COP26, but said she was open to the possibility, if asked. “I guess that will depend on the situation,” she said. “I don’t see why these people want to meet with me, but yeah.”

A week before she entertained the question about whether she would meet with Biden, Thunberg had accused the US president and other world leaders of offering pretty words but no real action on climate, only “blah blah blah,” in a speech to the Youth4Climate summit. That September 28 clip went viral. In the CCNow interview, conducted by NBC News, Reuters, and The Nation, she complained that youth climate activists “are not being taken seriously” by world leaders. “They’re just saying, ‘We listen to you,’ and then they applaud us, and then they go on just like before.”

The suggestion that Biden has not only spoken strongly about the climate crisis but is also trying to pass the most ambitious climate legislation in US history does not impress Thunberg. The climate measures in the Democrats’ spending plan now under ferocious negotiation in Washington have “been so much watered down by lobbyists,” she said; “so we should not pretend that this would be a solution to the climate crisis.” Biden’s political problem—that as president in a democracy, he shares power with a legislative body where he faces unanimous Republican opposition that is determined to block his agenda—does not interest her. She judges by results only: “Emissions are still going up.”

The notion of meeting with the president of the world’s other climate change superpower, Xi Jinping of China, seemed even more distant to Thunberg than a meeting with Biden. Calling Xi “a leader of a dictatorship,” she nevertheless did not rule out the idea. She stressed, however, that “democracy is the only solution to the climate crisis, since the only thing that could get us out of this situation is…massive public pressure.”

Wearing a grey hoodie and speaking from her kitchen table in Stockholm, Thunberg said that she will attend November’s COP26 despite the summit’s potential for “empty talk” and “greenwashing” because the gathering of thousands of government officials, activists, scientists, and journalists is an opportunity “to show that we are in an emergency, and…we are going to try to mobilize people around this.”

“In such an emergency as we are in right now, everyone needs to take their moral responsibility, at least I think so, and use whatever power they have, whatever platform they have, to try to influence and push in the right direction, to make a change,” she said. “I think that’s our duty as human beings.”

Making COP26 a success, Thunberg suggested, requires unflinching honesty about “the gap between what we are saying and what we are actually doing.… That’s not what we are doing now. We are trying to find concrete, small solutions that are symbolic in order to make it seem like we are doing something, without actually confronting the problem at all. We are still not counting all the emissions when we are announcing targets. We are still using creative accounting when it comes to emissions cuts, and so on. As long as that’s the case, we will not get very far.”

Thunberg endorsed the many lawsuits demanding compensation from fossil fuel companies for their decades of lying about climate change and the resulting damage and suffering, especially in frontline communities. “I think that these people need to be held accountable for all the damage that they have caused…especially for the people whose communities and whose health and livelihoods have been devastated by the actions of these companies,” she said. “I think that’s the bare minimum to ask for.”

The activist also called out the world’s media, which she said has largely “failed…to communicate the emergency that we are in.” She noted that “there are many, many news organizations and journalists that are trying” to do more, and she called the media “one of my biggest sources of hope right now.” Citing the coronavirus, she said that “when the media decided to treat this pandemic as an emergency, that changed social norms overnight. If the media decided, with all the resources that they have, to use their platform…they could reach countless people in no time, and that could have huge consequences, positive consequences.”

Thunberg’s core message has been consistent from the time she first emerged on the world stage with a fiery denunciation of global elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2019: Listen to the science and do what it requires; the science says our planetary house is literally on fire, and world leaders and everyone else should act like it.

The fact that world leaders, by her own account, are not doing what she and millions of activists are demanding has not led her and other movement leaders to consider new strategies and tactics, at least not yet. “Right now, we are just repeating the same message, like a broken record,” she said. “And we are going out on the streets because you need to repeat the same message…until people get it. I guess that’s the only option that we have. If we find other ways of doing it in the future that work better, then maybe we will shift.”

Thunberg emphasized that she sees “many, many bright spots” in the climate emergency, citing the millions of people around the world who are taking action. “When I’m taking action, I don’t feel like I am helpless and that things are hopeless, because then I feel like I’m doing everything I can,” she said. “And that gives me very much hope, especially to see all the other people all around the world, the activists, who are taking action and who are fighting for their present and for their future.”

Asked where she sees herself, and humanity, 10 years from now, Greta Thunberg smiled and said, “I have no idea. I think as long as I’m doing everything I can, as long as we are doing everything we can, we can just live in the moment and try to change the future while we still can, instead of trying to predict the future.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/greta-thunberg-biden-cop26/
Climate Journalism Is Coming of Agehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-journalism-awards/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeOct 6, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. Mark Hertsgaard is CCNow’s executive director and the environment correspondent of The Nation. Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of CJR.

t’s taken too long, but the mainstream media—finally and haltingly—seems to be realizing that the climate crisis is a story that can no longer be ignored. Until a couple years ago, many of the world’s most influential news organizations, especially in the United States, relegated the climate story to the fringe. What we have called “climate silence” prevailed.

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. And there are still plenty of stumbles, like when six of the biggest US commercial broadcasters did 774 stories about Hurricane Ida in the storm’s initial 72 hours and only 4 percent of them mentioned the words “climate change.” But the journey towards more and better climate coverage has clearly begun, and the days, decades really, of simply ignoring the story seem to be over.

How could they not be? This year’s unprecedented heat, drought, wildfires, and storms are shifting public attitudes. Three in four Americans now believe that global warming is happening today, and 70 percent say they are either “very” or “somewhat worried” about it, according to polling by the Yale Program on Climate Communication.

Which hints at a silver lining of the climate challenge for newsrooms: Committing to the climate story can be good for business. As people get more concerned about climate change, they understandably want more information about it. Mainstream news organizations, especially television, need nothing as much as they need younger audiences. Covering climate change is essential to having credibility and appealing to those audiences, many of whom say they distrust mainstream media outlets, partly because of their past climate silence.

With the story finally in the headlines, the question has shifted from whether to cover climate change—responsible newsrooms have settled that question—to how to cover it: Where’s the balance between hope and fear? How to engage an audience who may think this doesn’t affect them? How to restructure newsrooms to make the climate story central?

Covering Climate Now, the nonprofit media consortium we cofounded in 2019, has urged our colleagues throughout the news business to engage these questions directly. Over the past two years, we have been thrilled to see CCNow grow to more than 400 partner outlets reaching a combined audience of roughly 2 billion people. Together, we’ve tried to identify and spread best practices that journalists everywhere can apply to make their climate coverage more accurate, illuminating and effective at engaging audiences.

Today, October 6, we’ll showcase some of the best of the world’s climate coverage through the 2021 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. TV, radio, print, digital, and photography journalists from around the world submitted their work; we received nearly 600 entries from 38 countries. The finalists represent the state of the art of climate journalism and can serve as a template for journalists everywhere who are seeking to up their climate game.

We were among the four dozen judges for this year’s inaugural awards. Looking at the finalists, several themes of strong climate coverage emerge:

  • Firmly grounding climate stories in science (rather than, say, letting partisan politics influence the framing of a story)
  • Recognizing that the science says we face an emergency, and finding ways to convey that that don’t prompt audiences to tune out
  • Humanizing the climate story so it’s not abstract and audiences can relate
  • Localizing the story, without ignoring its global dimensions
  • Finding the climate angle in areas of life where it’s not expected, showing the depth and breadth of the crisis
  • Showing the problems and the solutions; in other words, telling the whole story.

We’re not here to spoil any surprises: This year’s winners will be announced in a video special cohosted by NBC News’s Al Roker and Savannah Sellers. Not your typical awards show, this program provides a snapshot of the global climate emergency as reported by the journalists receiving the awards. It illustrates how powerful storytelling, science-based reporting, and inequities of climate change are at the center of exemplary coverage of the defining story of our time.

The video will live stream today, October 6, at 4 pm Eastern Time on the websites of Covering Climate Now and our partners Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The Guardian, and NowThis. It also streams on NBC News NOW on October 8 at 11 pm Eastern Time and on October 10 at 7 am Eastern.

We are humbled by the ambition and talent of the winners of these awards, and grateful for the growing sense of community among journalists covering the climate story—a community that should include all of us, since climate change is a story that touches every beat in every newsroom. The press is still a long way from where it needs to be on the climate story. But we find ourselves, in this hopeful autumn, just a little bit closer.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-journalism-awards/
Joe Manchin, America’s Climate Decider in Chief, Is a Coal Baronhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/manchin-reconciliation-bill-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardSep 30, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen climate coverage.

oe Manchin has never been this famous. People around the world now know that the West Virginia Democrat is the essential 50th vote in the US Senate that President Joe Biden needs to pass his agenda into law. That includes Biden’s climate agenda. Which doesn’t bode well for defusing the climate emergency, given Manchin’s long-standing opposition to ambitious climate action.

It turns out that the senator wielding this awesome power—America’s climate decider in chief, one might call him—has a massive climate conflict of interest. Joe Manchin, investigative journalism has revealed, is a modern-day coal baron.

Financial records detailed by reporter Alex Kotch for the Center for Media and Democracy and published in The Guardian show that Manchin makes roughly half a million dollars a year in dividends from millions of dollars of coal company stock he owns. The stock is held in Enersystems, Inc, a company Manchin started in 1988 and later gave to his son, Joseph, to run.

Coal has been the primary driver of global warming since coal began fueling the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain 250 years ago. Today, the science is clear: Coal must be phased out, starting immediately and around the world, to keep the 1.5º C target within reach.

Scientists estimate that 90 percent of today’s coal reserves must be left in the ground. No new coal-fired power plants should be built. Existing plants should quickly shift to solar and wind, augmented by reducing electricity demand with better energy efficiency in buildings and machinery (which also saves money and produces more jobs).

This is not a vision that gladdens a coal baron’s heart. The idea of eliminating fossil fuels is “very, very disturbing,” Manchin said in July when specifics of Biden’s climate agenda surfaced. Behind the scenes, Manchin reportedly has objected to Biden’s plan to penalize electric utilities that don’t quit coal as fast as science dictates.

Manchin now holds veto power over US climate policy

The White House is not selling it this way, but the huge budget bill now under feverish negotiations on Capitol Hill is as much as anything a climate bill. The clean electricity performance program and other measures in this budget reconciliation bill are the core of Biden’s plan to slash US climate pollution in half by 2030, a reduction science says is necessary to limit global temperature rise to 1.5º C and avoid cataclysmic climate change.

Apparently keen to delay a vote on the bill—but not on the bipartisan infrastructure bill containing billions in subsidies for climate harming programs like making hydrogen from methane—Manchin asked on CNN, “What is the urgency?” of passing the larger bill. Like ExxonMobil, the senator appears to have jettisoned outright climate denial in favor of its more presentable, but no less lethal, cousin: climate delay.

Later this month, Biden will join other world leaders at the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow, described as a “now or never” moment for efforts to preserve a livable planet. Biden and his international climate envoy, John Kerry, have been leaning on other nations, especially China, to step up their commitments. But Biden can press that case successfully in Glasgow only if Congress passes the budget bill, and with its climate provisions intact.

That will depend in no small part on Manchin, who as the Democrats’ 50th vote in the Senate now holds what amounts to veto power over US climate policy.

It’s not illegal for Senator Manchin to own millions of dollars of coal stock—indeed, it illustrates the old saw that the real scandal in Washington is what’s legal—but it certainly raises questions about his impartiality on climate policy. Should any lawmaker with such a sizable financial conflict of interest wield decisive influence over what the US government does about a life-and-death issue like the climate emergency? Shouldn’t there be public discussion about whether that lawmaker should recuse himself from such deliberations?

In the realm of law, a judge who had anything like this level of financial conflict in a case would have to recuse and let a different judge handle the proceedings. The legal profession’s code of ethics dictates this approach not only because a judge’s financial interest would tempt them to rule in their own favor. It’s also because the two parties litigating the case and the broader public could not have faith that justice had been done by a judge with such a conflict.

Why shouldn’t a similar standard apply to the American public’s faith in government policy, especially when what’s at stake is, you know, the future of life on earth? Manchin could still vote for the budget bill; he just couldn’t touch its climate provisions.

Manchin is surrounded by a gaggle of reporters whenever he steps outside his Senate office, and he frequently appears on the agenda-setting Sunday morning TV shows. With votes on the budget bill fast approaching and the Glasgow summit starting October 31, it’s high time that journalists press America’s climate decider in chief about his glaring conflict of interest—and why he shouldn’t step aside from US climate deliberations.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/manchin-reconciliation-bill-climate/
Exxon Helped Cause the Climate Crisis. It’s Time They Paid Up.https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-summit-cop26-exxon-oil/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardSep 16, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

ossil fuel companies bear as much responsibility as governments do for humanity’s climate predicament—and for finding a way out. Our planetary house is on fire, and these companies have literally supplied the fuel. Worse, they lied about it for decades to blunt public awareness and policy reform.

There’s no better time for ExxonMobil and other petroleum giants to be held accountable than at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November. The Glasgow summit is more than just another international meeting. It is the last chance for world leaders to limit future temperature rise to an amount that civilization can survive. Doing so, scientists say, will require a rapid, global decline in oil, gas, and coal burning.

Fossil fuel companies have fiercely resisted this imperative for years, lobbying governments, often behind the scenes, to maintain the status quo. COP26 is an ideal setting to bring the companies’ resistance to the world’s attention and put it on trial, at least in the court of public opinion.

Courts of law around the world are already leading the way. As of year end 2020, at least 1,550 climate change lawsuits have been filed worldwide against governments and companies, according to data collected by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Dozens of these lawsuits seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies for the loss and damage caused by the burning of the companies’ products. Some lawsuits—for example, those brought by New York City and the state of Minnesota—point out that oil and gas companies have known privately for decades that their products would cause catastrophic temperature rise and extreme weather. Nevertheless, these companies lied about what they knew, telling the outside world that human-made climate change was unproven.

An internal Exxon document dated October 16, 1979, and stamped “Proprietary Information” stated that increasing fossil fuel combustion “will cause a warming of the earth’s surface…and dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” Royal Dutch Shell even anticipated the current wave of lawsuits: An internal study in 1998 forecast a scenario in which environmental groups would band together to file “a class action lawsuit on the grounds of neglecting what scientists, including [the industry’s] own, have been saying for years.”

Indeed, last May the Netherlands branch of the advocacy group Friends of the Earth won a landmark case against Shell. A Dutch court ordered Shell to bring its global operations in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5º Celsius above preindustrial levels. This will require Shell to reduce both its own and its customers’ emissions by a staggering 45 percent from 2019 levels by 2030. Shell is appealing the ruling.

Such large, rapid emissions reductions happen to be exactly what the latest science says the Glasgow summit must achieve. Only by slashing heat-trapping emissions in half by 2030 can humanity possibly achieve the larger imperative of ending emissions entirely by 2050.

Fossil fuel companies cannot be put on trial in Glasgow: The COP26 summit is a diplomatic meeting, not a court of law. But wrongdoing can also be alleged and adjudicated in courts of public opinion. COP26, as a high-profile gathering of thousands of government officials and civil society representatives that will receive extensive media coverage, could have a powerful impact on public narratives throughout the world.

The formal COP26 proceedings also offer an opportunity to make fossil fuel companies a constructive part of the solution to the climate emergency. Governments and climate activists in the Global South have long demanded compensation for the loss and damage poor countries suffer from extreme weather events that are worsened by the climate crisis, such as heat, drought, storms, and rising seas. They justify this demand on two grounds: These climate impacts fall disproportionately on poor countries, even though they have emitted exponentially less heat-trapping gases than rich countries have.

Rich countries accept this logic: In the Paris Agreement, they pledged to provide $100 billion a year in climate aid to poor countries. They have yet to honor that pledge, however, and experts calculate that poor countries actually need at least twice that much money to adapt to climate impacts while also shifting their economies to clean energy.

Whatever the actual amount, taxpayers in rich countries are the ones currently slated to cover the cost of such climate aid. But why shouldn’t that burden fall instead on the true authors of the climate emergency?

Fossil fuel companies have known for decades that they were driving civilization to ruin. They didn’t care. Indeed, they lied to keep the profits rolling in. Isn’t it time for them to start paying for the trouble and suffering they’ve caused?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-summit-cop26-exxon-oil/
Why Won’t TV News Say “Climate Change” About Hurricane Ida?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/hurricane-ida-fox-news-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardSep 2, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

he climate emergency is exploding in various parts of the world this week, but climate silence inexcusably continues to reign in much of the United States media.

Hurricane Ida has left more than a million people in Louisiana without running water, electricity, or air-conditioning amid a heat index topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The Caldor fire destroyed hundreds of houses and forced mass evacuations around Lake Tahoe in California. Abroad, vast swaths of Siberia were ablaze, while drought-parched Madagascar suffered what a United Nations official called the first famine caused entirely by climate change.

Painstaking scientific research has established that the climate crisis fuels these kinds of extreme weather. In other words, people can now watch the emergency unfold in real time on their TV and cell phone screens.

The problem is that most viewers won’t make that connection because most stories don’t contain the words “climate change.” Six of the biggest commercial TV networks in the United States—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, and MSNBC—ran 774 stories about Ida from August 27 to 30, an analysis by the watchdog group Media Matters found. Only 34 of those stories, barely 4 percent, mentioned climate change.

My own survey of the coverage confirmed the trend. Viewers were shown powerful images—roofs torn off, block after block of houses submerged in floodwaters, first responders pulling weeping victims to safety. They heard plenty of numbers: Ida was a category 4 hurricane with wind speeds of 172 miles an hour and storm surges of seven to 11 feet. But almost never were they told what was behind all this destruction.

It’s not as if making the climate connection is scientifically controversial or journalistically difficult, as a handful of exemplary stories demonstrated.

On NPR, the reporter Rebecca Hersher said that “climate change is basically super-charging this storm.… As the earth gets hotter because of climate change, the water on the surface of the ocean—it also gets hotter. So there’s more energy for storms like Ida to get really big and really powerful.”

On CBS This Morning, atop a graphic reading “Massive, fast-growing storms like Ida highlight climate crisis,” the meteorologist Jeff Berardelli pointed out that a hotter planet also means “you evaporate more moisture, the ground gets drier—we’re having the worst drought in 1,200 years in the west.”

In The Washington Post, the reporter Sarah Kaplan called Ida a “poster child for a climate change-driven disaster” and quoted MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emmanuel saying: “This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going to have to get used to as the planet warms.”

The vast majority of news coverage instead chose climate silence.

This amounts to nothing less than media malpractice. Scientifically accurate reporting would not only link this extreme weather to the climate crisis; it would note that climate change is caused primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal. ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have been lying for 40 years about their products’ causing dangerous climate change. Responsible journalism should tell the truth about what’s driving these terrible storms, fires, and famine.

Broadcast television’s failure is especially egregious in that it’s still the leading news source for most people. (About 45 percent of Americans get most of their news from television, while 18 percent rely primarily on social media, according to the Pew Research Center.) And it repeats the mistake TV news made while covering the extreme weather events of 2020. In the face of unprecedented fires in Australia and California (remember the orange skies over San Francisco?) and kindred calamities, only 0.4 percent of commercial TV stories mentioned the climate crisis, Media Matters found.

This kind of journalism leaves the public not just uninformed but misinformed. It gives the impression that these storms and fires are catastrophic (which, of course, is true) but that—to use a phrase that climate breakdown has made obsolete—they’re simply “natural” disasters.

They are not. Of course, hurricanes and wildfires were happening long before human-caused climate change emerged. The climate crisis, however, makes them significantly worse. As a Weather Channel segment on Ida explained, it’s not that “climate change caused the storm, but…that a warming world made Hurricane Ida more powerful.”

What’s odd is that plenty of journalists at big US news outlets know the climate crisis is an important story. And climate coverage had been improving. During the heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest in July, 38 percent of broadcast and cable news segments made the climate connection, Media Matters reported, as did about 30 percent of this summer’s wildfires coverage. So newsrooms have the ability to make the point when they choose to.

In two months, world leaders will gather in Glasgow for one of the most important diplomatic meetings in history. The COP26 summit will go a long way toward deciding whether humanity preserves a livable climate on this planet. From now to the summit and beyond, journalism has got to do better.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/hurricane-ida-fox-news-climate/
We Have to Choose the Future of the Planethttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ipcc-climate-cop26-report/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The NationAug 21, 2021

et’s be clear: This was avoidable,” a furious Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said in response to the latest United Nations climate report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, released on August 9, “is apocalyptic, catastrophic, and nothing we haven’t been screaming about from the rooftops for years,” Prakash continued. “If Biden really wants to be a world leader on climate, he’ll heed this call and pass the boldest reconciliation bill possible.”

The UN climate summit in November (COP 26) will be one of the most important diplomatic gatherings in history; world leaders will literally decide the future of life on earth. The Paris Agreement, signed at the last major summit in 2015, obliges the world’s governments to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6˚ Fahrenheit) and preferably to 1.5˚C (2.7˚F). The IPCC report, which UN Secretary General António Guterres labeled a “code red” warning that must “sound a death knell for fossil fuels,” makes it irrefutably clear that more than 1.5˚C risks absolute, perhaps irreversible, catastrophe for people and natural systems worldwide.

Although 1.5˚C will bring significantly worse impacts than observed today, they would be dramatically more severe at 2˚C and almost inconceivably more punishing if temperatures rise still higher. The extreme heat and drought that sparked the Dixie Fire this summer now occur five times as often as they have historically. If temperatures rise 2˚C, they will occur 14 times as often.

Thousands of scientists have separately declared a “climate emergency,” in part because humanity must now move incredibly fast to avert far worse conditions in the years ahead. Global temperatures have already risen by 1.1˚C, and trends point to a ruinous 3˚C later in this century. To stop at 1.5˚C, emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases must be cut in half by 2030 and reach “net zero” by 2050, according to IPCC scientists, who add that this will require transforming the global economy at a speed and scale “unprecedented” in human history.

The challenge is imposing—but by no means impossible. Almost all major obstacles to transitioning to a climate-friendly global economy are political.

The solutions therefore must be political as well. The UN summit absolutely must not fail; governments must reach an agreement that credibly puts the global economy on track to 1.5˚C by slashing emissions in half by 2030. “Credibly” is the key. The agreement must not be weakened by the kind of corporate-friendly loopholes that marred the infrastructure bill recently passed by the US Congress, which included, among other appalling examples, $8 billion for “blue hydrogen,” a term oil companies invented for hydrogen produced by—wait for it—burning more fossil gas!

The US carries a unique responsibility as the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. (China overtook the US in recent years to become the largest annual emitter, but cumulative emissions are what determine global temperatures.) Biden has talked a good game, pledging to cut climate pollution to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030, but his accomplishments to date fall far short of what’s needed for him to credibly pressure other countries to do more. And other countries must do more. In particular, China, India, and Russia—all large emitters—have so far refused to endorse the 1.5˚C target, a recipe for catastrophe.

The Sunrise Movement is correct that passing a reconciliation bill with ambitious climate provisions is imperative. But while activists focus their ire, and reporters their coverage, on Biden and fossil-fuel-friendly Democrats such as West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the congressional Republicans who’ve long been the main reason for America’s climate inaction largely escape censure. Politics is about power, and nothing concentrates a politician’s mind more than the prospect of being voted out of office. In the weeks remaining until COP 26, people power could change politicians’ calculations. Now is the time for politicians of all parties to hear, loud and clear: Either you do what’s necessary to preserve life on this planet, or we the people will make sure that the next election is your last.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ipcc-climate-cop26-report/
“This Was Avoidable,” Climate Activists Say About Grim New Sciencehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ipcc-climate-change-report/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark HertsgaardAug 9, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

he United Nations COP 26 climate summit this November was already set to be one of the most important diplomatic gatherings in history, a meeting where world leaders will—and this is no exaggeration—decide the future of life on earth. Today, in a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some of the world’s foremost climate scientists added further urgency to the summit by clarifying that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as envisioned in the Paris Agreement signed at the last major climate summit in 2015, is imperative. Temperatures have already risen by 1.1 C°; current trends point to a rise of a ruinous 3° C later this century.

The record-shattering heat waves, droughts, fires, and floods that have roiled the planet in recent years are evidence of “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” climate change that is “unprecedented in thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, the vice chair of the United Nations IPCC, told journalists on the eve of releasing volume one of the Sixth Global Assessment report. To close followers of climate science, many of the report’s findings will be familiar—but there are a few surprises. Above all, the report underscores that a temperature rise of more than 1.5° C above the level during the pre-industrial era risks absolute, perhaps irreversible, catastrophe for people and natural systems worldwide.

But Barrett added that humans can make an enormous difference through the actions they take in the next 10 years. “It’s still possible to forestall many of the most dire impacts, but it requires unprecedented, transformational change: a rapid and immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050,” said the senior climate adviser at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “But the idea that there still is a pathway forward, I think, is a point that should give us some hope.”

“The bad news is, dangerous climate change has arrived,” climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University told ABC News. “The good news is, we can prevent it from getting worse. The latest science tells us that if we bring our carbon emissions down to zero, the planet stops warming up.” Noting that the Biden administration has pledged to cut US emissions by a factor of two by 2030, Mann stressed that if other countries do the same, “we can prevent the planet from warming beyond a catastrophic level.”

The new IPCC report represents a vindication of climate activists and government officials from the Global South who insisted in 2015 that the Paris Agreement endorse keeping temperature rise “well below” 2° C and preferably to 1.5° C. The United States and most other high-income countries favored a goal of 2° C, a level that today’s report warns would be utterly disastrous.

Although 1.5° C of temperature rise will bring significantly worse impacts than those occurring today, the impacts would be dramatically more severe at 2° C and almost inconceivably more punishing if temperatures rose beyond that. Extreme heat waves like the one that broiled North America’s Pacific Northwest this summer now occur five times as often as they did historically. But if temperature rise reaches 2° C, scientists concluded, such heat waves will occur 14 times as often.

Likewise, sea levels have risen faster over the past century than they have “in at least 3,000 years,” said Robert Kopp, director of the Rutgers Institute of Earth, Oceans, and Atmospheric Sciences, leading to “a near doubling in the frequency of coastal flooding since the 1960s.” If emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are unchecked, Kopp added, scientists cannot rule out two meters (almost seven feet) of sea level rise by 2100—enough to put large parts of New York, Washington, Shanghai, Lagos, and countless other coastal cities underwater. But if temperature rise is instead kept “well below 2 degrees C, we’re still going to have two meters of sea level rise, but it’s going to take centuries and possibly millennia,” he explained, a much more manageable time scale for adaptation.

One ray of hope emerges from the report’s apparent endorsement of a major shift in scientific understanding of the climate challenge. No longer, it seems, do scientists believe there is necessarily a large amount of additional warming “in the pipeline” that is bound to surface no matter how quickly emissions of heat-trapping gases end. Instead, if emissions were to end overnight—a hypothetical scenario employed to illuminate policy options—temperature rise would halt within the next two decades, said Kim Cobb, the director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech University. Cutting emissions of methane is especially important, the new report finds, because methane is an exceptionally powerful but short-lived greenhouse gas whose elimination would buy extra time to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. Thus, if humanity does move aggressively to cut emissions, Cobb added, “the next two decades of global warming could be our last, and [we could] begin cooling globally later this century.”

That is the challenge awaiting world leaders at this November’s COP 26 summit scheduled to take place in Glasgow, Scotland. Calling the new IPCC report “the starkest warning yet that human behavior is alarmingly accelerating global warming,” Alok Sharma, the COP 26 president, told The Observer that “COP 26 is the moment we have to get this right. We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, ten years—this is the moment.”

“Let’s be clear—this was avoidable,” Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said in response to the IPCC report. “Today, I and so many other young people wake up enraged—the IPCC report is apocalyptic, catastrophic, and nothing we haven’t been screaming about from the rooftops for years…. If [President Joe] Biden really wants to be a world leader on climate, he’ll heed this call and pass the boldest reconciliation bill possible…. Anything less…is ignoring science, ignoring the IPCC report, and failing our generation.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ipcc-climate-change-report/
The Media’s Climate Blind Spot Is Geographichttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-global-south/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark HertsgaardJul 15, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate emergency.

limate change amounts to an undeclared, deeply unjust war against the global poor. Though they have emitted almost none of the heat-trapping gases that have raised global temperatures to their highest levels in civilization’s history, it is the poor—especially in low-income countries in Asia, Africa, and South America—who suffer first and worst from overheating the planet.

For more than a decade, perilous, climate-driven events in wealthier nations have been preceded by counterparts in the Global South. The deadly heat that has brutalized the American West—and rightly attracted headline news coverage—these past few weeks? That kind of heat has been killing and immiserating people across the Sahel in Africa for many years—for example, in Burkina Faso, where, as one local journalist lamented with tears in his eyes to me, the suffering was especially heartbreaking among “the old, the old” people in his village. The sea-level rise that is increasingly inundating Venice, despite the $6 billion spent on elaborate sea barriers meant to protect the city’s treasures? Rising seas have been slashing rice yields in Bangladesh for years, as salty ocean water intrudes farther and farther inland onto the soil of the tabletop-flat delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.

Recent scholarly studies and social media posts have suggested that this summer’s unprecedented heat and unfolding fire season might finally help more Americans acknowledge the realities of climate change. Perhaps now, the thinking goes, more of them will realize that climate change is not only real and dangerous—it’s happening, right now, to them or people just like them. But those realities have been clear for some time: The global poor have been living, and dying, from such climate-driven disasters for years—and with much less attention from the world media.

A glaring example came last week when virtually every news outlet in the Global North ignored a landmark meeting where leaders of low-income countries articulated their positions prior to the make-or-break United Nations COP26 climate summit in November. This V20 meeting—so named for the 20 countries that founded the Climate Vulnerable Forum in 2015—was hosted by Bangladesh in its capital city, Dhaka, on July 8.

Heads of government or finance ministers from 48 countries that are exceptionally vulnerable to climate change and inhabited by 1.2 billion people attended the Dhaka summit in person or online. So did John Kerry, US President Joe Biden’s international climate envoy; António Guterres, the UN secretary-general; David Malpass, the president of the World Bank Group; and the heads of development banks in Asia and Africa.

The world media was nowhere to be seen.

V20 organizers made it as convenient as possible for European and American news organizations to cover the Dhaka event. Online streaming provided real-time access to the proceedings, in a choice of languages: English, French, Spanish, or Arabic. Mindful of the time differences involved—Dhaka is five hours ahead of London, 10 hours ahead of New York—organizers even scheduled the event for late-night Bangladesh time: It was 10:30 pm local time when the opening session began.

Nevertheless, it appears that the only coverage by a Global North news outlet was a 750-word story by Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Thomson Reuters global news and information service. And, apparently, the only places that story was picked up were the websites of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the tabloid Daily Mail in Britain.

It’s inconceivable that the world media would treat a G7 or G20 summit like this. When leaders of the world’s seven largest advanced economies met in June, broadcast networks and newspapers across the Global North provided daily coverage before, during, and after the summit. There was abundant coverage again last week when finance ministers of the world’s 20 richest countries announced a tax crackdown on multinational corporations.

The contrasting silence about the V20 summit reveals an inexcusable double standard on the part of Global North news organizations. The unmistakable, if unwitting, message is that some voices in the global climate discussion count much more than others.

Correcting this double standard is not merely a matter of fairness; it’s also about telling the climate story accurately and in full in the lead-up to the crucial COP26 summit.

Had newsrooms in the Global North tuned in, they would have seen that the V20 summit in fact made plenty of news. Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina and other V20 heads of government reminded rich countries of their pledge under the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and to provide $100 billion a year in climate aid to poor countries. Secretary-General Guterres and the COP26 president, British MP Alok Sharma, reiterated the point. More surprising, given the United States’ patchy history around these issues, Kerry also endorsed the idea, calling the $100 billion in annual aid “imperative.” V20 finance ministers also announced that each of their countries is creating a National Climate Prosperity Plan to boost resilience to climate impacts, while also building economic prosperity. Bangladesh is leading the way with its Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, named after the statesman regarded as “the father of the nation” there.

But to achieve these goals, low-income countries need financial help—which rich countries have promised, but mostly failed to deliver, for years now. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development claims to have given $79 billion in 2018 (the last year with reliable data)—a claim that unfortunately was taken at face value in the Thomson Reuters Foundation article. An analysis by the anti-poverty NGO Oxfam found that this figure is wildly inflated, based on dodgy definitions and accounting tricks; for example, 80 percent of the aid was given as loans and other non-grant instruments, not grants. 

This aid shortfall carries profound implications, not only for the global poor but also for the rich’s own prospects of survival. 15 percent of people on Earth lives in the 48 countries in the Climate Vulnerable Forum. If those countries lack the means to choose a green- over a brown-energy future, there is zero hope of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 C. In that event, the rich, as well as the poor, will suffer, as the current heat and fire in the American West—which are occurring after “only” 1.1 C of temperature rise—painfully demonstrate.

All this amounts to news that could hardly be more urgent for people to hear, wherever they happen to live on this planet. It’s past time the world media treated it that way.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-global-south/
Greta Thunberg: ‘Nature and Physics Are Not Entertained nor Distracted by Your Theater’https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/greta-thunberg-austrian-world-summit/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJul 6, 2021

he Nation, we believe, was the first US magazine to put Greta Thunberg on its cover. This was back in March 2019, shortly after the Swedish teenager delivered a scientifically impeccable tongue-lashing to global elites at their annual talk-fest in Davos. “I don’t want your hope,” she told them. “I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”

Thunberg since then has delivered plenty more plain talk, including an epic “How dare you?” takedown of world leaders at the 2019 United Nations climate summits, and inspired millions of young people around the world to “school strike for climate,” to quote the sign she carried outside the Swedish Parliament—mass actions that have propelled the climate issue onto the global public agenda in a way that could not be ignored. Those strikes have now taken place for 150 weeks, Thunberg announced last week in a speech to the annual Austrian World Summit 2021, organized by actor and former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This latest speech was also a tour de force. Brilliantly employing a play on words (while speaking in her second language, no less), the young Swede blasted government and corporate officials for responding to the movement’s demands by deciding to act—but only to “act like” they are taking meaningful steps, not what’s actually necessary to preserve a livable climate.

Her speech, less than eight minutes, is shown here in its entirety.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/greta-thunberg-austrian-world-summit/
The Climate Crisis Is a Crime Storyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-crime/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJun 30, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate emergency.

very person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.

This crime has been going on for decades. We see its effects in the horrific heat and wildfires unfolding this summer in the American West; in the mega-storms that were so numerous in 2020 that scientists ran out of names for them; in the global projections that sea levels are set to rise by at least 20 feet. Our only hope is to slow this inexorable ascent so our children may figure out some way to cope.

This crime has displaced or killed untold numbers of people around the world, caused countless billions of dollars in economic damage, and ravaged vital ecosystems and wildlife. It has disproportionately affected already marginalized communities around the world, from farmers in coastal Bangladesh, where the fast-rising seas are salting the soil and slashing rice yields, to low-income residents of Houston, Chicago, and other cities, whose neighborhoods suffer higher temperatures than prosperous areas across town.

This crime threatens today’s young people most of all and calls into question the very survival of civilization. And yet the criminals responsible for this devastation are still at large. Indeed, they continue to perpetrate their crime, and even make money from it, not least because their crime remains unknown to most of the public.

It’s enough to make your blood boil, especially if you’re a parent. My daughter just turned 16, and I’ve been thinking about the safest place she can spend her adult life since she was a baby and I first started writing about adapting to climate change. The orange skies blanketing her hometown of San Francisco after last summer’s record wildfires were a heartbreaking, infuriating sign that California will not be that safe haven.

The crime in question is the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years of lying about climate change. Arguably the most consequential corporate deception in history, the industry’s lies have had the effect of blunting public awareness and governmental action against what scientists say is now a full-fledged climate emergency. As a candidate in 2020, Joe Biden said he would support efforts to prosecute the oil giants for their lies. It remains to be seen whether he will keep that promise.

Journalists have dedicated years to documenting the crime scene evidence. Then, in 2015, the Los Angeles Times, Inside Climate News, and the Columbia Journalism School blew the case open by tracing the crime link to ExxonMobil, then the world’s largest oil company.

Internal records showed that by the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists were briefing its top executives that man-made global warming was real, potentially catastrophic, and caused mainly by burning fossil fuels. Climate activists seized on the revelations, launching the hashtag #ExxonKnew.

Further investigations found that Chevron, Shell, BP, and other oil giants likewise knew that their products threatened to render the earth’s climate uninhabitable. In short, it wasn’t just that Exxon knew. They all knew.

And they all chose to lie about it.

Beginning in the 1990s, oil companies spent millions upon millions of dollars on public relations campaigns to confuse the press, the public, and policy-makers about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels. Their aim was “to reposition global warming as theory, not fact,” one planning document stated. Front groups and friendly politicians spread the companies’ lies. News outlets, especially in the United States, swallowed and regurgitated those lies to an unsuspecting public.

Humanity ultimately wasted precious decades arguing about whether global warming was real rather than defusing the threat. Instead of launching a transition to renewable energy, the consumption of fossil fuel increased. More than half of the total greenhouse gases now overheating the planet were emitted after 1990—after Exxon and other fossil fuel giants privately knew what havoc they were seeding.

Exxon “could have ended the pretend debate over climate change as early as the 1980s,” the author and activist Bill McKibben later wrote. “When scientists like Nasa’s Jim Hansen first raised public awareness of climate change [in 1988], think of what would have happened if Exxon’s chief executive had gone to Congress, too, and said that their internal scientific efforts show[ed] precisely the same thing.”

While pockets of the American public may already know about Big Oil’s crime, the vast majority of its victims almost certainly do not. How could they? Big Oil’s record of lying never became part of the public narrative about climate change, largely because most news outlets did not incorporate it into their continuing coverage of climate change.

The initial “Exxon knew” revelations in 2015 received relatively little follow-up coverage beyond the outlets that published them. Television, which even in the Internet era remains the primary source of news for most people, ignored the revelations entirely. There were a few stories in the business press and independent media, especially years later when New York state and other local governments began suing oil companies for damages. But the media as a whole seems to have forgotten that Big Oil’s climate lies ever happened.

It’s long past time to right these wrongs. To date, the oil companies, the executives in charge of them, the propagandists they’ve employed, and the politicians they’ve funded have largely escaped blame, much less had to pay—whether through financial penalties or prison time—for the immense damage they have done. News outlets also owe the public an apology for mishandling this story, along with a commitment to doing much sharper coverage in the future.

Humanity cannot get back the 40 years lost to Big Oil’s climate lies. It is now beyond urgent that rich and poor countries alike quit fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy and other climate-smart practices. Equally crucial, we must fortify our communities against the fearsome climate impacts that, because of our decades of delay, can no longer be avoided.

All this will cost money—lots of it. The world’s governments will be arguing from now through the make-or-break UN climate summit in November about who pays how much. Restoring Big Oil’s lies to their rightful place at the heart of the climate story would offer an answer to that riddle, one that Joe Biden should be pressed on: Big Oil knew—shouldn’t Big Oil pay?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-crime/
Climate Justice, for the First Time Ever, Is on the G7 Agendahttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-g7/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJun 11, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

eaders of the seven richest countries per capita are meeting at the Group of 7’s annual summit this weekend—and climate justice is explicitly on the agenda. That has never happened. How the G7 leaders respond to the climate justice challenge this weekend will shape the chances of success at November’s global climate summit that United Nations Secretary General António Guterres calls “our last opportunity” to defuse the climate emergency.

“Twenty twenty-one is a make-it-or-break-it year,” Guterres said in an interview this week with the global news consortium Covering Climate Now. “I think we are still on time, but when you are on the verge of the abyss, you need to make sure that the next step is in the right direction.”

At issue are the promises that rich countries made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, promises that they have flagrantly violated. Most media attention has focused on G7 countries’ pledges to cut emissions enough to limit global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5 C. Current policies and emissions trajectories instead put the earth on track for a 2.9 C increase by 2100, a de facto death sentence for millions of people and countless ecosystems, moving humanity further down the path to extinction. That disquieting prospect continues to spur grassroots protests against oil, coal, and gas development, including the Keystone XL pipeline in Canada whose owners officially canceled the project this week.

Equally important, though much less discussed, is rich countries’ Paris Agreement pledge to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries quit fossil fuels and protect against climate impacts. This obligation, which was to take effect in 2020, was grounded in the truism that climate change is overwhelmingly caused by the rich but disproportionately punishes the poor. Rich countries have not honored their $100 billion pledge either. Instead of $100 billion a year of climate aid, they have provided about $20 billion, according to an analysis that the global anti-poverty NGO Oxfam conducted of 2018 figures (the last year of authoritative data).

Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister and host of this year’s G7 summit, and Guterres have said they will press the other G7 leaders—US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga—to make good on their Paris Agreement obligations. Doing so is a matter not only of justice, Guterres told Covering Climate Now, but also of establishing the trust between rich and poor countries, trust that Guterres believes is necessary in order for the COP 26 climate summit this November to succeed. G7 leaders must guarantee that they will provide the climate aid they promised, Guterres said, and “clarify how that $100 billion will be delivered.”

Supplying climate aid is an act not of charity but rather of self-preservation, according to a landmark International Energy Agency report released last month. In order to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 C, the IEA said, the world must halt all new fossil fuel development, and both developing and developed countries alike must shift rapidly to non-carbon energy. That shift will be “impossible” for developing countries, Guterres said, without sizable financial and technological help.

The climate crisis and the Covid pandemic share something big in common. “You can’t protect yourself unless you protect everybody else,” said Rachel Kyte, the World Bank Group’s special representative to the Paris climate summit and now the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. To that end, G7 leaders need to make it clear at this weekend’s summit that they “will share [their] vaccine surplus and share it now. Otherwise, we’re going to have variants coming back and coming back, and we’ll never escape.” Likewise, rich countries must help “get the entire world off coal” if they themselves want to survive climate change, Kyte added. “It’s one boat. You don’t survive in your end of the boat if the other end of the boat is going underwater.”

But rebuilding trust with developing nations is problematic given G7 countries’ poor record on climate aid, said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, who was instrumental in helping diplomats from the global South insert the 1.5 C target in the Paris Agreement. “It’s the same seven countries that made that promise [of climate aid in the Paris Agreement], which they reneged on. So, if they’re going to have any credibility or trust, they’re going to have to deliver [the money] they were supposed to for 2020, and then there’s another $100 billion due in 2021. The issue is the credibility of the [G7] leaders, and whether we can believe anything they say at all.”

To hear rich countries tell it, they actually have done a pretty good job of fulfilling their climate aid obligations. Citing 2018 data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group of 38 of the world’s highest-income economies, rich countries gave roughly $79 billion in climate aid in 2018.

But Oxfam’s analysis of the OECD data reveals that this $79 billion figure is wildly inflated and based on dodgy definitions and accounting tricks. Some 75 percent of the $79 billion were given as loans that must be repaid rather than outright grants, said Tracy Carty, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam who co-authored the Oxfam analysis. And some aid was for projects that only a very forgiving mind would consider climate-friendly. For example, Japan claimed that its investment in a new coal plant in Bangladesh, a country with some of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems, qualified as climate aid because the new plant was more efficient than older models.

What’s more, only 20 to 25 percent of rich countries’ aid helps poor countries protect themselves from the heat waves, droughts, storms, rising seas, and other impacts of rising temperatures. Instead, most aid has been aimed at reducing emissions in the biggest developing economies, such as China, India, South Africa, and Brazil, Huq said, “while only 20 percent has gone to the most vulnerable countries, like my country, Bangladesh, to adapt to the impacts of climate change.” One reason is that investments “in renewable energy projects generate revenue that allows loans to be repaid”; giving poor people money to survive storms and floods does not. Highly vulnerable developing countries demand, Huq added, that half of all climate aid “should be for adaptation in the most vulnerable countries,” and that such aid must come as grants, not loans.

If G7 leaders do not issue a credible guarantee this weekend that they will honor their climate aid and other Paris Agreement obligations, then the world is headed for failure at the make-or-break climate summit in November, Huq and Kyte said. “The nearest thing we have to global government are these seven big economies, and if they decide to do something, then that something gets done,” Huq said. “So far, both with climate aid and Covid vaccinations, [the G7 leaders] see themselves as the leaders of their own countries and don’t care about the rest of the world. And they think they’re going to be safe. But they’re not going to be safe.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-g7/
Call It What It Is: A Climate Emergencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-media/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeJun 3, 2021

TV newsman Bill Moyers likes to tell the story of how Edward R. Murrow, the preeminent US broadcast journalist of his time, insisted on covering what became Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Murrow’s bosses at CBS News had other priorities; they ordered Murrow’s reporters to cover dance competitions in Hamburg, Paris, and London, explaining that Americans needed some happy news. Murrow wouldn’t do it. “It’ll probably get us fired,” he told his colleagues, but he sent his correspondents to the German-Polish border; they arrived just in time to witness Hitler’s tanks and troops roar into Poland. Suddenly, Europe was at war. And Americans heard about it because journalists at one of the nation’s most influential news outlets defied convention and did their jobs.

Today, all of humanity is under attack, this time from an overheated planet—and too many newsrooms still are more inclined to cover today’s equivalent of dance competitions. The record heat waves and storms of 2020 confirmed what scientists have long predicted: Climate change is underway and threatens unparalleled catastrophe. And because carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere for centuries, temperature rise and its effects are only getting started. As one scientist said as wildfires turned San Francisco’s skies orange last September, “We’re going to look back in 10 years, certainly 20…and say, ‘Wow, 2020 was a crazy year, but I miss it.’”

A handful of major newspapers are paying attention. But most news coverage, especially on television, continues to underplay the climate story, regarding it as too complicated, or disheartening, or controversial. Last month, we asked the world’s press to commit to treating climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is; their response was dispiriting.

We created Covering Climate Now in April 2019 to help break the media’s climate silence; Bill Moyers talked about Murrow at our inaugural conference. Since then, Covering Climate Now has grown into a consortium of hundreds of news outlets reaching a combined audience of roughly 2 billion people, and the climate coverage of the media as a whole has noticeably improved.

But that coverage is still not going nearly far enough. To convey to audiences that civilization is literally under attack, news outlets should play the climate story much bigger, running more stories—especially about how climate change is increasingly affecting weather, economics, politics, and other spheres of life—and running those stories at the top, not the bottom, of a homepage or broadcast. News reports should also speak much more plainly, presenting climate change as an imminent, deadly threat.

This message is muted at best today, and the result is predictable. In the United States, only 26 percent of the public is “alarmed” about climate change, according to opinion polls analyzed by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications (a member of the CCNow consortium). One reason why? Less than a quarter of the public hear about climate change in the media at least once a month.

Good journalism leads the conversation, and there is certainly plenty of climate news worth covering these days. In a pair of stunning developments last week, a court in the Netherlands ordered the Royal Dutch Shell oil company to reduce its own and its customers’ greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030 in accordance with the Paris Agreement, even as shareholders of ExxonMobil and Chevron rebelled against management’s refusal to take strong climate action. A week earlier, the International Energy Agency declared that all new fossil fuel development must stop to prevent irreversible climate destruction. The climate emergency is upending politics, economics, and virtually every other subject journalists cover, and newsrooms need to catch up.

They can start with the Climate Emergency Statement that CCNow issued in April as part of our Earth Day coverage. Cosigned by eight of our partners—Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The Guardian, Scientific American, Noticias Telemundo, La Repubblica, the Asahi Shimbun, and Al Jazeera English—the statement’s first sentence said “it is time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here.” Emphasizing that this was “a statement of science, not politics,” the statement linked to articles in peer-reviewed journals where thousands of scientists affirmed that fact. The statement noted that the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated how well news outlets can cover emergencies when they commit to it, and it invited journalists everywhere to apply that same urgency to the climate story.

More than 30 newsrooms have now signed the statement (an updated list is available on the Covering Climate Now site), but some major outlets told us privately they won’t sign. The phrase “climate emergency” sounded like activism, they said; endorsing it might make them look biased. Instead, they added, they would let their climate coverage speak for itself.

But that’s the problem: Their coverage does speak for itself, and it is simply not reflecting the facts of the story. It is a fact that thousands of the world’s scientists, including many of the most eminent climate experts, say humanity faces a climate emergency. Most major news outlets still present climate change as no more important than a dozen other public issues, when the fact is that if the world doesn’t get it under control, fast, climate change will overwhelm every other issue. Another fact: The climate emergency comes with a time limit—wait too long to halt temperature rise and it becomes too late; CO2’s long atmospheric life makes further temperature rise inevitable, perhaps irreversible.

We’re not obsessed with whether a news outlet does or doesn’t use the term “climate emergency”; what matters is whether the outlet’s overall coverage treats climate change like an emergency. For example, does the outlet give the climate story the same 24/7 coverage it has devoted to the Covid-19 pandemic or, before that, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or other landmark events? Has it reoriented its newsroom and reassigned reporters to cover the climate story? Do its journalists present the story with a sense of urgency?

At a summit in Glasgow this November, world leaders are supposed to adopt much stronger measures against the climate emergency. Between now and then, journalists have a responsibility to make sure the public understands what’s at stake and, crucially, that humanity already has the technologies and solutions to decarbonize our economies; what’s needed is the political will to implement them. Journalists also have a responsibility to hold powerful interests accountable for doing what’s needed to preserve a livable planet. That starts with telling the truth: about the climate emergency, its solutions, and how little time remains before it’s too late.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-change-media/
Big Oil Loses Big in a Day of Game-Changing Climate Newshttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/shell-court-case-climate-change/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardMay 27, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

aybe Shakespeare was wrong to urge, in Henry VI, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Yesterday, lawyers in the Netherlands won a historic court case against the Royal Dutch Shell oil company that carries the most profound implications for defusing the climate emergency. The court ordered Shell to bring its global operations in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius; this will require Shell to reduce both its own and its customers’ greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent from 2019 levels by 2030.

Together with shareholder revolts demanding stronger climate action by ExxonMobil and Chevron, the Dutch court ruling made May 26 one of the biggest days of climate news in years. Following last week’s landmark International Energy Agency report declaring all new fossil fuel development must stop for the planet to avoid irreversible climate destruction, the events amount to a crushing repudiation of Big Oil’s long-standing assertion that its profits matter more than civilization’s survival.

The Dutch case is particularly remarkable, for three reasons. First, “because it is the first time a judge has ordered a large polluting corporation to comply with the Paris climate agreement,” Roger Cox, a lawyer for Friends of the Earth Netherlands (in Dutch, Milieudefensie)—which brought the case with 17,000 other plaintiffs—told The Guardian. Second, because the judge held that society’s interest in emissions reductions takes priority over the commercial harm that Shell would suffer as a result. And third, and perhaps most far-reaching, because Shell must slash not only its direct emissions—the heat-trapping gases Shell releases when it drills for, refines, and brings oil to market—but also the company’s indirect emissions, the gases millions of customers around the world release when they use Shell’s gasoline and other products. As climate activist Greta Thunberg observed, this latter provision is what makes the court ruling such “a game changer.” If other countries apply the same logic, fossil fuel companies would have to leave much of their product in the ground, just as climate science says is imperative.

For now, the court ruling carries legal force only within the Netherlands, and although the judge ordered Shell to cut emissions “at once,” the company is appealing the ruling.

Meanwhile, the shareholder rebellions against the managements of ExxonMobil and Chevron flash an additional signal of public impatience with intransigence from Big Oil. The annual votes that shareholders of publicly owned companies cast almost always rubber-stamp management’s positions. But at Exxon, at least two of management’s candidates for the company’s board of directors were defeated. The opposition was spearheaded by a hedge fund, Engine No. 1, and pension funds from California and New York; the fate of two additional board seats was unclear as this article went to press, the vote still too close to call. “This is a landmark moment for Exxon and for the industry,” Andrew Logan of the nonprofit investor group Ceres told The New York Times. “How the industry chooses to respond … will determine which companies thrive through the coming transition and which wither.”

All in all, the climate story has taken a decisive turn; Big Oil’s fortress walls, which for decades have been the strongest obstacles to climate action, might finally be crumbling. For journalists, these developments present countless new angles and vividly illustrate why it’s crucial not to silo climate coverage on the weather or science beats. Leaving fossil fuels behind and rapidly shifting to renewable energy sources will carry enormous economic, political, social, and even cultural ramifications that journalists must now make clear to the public and policy-makers alike. As we often say at Covering Climate Now, climate change is the defining story of our time—and now is the time for newsrooms to tell it as vigorously, and rigorously, as we can.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/shell-court-case-climate-change/
On Earth Day, US Power Brokers Acknowledge the Scale and Urgency of the Climate Crisishttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-earth-day/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardApr 23, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

he vice president of the United States is predicting that the climate crisis will soon spark wars over water, the essential element of life on earth.

“In a short period of time, wars will be fought over water,” Kamala Harris says in a documentary the news outlet NowThis and other Discovery channels released on Earth Day. Fresh water “is in diminishing supply because of the climate crisis,” Harris continues, adding that “extreme drought” is causing people to leave their ancestral lands and move to “where they can grow food.”

The opening session of president Joe Biden’s Earth Day climate summit heard from one such migrant: 18-year-old Xiye Bastida, whose family moved to the United States from Mexico after two years of extreme drought made farming all but impossible. Bastida told world leaders to “accept that the era of fossil fuels is over” and to end all greenhouse gas emissions by 2030—a radically more ambitious goal than Biden’s pledge to halve US emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

Harris is not the first public official to warn that water shortages could ignite armed conflict, but her comment signals a new awareness in Washington of climate change’s security implications after four years of former President Donald Trump denying climate science and urging more fossil fuel production. Nevertheless, Harris and the other Biden administration officials interviewed in the NowThis documentary focus more on the economic opportunities that a transition to renewable energy offers—and the environmental injustices that today’s fossil fuel economy inflicts, especially on people of color and the poor.

Other countries that have invested in electric vehicles, battery storage, and other green technologies are “creating jobs hand over fist, good-paying jobs,” says Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, apparently referring to China, Germany, and other economic competitors of the United States. “So, we just have to be fearless, I think, about investing in our nation. It is a once in a century opportunity to say, ‘We’re going to invest in the future.’”

The documentary visits a perhaps surprising location to highlight the benefits of such investments: Wyoming, a rural state that votes red and boasts the Powder River Basin, the single largest coal deposit in the United States. The US coal business is in terminal decline, as one former Powder River Basin miner regretfully acknowledges: “You can’t force people to buy coal.” But in southern Wyoming, wind farm manager Laine Anderson drives across a wind-swept plain as row upon row of white turbines spin above him. “There are over 1,000 turbines under my direction, over 2,240 megawatts,” Anderson says, adding that the facility is “exporting this power to Utah, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.” The Republican mayor of Rawlins, a nearby town, says wind power “provides money. It provides jobs. It provides taxes,” adding that Rawlins will soon be home to the largest wind farm in the United States.

The challenge is to match up these economic opportunities with the locations and skills of today’s workers and communities, says Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser. The transition to a climate-friendly economy, McCarthy says, “has to include everybody: no worker or community left behind. And I think that’s a much better framing than picking yesterday’s energy and thinking that it’s going to be tomorrow’s future.”

NowThis released the documentary, Action Planet: Meeting the Climate Challenge, on social media with discovery+, accompanied by broadcast showings on the Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and OWN. NowThis is part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of hundreds of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story; CCNow partners have been presenting an extended week of Earth Day coverage with the theme, “Living Through The Climate Emergency.”

One measure of that emergency: Continued reliance on oil, gas, and especially coal is killing millions of people around the world every year, says Aaron Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School. In addition to overheating the planet, burning fossil fuels causes air pollution that leads “to early death of 330,000 Americans every year and 8 million people around the world; that’s one in five people dying because of our reliance on fossil fuels,” says Bernstein. He adds that the illnesses and deaths caused by the Covid-19 virus are “like a sneak preview of what we expect to see more of with climate change in the health care setting.”

For example, rising global temperatures encourage the spread of mosquitoes carrying other deadly diseases, such as dengue fever. “Dengue affects 96 million people every year and has been increasing exponentially on every continent except Antarctica,” says Erin Mordecai, a professor at Stanford University. “As the climate becomes more suitable for these mosquitoes, it’s going to become a much bigger and more expensive problem.”

Illustrating the truism that climate change punishes the poor and people of color most of all is an environmental justice battle in Memphis, Tenn., led by Justin J. Pearson, a 27-year-old local African American activist. Pollution billows from the smokestack of one of the 17 industrial facilities looming over South Memphis, the oldest Black community in town, as Pearson explains how racist housing policies compound the problem: “You redline Black folks into a particular community where toxins are being pumped into the air. And the consequences are in the death rates, in the cancer rates, in the asthma rates of our community.”

Now, the Valero Energy Corp. wants to run an underground gas pipeline through South Memphis—and directly above the Memphis Sand Aquifer, a crucial local water source. Former vice president Al Gore appears at a rally organized by Pearson and assures the crowd that it can win this fight by remembering that “political will is a renewable resource.” On April 20, too late for the documentary, the mayor of Memphis, Jim Strickland, who is white, came out against the pipeline, calling it “a risk we should not take.”

The climate crisis, vice president Harris tells NowThis correspondent Zinhle Essamuah, “is about equal justice.It’s about equity. It’s about public health.” NowThis, which says it is the most-watched mobile news brand globally, reaches an audience inclined to activism; in 2020, 68 percent of its viewers reported that they had recently taken an “environmentally friendly action.” Essamuah’s closing commentary urged them, and everyone, to do more. “Climate change,” she said, “is the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family…. There is no alternative. Now is the time to act.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-crisis-earth-day/
Dear Media, Let’s Treat the Climate Emergency Like the Pandemic Emergencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/covering-climate-now-media/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardApr 12, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

t’s long past time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here. To be clear, that is a statement of science, not politics—and the science says the hour is very late.

As a cofounder of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of hundreds of news outlets reaching roughly 2 billion people, The Nation joins the following CCNow partners in urging colleagues throughout the media to acquaint themselves with the relevant science and cover the climate story accordingly: Columbia Journalism Review (also a CCNow cofounder), The Guardian (CCNow’s lead media partner), Al Jazeera English, The Asahi Shimbun, The Guardian, La Repubblica, Scientific American, and Noticias Telemundo. We are inviting journalists and news outlets everywhere to join us in signing the Climate Emergency Statement that has been posted on Covering Climate Now’s website.

Many of the world’s top scientists now say humanity faces a “climate emergency.” Among them are James Hansen, the former NASA scientist whose 1988 US Senate testimony put the climate problem on the public agenda, and David King and Hans Schellnhuber, former science advisers to the British and German governments, respectively. And some 14,000 scientists have signed the “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.”

Why “climate emergency” rather than “climate problem” or even “climate crisis”? Because words matter.

To preserve a livable planet for today’s young people, science says, humanity must take far-reaching action immediately. Failure to slash the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will make the extraordinary heat, storms, wildfires, and ice melt of 2020 routine and could “render a significant portion of the Earth uninhabitable,” warned a recent Scientific American article. And because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many decades after being emitted, the longer we wait to take strong action, the more extreme weather there will be—and the greater the likelihood of crossing points of no return.

As journalists ourselves, we understand why some of our colleagues are cautious about initiatives like this Climate Emergency Statement, but we ask that they hear us out. Journalists rightly treasure our editorial independence, regarding it as essential to our credibility. To some of us, the term “climate emergency” may sound like advocacy or even activism—as if we’re taking sides in a public dispute rather than simply reporting on it.

But the only side we’re taking here is the side of science. As journalists, we must ground our coverage in facts. We must describe reality as accurately as we can, undeterred by how our reporting may appear to partisans of any stripe and unintimidated by efforts to deny science or otherwise spin the facts.

The Covid-19 pandemic has provided a tragic lesson in how important it is for science to guide journalism, and much of the news media has responded admirably. In accordance with the best available evidence, journalists have described the pandemic as a public health emergency. They have chronicled its devastating impacts, called out disinformation, and told audiences how to protect themselves (with masks, for example, and vaccinations).

Now, we need the same commitment on the climate story. Signing the Climate Emergency Statement is a way for journalists and news outlets to alert their audiences that they will do justice to that story. And make no mistake: Polling data indicates that most of the public in the United States and around the world, especially younger people, want more, not less, coverage of climate change, especially on possible solutions.

But whether a given news outlet makes a public declaration by signing the statement is less important than whether the outlet’s coverage treats climate change like the emergency that scientists say it is. The theme for the Covering Climate Now consortium’s April 12 to 22 Earth Day coverage, for example: “Living Through The Climate Emergency,” with stories both on how people are experiencing that emergency and how we all can survive it. As a founding partner of Covering Climate Now, The Nation has been proud to help lead this global effort to increase the quantity and quality of climate coverage throughout the media, working in collaboration with journalists and newsrooms around the world to tell the defining story of our time.

We invite journalists everywhere to join us. The climate emergency demands nothing less.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/covering-climate-now-media/
Covering Young Climate Activists Isn’t an Act of Favoritism—It’s an Act of Journalismhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-media-youth-activists/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardMar 17, 2021

Covering Climate NowThe Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is Covering Climate Now’s deputy director.

This Friday, March 19, thousands of young activists around the world will march and strike for climate action as part of Fridays for Future, a movement launched by Greta Thunberg and other organizers. Events are planned on five continents. The theme: #NoMoreEmptyPromises. “Those in power continue to only deliver vague and empty promises for far off dates that are much too late,” reads a statement by Fridays For Future. “What we need are not meaningless goals for 2050 or net-zero targets full of loopholes, but concrete and immediate action in-line with science.”

For some journalists, covering activism presents an uncomfortable dilemma. Too much coverage might come across as cheerleading or make journalists look like they are activists themselves, contradicting institutional notions of neutrality. A reporter’s job is to cover the news, the argument goes, not boost one side or the other.

Fair enough. But activists are newsmakers—just like the politicians, scientists, and corporate officials we cover all the time.

Youth-dominated groups have upended global climate politics over the last two years and injected a much-needed emphasis on environmental justice into the public conversation. Whether by scolding jet-setting elites at Davos for their obliviousness, as Thunberg did, or occupying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office, as Sunrise Movement activists did to demand that Democrats walk their talk on climate change, youth activists have forced the climate issue onto government and, yes, media agendas around the world.

During the 2020 US presidential race, youth activists’ grassroots pressure pushed then-candidate Joe Biden to dramatically strengthen his climate proposals even as it helped raise climate change to a top-tier campaign issue. For the general election in November, Sunrise and other youth-led groups mobilized large numbers of new voters, including in Georgia and other swing states, that helped elect Biden president and gain Democrats a razor-thin majority in the US Senate. Now, with Biden in the White House, activists are continuing to push him to make good on his promise to treat climate change as the “existential crisis” he rightly says it is.

In short, climate activists are a potent political force. Covering them is no act of favoritism but simply a matter of accurately telling the climate story.

Indeed, one could argue that activists, as a whole, have been ahead of journalists on this story. Media coverage of the climate crisis has long lagged behind warnings from scientists and other experts—especially in the United States, where coverage was sporadic at best, and often descended into a scientifically indefensible bothsidesism that portrayed corporate flaks and real scientists as equally credible. Improved news coverage overlaps with the emergence of the youth climate movement: According to a 2020 analysis by the watchdog outfit Media Matters for America, the outpouring of climate activism in 2019—especially a global youth strike in September of that year, led by Thunberg and involving some 6 million people—was largely what finally shocked the media out of their collective climate silence. In other words, despite a wealth of evidence establishing climate change as a story of massive, global importance, many news organizations still needed to be led out of the darkness.

With a climate realist now in the White House, a new era of possibility in the climate story has arrived. It’s more important than ever for journalists to cover activist groups and their activities accurately and fairly, showing them no more fear or favor than we show any other type of newsmaker.

That task begins with doing a better job of portraying who the climate movement actually is. Even after news organizations finally recognized that young climate activists were making news, too many stories fixated on the celebrity of Thunberg and a small handful of others, while giving short shrift to the substance of their message. “Instead of focusing on the climate and listening to the scientific message, people are instead listening to and talking about me,” Thunberg remarked in September 2020. Such coverage gives the impression that Thunberg was the only young activist worth hearing, a grievous misrepresentation. “Dear media, I see you are writing about the international climate crisis lawsuit @GretaThunberg and I launched today with 15 other child plaintiffs,” Alexandria Villaseñor, a prominent activist from New York, wrote on Twitter in 2019. “The other plaintiffs have names, experiences and stories. Make sure you write about them, too.”

Some outlets have done well on that front, featuring a range of activists in their stories and even profiling them or publishing their op-eds. For example, both CNN and PBS NewsHour recently ran extensive stories about the Indigenous activists in Minnesota fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline overseen by Enbridge, a Canadian multinational company. PBS correspondent Ivette Feliciano interviewed Winona LaDuke of the Indigenous climate justice organization Honor the Earth, who said the greenhouse gas emissions of the Line 3 pipeline are “the equivalent to 50 new coal-fired power plants. So, you know, if you’re trying to save the planet, this is not the way to do it.”

Other times, outlets have struggled to show the diversity and breadth of the climate movement. In an emblematic incident from January 2020, the Associated Press cut Vanessa Nakate, a 23-year-old climate activist in Uganda, out of a photo depicting four other influential young activists, including Thunberg, all of whom are white. (Reuters, at the same time, misidentified Nakate as Zambian activist Natasha Mwansa.) At first, the AP said the crop was a deadline decision made to improve the photo’s composition; the agency later apologized for the error. Nakate responded that the AP’s action was evidence of how Africans and others from poor countries are often excluded from the climate conversation. “It showed how we are valued,” Nakate said.

The modern climate and environmental movements are diverse and enormous. Rather than select, elevate, and revisit a handful of celebrities, journalists should seek out a range of voices, especially activists at the local level representing Indigenous groups or people of color whose communities are often disproportionately affected by climate change.

That said, thoughtful reporting on climate activism should not preclude journalists from asking probing questions about the activists’ platforms, tactics, and operations. For example, many young activists engage the climate crisis as an intersectional issue, in which individual and overlapping identities—including those of race, class, and gender—shape their platforms and their work, including dealings with older activist organizations and policymakers. Some of the best-funded climate-advocacy groups have long been far from diverse in their staffing and leadership, despite repeated promises to improve. News coverage should engage the full substance of activist groups’ agendas in an ongoing way, with attention to their complexities and efficacy—and not only when they’re marching in the streets.

As many activists would say, ultimately the climate story is not about them; it’s about whether humanity can defuse the climate emergency in time to preserve a livable planet. By telling that story, journalists can get themselves, and their audiences, up to speed on the defining challenge of our time.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-media-youth-activists/
Amanda Gorman’s Poem Rhymes With Biden’s Climate Agendahttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/amanda-gorman-climate-biden/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJan 22, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

For there is always light
If only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

hose are the closing words of “The Hill We Climb,” the stunning poem Amanda Gorman, the first youth poet laureate of the United States, delivered yesterday at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. For those worried about climate change, the ever-shining light referenced in Gorman’s poem was perhaps difficult to make out during Donald Trump’s presidency. Now, a new day has dawned that brings great possibilities and equally great challenges.

Biden ran on the strongest climate platform of any major presidential candidate in US history. He was pushed to that stance by his erstwhile rival Senator Bernie Sanders and pressure from a younger generation of activists who insist on centering economic, racial, and gender justice in climate policy. And to Biden’s credit, he agreed to be pushed. Now, Biden has named a team of cabinet officials and aides who are experienced, diverse, and more committed to climate progress than their counterparts in any previous administration.

Biden and Harris have repeatedly described climate change as one of four intertwined crises—along with the Covid pandemic, the collapsed economy, and racial justice—that will be addressed by every part of the federal government. For example, Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee for treasury secretary—who has supported taxing carbon polluters and returning the proceeds to all Americans—said during her Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday that climate change is “an existential threat” to the US economy, and she pledged to appoint a “very senior” official to oversee her department’s handling of the problem.

The 180-degree reversal in US climate policy was also clear from the executive orders President Biden signed on the afternoon of his inauguration. The United States will rejoin the Paris Agreement. The Keystone XL pipeline, a landmark climate battle during the Obama years, will be canceled once and for all. And the Trump administration’s weakening of regulations covering vehicle fuel efficiency, emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases, and other climate-related policies will be reviewed and likely overturned. (The day before Biden’s inauguration, a federal court separately struck down Trump’s attempt to weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan that will slashed emissions from electricity generation.)

Now, attention turns to Capitol Hill. Conventional wisdom inside the Beltway says there is little chance of passing transformative climate legislation. After all, Democrats have only a one-vote majority in the Senate, with Vice President Harris casting tie-breaking votes, while Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia has long been hostile to restricting coal and other fossil fuels. Nor do Republicans give any sign of abandoning their lockstep resistance to serious climate action.

Politics is too full of surprises, though, to treat such predictions as prophecy. Upwards of 70 percent of US voters, including majorities among both Democrats and Republicans, now favor increased government spending on solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. If forced to take an up-or-down vote, how many members of Congress will oppose such broadly popular policies, especially if such clean energy provisions are included in a larger infrastructure bill, as Biden’s “Build Back Better” strategy envisions?

If Republicans do remain united behind a fossil fuel agenda, the possibilities for passing meaningful climate legislation—even significant portions of a Green New Deal—still might be greater than commonly assumed, as Geoff Dembicki reported in a must-read Vice article. Experts Dembicki interviewed said that “many Green New Deal-style actions are still possible—making low carbon industries a key part of the pandemic stimulus, creating millions of green jobs, employing vast numbers of laid-off oil and gas workers, and moving much faster than before to clean electricity.” These reforms will not come in “single, sweeping piece of legislation” the way some Green New Deal advocates imagine, said one expert. But sufficient bipartisan support is plausible for an array of measures that “when you add them up are really big,” said another.

Overseas, Biden has a freer hand. Returning to the Paris Agreement is an essential first step, and Biden’s commitment to climate action at home can dissolve some of the international skepticism fostered by previous US administrations. One often overlooked issue to watch: Will the Biden administration discourage international development banks and its own lending agencies, such as the US Export-Import Bank, from financing fossil fuel projects in developing economies in Asia, Africa, and South America? Another looming question: Will the United States under Biden join the European Union, Japan, Great Britain, Canada, and other leading greenhouse-gas emitters in formally declaring that humanity faces a “climate emergency”?

For journalists, one thing is clear: Climate change will be a major story in Biden’s first year as president. Biden and his aides have ambitious plans that will provide news peg after news peg. The need for well-informed and high-visibility coverage, told as often as possible through a human lens, could not be plainer. And there’s nothing partisan in news outlets’ meeting that need; it’s about human survival. Going forward, journalists, as well as fellow citizens and elected leaders, might well be guided by another passage in Gorman’s fierce, beautiful poem:

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation
Because we know our inaction and inertia
Will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burden

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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/amanda-gorman-climate-biden/
Trump’s Insurrection Threatens US Democracy—and Therefore Climate Survivalhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/trump-insurrection-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardJan 13, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis article is part of Covering Climate Now, a consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

It’s doubtful that Donald Trump or the bloodthirsty armed supporters who invaded the US Capitol threatening to kidnap or kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were thinking much about climate change at the time. Nevertheless, the mob Trump unleashed to try to overturn his election defeat was an assault not only on American democracy but also on humanity’s climate survival. If Trump’s attempted coup had succeeded in keeping him in power for a second term, it would have been, scientifically speaking, “game over for climate,” as Michael Mann of Penn State University put it: Four more years of the world’s biggest economy accelerating rather than ending fossil fuel development would have made limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius impossible. Nevertheless, Trump’s insurrection, besides being an enduring stain on America’s reputation as a nation of law, also threatened climate survival in a second way, because a US democracy that works is vital to avoiding climate catastrophe.

A democracy that works is not one merely in which a losing president does not seek to overturn their defeat through coercion and violence. Well-functioning democracies reflect the wishes of the majority and provide effective channels through which citizens can make their voices heard and help shape the decisions made in the halls of power. Trump’s coup was a deliberate attempt to nullify this social compact and subvert an election in which a clear majority of the voters rejected him. As it happens, many of those voters were motivated in no small part by the climate crisis and a desire to replace Trump’s disastrous denial and obstruction with Biden’s commitment to tackle what he calls “the existential threat of our time.”

It’s no secret that the United States has fallen short of the democratic vision outlined in the Constitution, starting long before an authoritarian con man tricked and lied his way into the Oval Office in 2016. For centuries after the nation’s founding, the right to vote was withheld from African Americans, Native Americans, and women, among others. Voter suppression and gerrymandering, which effectively enable politicians to choose their voters rather than vice versa, continue to make a mockery of majority rule. And for going on 50 years now, American democracy, especially as played out in the nation’s capital, has been dominated by Big Money, as campaign finance laws were whittled away to today’s pitiful twig, where money is defined as speech and unlimited sums can be spent in secret for or against policies the super-rich or corporate power like or don’t like. Profit-making prevails over public interest more often than not.

Climate change is a prominent example, though the phenomenon is distressingly clear on issues ranging from health care to taxes as well. ExxonMobil and the rest of the fossil fuel industry have enjoyed a de facto veto over federal climate policy for decades, going back at least to the 1980s, when NASA testimony put the climate crisis on the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time. Ample campaign contributions steadily channeled to members of Congress and presidential candidates was the most direct way Exxon, et al, made sure that Washington didn’t do much about the gathering climate crisis—a crisis, we now know, that oil company executives knew threatened the planet’s habitability—but it was not the only way. As the sector whose products provided the energy, the lifeblood, that animated the economy as a whole, the fossil fuel industry exercised a broader political power that made the grade school civics concept of one person, one vote sound quaint.

The influence of Big Money in US politics is so pervasive and entrenched that it’s almost hard to condemn the politicians who continue to play the game—almost. Which is why the problem has long been a thoroughly bipartisan one. Today, Republicans are branded, correctly, as resolute opponents of climate action. But throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Democrats both in the White House and on Capitol Hill were only slightly less resistant to meaningful policies than their Republican colleagues. In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration didn’t even put the Kyoto climate treaty up for a vote in the US Senate, Gore told me in a 2006 interview, because they couldn’t find even 10 Democrat Senators who would vote yes. Similar examples abound.

But neither bipartisan domination by Big Money nor an out-of-control commander in chief directing a siege on the US Congress comprises the whole story of contemporary American democracy. For all its apparent weaknesses, our professed system of governance also contains enormous promise for “we the people” to make ourselves heard. On paper at least, the system stipulates and guarantees rights and processes by which citizens can petition government officials and hold them accountable, if only through the ultimate sanction of voting them out of office.

Here again climate change illustrates the point. A big part of the reason climate change is now a top issue in US politics is that citizens worked the tools and levers of democracy to pressure elected officials to take the problem seriously. A grassroots climate movement first emerged during the Obama years—it was plainly evident at the UN climate summit held in Copenhagen in 2009—as activists used protest marches, public education, election campaigns, civil disobedience, and other tactics to press their case. The movement scored a landmark victory when it got President Obama to reverse course and block the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015. By January 2019, a sit-in House Speaker Pelosi’s office launched the Green New Deal into the public arena. In 2020, climate activists demonstrated such electoral strength while backing the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders that Biden, taking the hint, ended up adopting the strongest climate platform of any major party presidential nominee in US history. Climate activists, joined by counterparts demanding racial justice, then delivered the dramatically increased turnout among younger voters that proved decisive in Biden’s victory over Trump.

Without that expression of grassroots democracy, the world would likely be entering the climate nightmare of four more years of Trump. Instead, we’re witnessing the fascistic nightmare of the president of a country that considers itself the greatest democracy of all time fomenting a coup to remain in power despite a landslide electoral defeat. The first nightmare has been narrowly avoided, as will be formalized with Biden’s inauguration on January 20. The second will go down in infamy, with the names of Trump and his many enablers in the Republican party, the news media, and social media platforms permanently inscribed in US history’s book of shame.

Going forward, whether American democracy can regain sufficient vigor and respectability to avoid descending into the authoritarianism that Trump and his supporters represent remains to be seen. And what’s at stake is not only the continuation, however imperfect, of a government of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln phrased it, but whether that government will rise to the challenge of defusing the climate crisis while there’s still time.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/trump-insurrection-climate/
A New Year’s Resolution: Climate Journalism to Match the Crisishttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/resolution-biden-climate-journalism/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormickJan 6, 2021

Covering Climate NowThis article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

umanity begins 2021 with a real chance to pull back from the brink of climate catastrophe. The odds get even better if Democrats win both Georgia runoff elections and take control of the US Senate. (At the time of writing, some outlets had reported a victory for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff over Republican incumbent David Perdue, based on projections, while others held off.) In any case, strong climate journalism in the year to come is essential to help humanity rise to the challenge.

For the last four years, the world’s largest economy and single biggest all-time emitter of heat-trapping gases has been in the grips of an aggressive climate denier. The Trump administration slashed environmental regulations, expanded concessions to the oil and gas industry, and withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the hard-won 2015 pact to compel international cooperation on the defining problem of our time. Climate progress did continue in Washington’s absence, but too slowly. Select state and local governments in the United States, as well as governments abroad, forged ahead with plans to curb emissions. Thirty-eight countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan, declared a “ state of climate emergency.” And China, the second-biggest historical emitter behind the United States, announced a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Still, obstruction and backsliding in Washington placed the world on track for a hellish future.

With Joe Biden’s inauguration imminent, a new era in the climate story is at hand. Biden made the climate crisis a central issue in his campaign, running on the strongest climate and environmental justice platform ever adopted by a major US party. Biden pledged to rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one as president; in December, he nominated a slate of qualified leaders to top climate and environmental positions, including, to the position of interior secretary, Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, who would become the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history. If confirmed, Halaand will be among the most influential climate officials in Washington; the Interior Department oversees the nation’s public lands, hundreds of millions of acres where Biden has pledged to halt fossil fuel production.

From a scientific perspective—and not, to be clear , as a matter of political partisanship—this is welcome news. To limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and thereby avoid the worst climate impacts, the world must, at a minimum, cut emissions nearly in half by 2030; as all the record-breaking extreme weather in 2020 showed, there’s no time to waste. For the press, then, this new year presents a much-needed opportunity to reinvent our climate coverage—to redouble, not relax, our commitment to telling the climate story so people get it and, moreover, resolve that they and especially their governments do something about it.

We say regularly in this column that the climate crisis is a story for every beat. That will prove truer than ever this year, as climate takes center stage in the US national discourse.

For political journalists, there will be the matter of holding the Biden-Harris administration accountable for its ambitious climate promises. Whether Biden will have sufficient support from Congress to pass his proposed $2 trillion climate plan or is able to enact only more incremental reforms, the press must measure the Biden administration’s actions against what the science demands. But journalists should be no less aggressive in holding to account those who would stand in the way of needed reforms. Attention must be paid in particular to the Republican party, which perhaps more than any other American institution has remained recalcitrant, for decades, in the face of climate science.

Other key stories to watch in the political space: Climate activists were critical in elevating Biden to the White House; now that meaningful climate action is finally on the table, reporters should expect these groups to be louder, not quieter. Calls for a Green New Deal, especially as a means to economic recovery in the wake of Covid-19, will continue apace. And, outside of Washington, how will cities and states sustain climate progress?

In the business world, companies face pressure to slash emissions, at the same time that banks, investment firms, and other financial institutions are divesting from fossil fuels entirely. In December alone, Lloyd’s, the world’s largest insurance market, pledged to stop insuring coal, oil sands, and Arctic energy projects by 2022; and the Rockefeller Foundation, a storied philanthropy built by oil money, said it would cut ties with the fossil fuel industry. In the aggregate, moves like these promise a comprehensive reconstitution of the financial system as we know it. Fortunately, journalists are good at following the money.

It is critical in all coverage of the climate story to show the lived experience of ordinary people, including the disproportionate effects climate change has on the poor and communities of color. Too often, climate change is reported as a wonky excursion into scientific models and projections, detailing parts per million of carbon dioxide and fractions of degrees Centigrade. This information has its place, of course, but journalists should remember that climate change in the end is a story about human lives.

In pursuing all these stories, news organizations must eschew outdated assumptions and unhelpful bothsidesism. During the 2020 campaign, the facts of climate change routinely took a back seat to the partisan horserace. The effect was to leave audiences—and voters—with a stunted, inaccurate view of the challenges we’re up against. Moving forward, every member of the newsroom should become climate literate; from reporters and editors to headline writers and social media teams, all journalists must equip themselves to cover the climate debate with the same rigor and depth they applied to, say, Trump’s impeachment hearings and the coronavirus pandemic.

When the pandemic hit, news organizations proved more than capable of adapting to an all-encompassing, fast-evolving story. Even amid skepticism from significant segments of the audience, the press insisted on prioritizing coronavirus coverage, illuminating the story from every angle and finding creative ways to break through the disinformation and political rancor. Think: In The New York Times, when Covid-19 deaths approached 100,000, a full front page of names; on TV news programs, permanent graphics depicting infection rates and deaths across the country; and, across the web, a lowering of paywalls for coronavirus-related content to ensure public access to critical information.

With big change finally possible, now is the time to apply that same journalistic energy to the climate crisis. Audiences will likely respond in kind, for the climate story has all the elements of an irresistible drama: inspiring heroes and dastardly villains, trillions of dollars to be won or lost, and an underdog’s chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, all while creating abundant jobs and business opportunities. Climate solutions are known and available now, if only we as a society reach out and grab them. To do our part, journalists must chronicle the story with gusto and professionalism, never forgetting that the clock is ticking fast.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/resolution-biden-climate-journalism/
As 2020 Ends, It’s Time for News Outlets to Declare a ‘Climate Emergency’https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-emergency-united-nations/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark HertsgaardDec 17, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their own countries until carbon neutrality is reached.” So said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres in his speech to the Climate Ambition Summit on December 12, the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Guterres’s appeal seemed aimed at leaders of national governments; the secretary general noted that “thirty-eight countries have already” made such declarations (among them, such big emitters as the United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada). But it’s time for media leaders to declare a State of Climate Emergency as well.

Journalists and news executives in charge of newspapers, TV, and radio programs exercise a profound influence over how the public thinks and feels about the defining problem of our time—and what, if anything, governments, businesses, and other powerful actors end up doing about it. Shouldn’t news organizations be telling the unvarnished truth about the climate problem and, not least, its solutions?

Among major news organizations, only The Guardian has thus far made the kind of climate-emergency declaration the UN secretary general urges. On October 16, 2019, the newspaper issued a statement from Katharine Viner, its editor in chief, promising “to provide journalism that shows leadership, urgency, authority, and gives the climate emergency the sustained attention and prominence it deserves.” A month later, the Oxford Dictionaries named “climate emergency” its word of the year for 2019, partly in recognition of the hundreds of cities, towns, and countries that had declared such emergencies. Yet news organizations have held back.

Some of my media colleagues will feel uneasy about taking such a step, fearing that this would cross the line between journalism and advocacy. That is a serious, understandable concern—after all, activists from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement, among others, have all repeatedly invoked the “climate emergency” as a rallying cry to demand a rapid decarbonization of the world’s economies.

But here is a companion fact that too many newsrooms seem unaware of—or, worse, ignore: It’s not just activists who talk about a “climate emergency.” As this column has mentioned more than once, more than 11,000 leading scientists have expressly chosen the phrase “climate emergency” to describe the situation currently facing our civilization. Skeptical journalists should bear in mind that scientists tend to be data-driven, rationally inclined individuals who generally shun emotionally charged words. Scientists are embracing the phrase “climate emergency” now because the physical realities have become so extreme, the time remaining to fix the problem so limited, and the necessary reforms so difficult that no other words suffice. Humanity must slash emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to avoid utter catastrophe, UN scientists have warned, which will require transforming the world’s energy, agriculture, finance, and other key sectors at a pace and scale unprecedented in history.

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is,’” the statement signed by the 11,000-plus scientists begins.

Journalists demonstrated just such a moral obligation while covering the coronavirus this year. Despite staff cuts that required many journalists to work what used to be two or three separate newsroom jobs, news outlets heroically embraced the challenge of informing audiences about what was happening during the pandemic, why it was happening, and how people could protect themselves and others. The media also held political leaders to account, with most US-based outlets (aside from Fox News and other cheerleaders for Donald Trump) spotlighting unfounded or dangerous assertions by the president and other purveyors of misinformation. No one who followed most coverage of the pandemic was left in doubt that our societies were facing, to recall the climate scientists’ statement, “a catastrophic threat”—and this outcome was because journalists did not shrink from “telling it like it is.”

Now, journalists must bring that same sense of professional dedication to covering the climate emergency. As Guterres pointed out, the earth “is headed for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than 3 degrees [Celsius] this century.” Such an increase, science makes clear, would be a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people, and civilization as we know it. Saying so is no more partisan than saying this coronavirus is highly contagious and threatens to kill millions but can be contained if people wear masks and physically distance.

Climate journalism has come a long way in 2020. If 2019 was the year when the mainstream media, especially in the United States, at last abandoned the “climate silence” that had blunted public understanding and political action for so long, 2020 has been the year when politicians and newsrooms alike began treating climate as a top-tier issue that demanded serious attention. For the first time, climate change was discussed at length during the US presidential and vice presidential debates; it was even raised during the Senate runoff debates in Georgia. There were still shortcomings: For example, coverage of last summer’s hurricanes often did not mention that climate change helps drive extreme weather. But those errors were later rectified as coverage of the California wildfires generally made the climate connection.

Coverage of the secretary general’s appeal for declarations of a climate emergency, however, illustrates that there is still far to go. Although Reuters ran an article that headlined Guterres’s statement, and the Associated Press referenced it in one sentence, many of the world’s biggest news organizations did not even report it, much less headline it.

The coming months will be a pivotal time in the climate emergency. In Washington, the question will be whether the incoming Biden administration can implement reforms matching the scope and severity of the crisis, and whether Republicans continue to obstruct progress and thereby knowingly condemn young people to a future hell on earth. Globally, the UN summit in November will decide whether the world’s governments do not merely pledge in words to reach “net zero” emissions by mid-century but also take actions to do so.

Declaring a “climate emergency” is, too, a matter of words, but politics is often a dance between words and deeds. Words can set the stage for deeds, both by clarifying what is at stake and by providing a standard for holding leaders to account. News organizations have big megaphones, and in 2020 we used them well to help steer our societies through a terrible pandemic. Let 2021 be the year that we declare, in accordance with science, that humanity is facing a climate emergency—an emergency we promise to illuminate and, we hope, help humanity overcome.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-emergency-united-nations/
UN Secretary General: Without the US in the Paris Agreement, Humanity Faces Climate ‘Suicide’https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/paris-agreement-biden-climate-suicide/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardDec 2, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

he way we are moving is a suicide,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in an interview on Monday, and humanity’s survival will be “impossible” if the United States doesn’t rejoin the Paris Agreement and achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged.

The secretary general said that “of course” he had been in touch with President-elect Biden and looked forward to welcoming the United States into a “global coalition for net zero by 2050” that the UN has organized. The country is the world’s largest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions and its biggest military and economic power, Guterres noted, so “there is no way we can solve the [climate] problem…without strong American leadership.”

In an extraordinary, if largely unheralded, diplomatic achievement, most of the world’s leading emitters have already joined the UN’s “net zero by 2050” coalition, including the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and China (which is the world’s largest source of annual emissions and has committed to achieving carbon neutrality “before 2060”). India, meanwhile, the world’s third largest annual emitter, is the only Group of 20 country on track to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, despite needing to lift many of its people out of poverty, an achievement Guterres called “remarkable.” Along with fellow petro-state Russia, the United States has been the only major holdout, after Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing the country from the Paris Agreement soon after he became president four years ago.

The new pledges could bring the Paris Agreement’s goals “within reach,” provided that the pledges are fulfilled, concluded an analysis by the independent research group Climate Action Tracker. If so, temperature rise could be limited to 2.1 C, the group said—higher than the agreement’s target of 1.5 to 2 C, but a major improvement from the 3 to 5 C future that business as usual would deliver.

“The targets set at Paris were always meant to be increased over time,” Guterres said. “[Now,] we need to align those commitments with a 1.5 C future, and then you must implement.”

Reiterating scientists’ warning that humanity faces “a climate emergency,” the secretary general said that achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 is imperative if we are to avoid “irreversible” impacts that would be “absolutely devastating for the world economy and for human life.” He said rich countries must honor their obligation under the Paris Agreement to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries limit their own climate pollution and adapt to the heat waves, storms, and sea-level rise already underway. The trillions of dollars now being invested to revive pandemic-battered economies also must be spent in a “green” way, Guterres argued, or today’s younger generations will inherit “a wrecked planet.” And he predicted that the oil and gas industry, in its present form, will die out before the end of this century as economies shift to renewable energy sources.

The secretary general’s interview, conducted by CBS News, The Times of India, and El País on behalf of the journalistic consortium Covering Climate Now, is part of a 10-day push by the UN to reinvigorate the Paris Agreement before a follow-up conference next year. That conference, known as the 26th Conference of the Parties, or COP 26, was supposed to take place this week but was postponed because of the pandemic. On December 12, 2020, Guterres will mark the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement by convening a global climate summit with Boris Johnson, who as prime minister of the UK is the official host of COP 26, which occurs in Glasgow, Scotland, next November.

A total of 110 countries have joined the “net zero by 2050” coalition, the secretary general said, a development he attributed to growing recognition of the increasingly frequent and destructive extreme weather events climate change is unleashing around the world and the “tremendous pressure” governments have faced from civil society, including millions of young people protesting in virtually every country as well as more and more workers in the private sector.

“Governments, until now, thought to a certain extent that they could do whatever they wanted,” Guterres said. “But now…we see the youth mobilizing in fantastic ways all over the world.” And with solar and other renewable energy sources now cheaper than carbon-based equivalents, investors are realizing that “the sooner that they move…to portfolios linked to the new green and digital economy, the best it will be for their own assets and their own clients.”

For a global economy that still relies on oil, gas, and coal for most of its energy and much of its food production, moving to “net zero” by 2050 nevertheless represents a tectonic shift—all the more so because scientists calculate that emissions must fall roughly by half over the next 10 years to hit the 2050 target. Achieving those goals will require fundamental shifts in both public and private policy, including building no new coal plants and phasing out existing ones, Guterres said. Governments must also reform tax and subsidy practices.

There should be “no more subsidies for fossil fuels,” the secretary general said. “It doesn’t make any sense that taxpayers’ money is spent destroying the planet. At the same time, we should shift taxation from income to carbon, from taxpayers to polluters. I’m not asking governments to increase taxes. I’m asking governments to reduce the taxes on payrolls or on companies that commit to invest in green energy and put that level of taxation on carbon pollution.”

Governments must also ensure a “just transition” for the people and communities affected by the phase-out of fossil fuels, with workers getting unemployment payments and retraining for jobs in the new green economy. “When I was in government [as the prime minister of Portugal], we had to close all the coal mines,” he recalled. “We did everything we could to make sure that those who were working in those mines would have their futures guaranteed.”

The “cycle of oil as the key engine of the world economy is finished,” Guterres said. By the end of the 21st century, petroleum might still be used “as raw materials for different products…but the role of fossil fuels as [an energy source] will be minimal.” As for fossil fuel companies’ stated ambitions to continue producing more oil, gas and coal, Guterres said that throughout history various economic sectors have risen and fallen and that the digital sector has now displaced the fossil fuel sector as the center of the global economy. “I’m totally convinced that a lot of the oil and gas that is today in the soil,” he said, “will remain in the soil.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/paris-agreement-biden-climate-suicide/
The Fall of Trump Propels the Climate Story Into a Decisive New Erahttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/trump-lose-climate-change/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardNov 11, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

onald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election is the biggest development in the climate story in years, if only because it means that the story might not have a hellish ending after all. News columns and Zoom meetings are already abuzz with to-do lists and speculation about what the administration of President-elect Joe Biden will or will not be able to accomplish on climate change. But that is another story for another day.

Like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Apollo 11 moon landing, Trump’s impending departure from the most powerful office on earth is an event of epochal importance whose ramifications cannot be fully fathomed at this point, much less confidently forecast. Instead of trying to predict what will come next, this is a time to pause and reflect. Let’s recognize the magnitude of what America’s voters just did and ponder what lessons it holds for the challenges ahead.

Penn State University scientist Michael Mann spoke for many climate experts when he warned before the election that “a second term for Trump would be ‘game over’ for climate.” That was not partisan hyperbole but unsentimental physics and math. To avoid an apocalyptic future—one shaped by intensifying heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and storms—humanity must slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, scientists with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in a landmark 2018 report. That remains an immensely difficult challenge, requiring shifts in economic behavior at a scale and speed the scientists called “unprecedented” in human history. But the task would have become outright impossible, Mann explained, if the world’s biggest economy spent a second four years galloping in the wrong direction under a reelected president Trump, with his pro–fossil fuel policies and rejection of the Paris Agreement.

That is the suicidal scenario humanity just avoided.

But make no mistake: Many more mountains remain to be climbed in order to preserve a livable climate. For example, three of the world’s four biggest economies—the European Union, Japan, and China—have recently pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 or, in China’s case, 2060; citizens, public officials, and business leaders will have to push those countries’ governments to make that scientifically correct target a political reality. The United States must match these net-zero efforts, starting during the Biden administration and despite all-but-certain opposition from Republicans and other fossil fuel loyalists in Congress, and sustain that progress for decades. Meanwhile, business and financial interests the world over must shift investment and loans away from the climate-destabilizing status quo and toward clean energy, regenerative agriculture, and other foundations of a post-carbon economy. And all this and more must be accomplished even as the diminished yet still-formidable wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry continues obstructing progress.

Removing Trump, then, is a necessary first step—but it is only a first step, a prerequisite to the difficult journey ahead. Where to turn next?

Good journalism is vital to answering that question, because the overall US election results, including congressional races, yield decidedly mixed signals about how committed America’s voters are to climate action.

Young activists—with their moral fervor; massive street protests; insistence on the intersectionality of racial, class, gender, and environmental justice; and pathbreaking policy reforms such as the Green New Deal—have upended climate politics in recent years. In the United States, the Sunrise Movement and other groups mounted extensive campaigns to register and mobilize voters, especially other young people, to oppose Trump and vote champions of climate action into office. Post-election, activists have claimed considerable credit for the outcome. Observing that the candidate “with the strongest climate plan in history just won the White House with the most votes ever,” Varshini Prakash, the executive director of Sunrise, said that “a big part of the story is an unprecedented level of youth voter turnout, especially among young people of color.”

On the other hand, more than 71 million Americans, very nearly half of the electorate, voted to reelect a president whose climate policies promised certain death for the world they know and love. They did so even though preelection polling consistently found that sizable, bipartisan majorities of the American public supported clean energy and other forms of climate action. And while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct that Representative Michael Levin, a fellow cosponsor of the Green New Deal, kept his seat, quite a few other Green New Deal backers—including Sunrise-backed candidates Mike Siegel in Texas, Beth Doglio in Washington, and Marquita Bradshaw in Tennessee—were handily defeated.

Identifying the ways in which the climate crisis shaped political engagement this election cycle should be a top priority for newsrooms in the weeks ahead. There is no substitute for shoe-leather reporting and talking in-depth with as many voters as possible to understand how and why they voted as they did. Probing, open-minded interviews can drill down into individual races, comparing what political parties, candidates, activist groups, and others claim they accomplished with what voters say as well as the final election tallies. Don’t put much stock in exit polls, which have increasingly been recognized as methodologically suspect. Better insights come from Pew Research Center analyses that match post-election voter surveys with official voting records. It takes months to produce such analyses, however; in the meantime, newsrooms should be cautious about drawing conclusions about what role climate change did or did not play in the 2020 US elections.

What’s clear is that the fall of Trump propels the climate story into a decisive new era. The world is about to see whether the US government will help humanity grasp a final opportunity to turn down the heat. For journalists on the climate beat, it’s an exciting, important time. There are indeed mountains still to climb in humanity’s quest for a livable climate future. Strong and steadfast journalism is essential to lighting the way.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/trump-lose-climate-change/
The World Is Burning, but the Political Press Insists It’s a Horse Racehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/election-2020-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormickOct 29, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

ast week, audiences watched the most substantive conversation on climate change to ever feature in a US presidential debate. Moderator Kristen Welker, of NBC News, first asked the candidates what each would do to combat climate change while also supporting job growth—a welcome improvement on questions in the first presidential debate and vice presidential debate, which absurdly framed climate change as a matter of opinion. Welker followed up with a sharp question about the disproportionate levels of pollution experienced by communities of color, the first environmental justice question to ever appear in a general election debate.

In response, Trump repeated falsehoods he’s deployed in the past—asserting, for example, that wind power is “extremely expensive” and inflating the cost of Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan by a factor of 50—while Biden called climate change an “existential threat to humanity” and detailed how he would invest public money to build a clean-energy economy and create jobs. On Welker’s pollution question, Trump rejected the premise, saying incorrectly that the communities she mentioned are paid for their trouble; Biden, meanwhile, gave an informed description of the negative health outcomes that “fenceline” communities routinely face. Despite the uneven back-and-forth, it was a refreshing, all-too-rare moment in US media coverage of the climate story: nearly 12 minutes, in prime time, during which journalism treated climate change as a serious, multidimensional subject worthy of public discourse.

And then what did the political press do with this material in its follow-up coverage? Fumbled it, mostly.

Across the media, journalists fell back on horse-race framing that ignored science and made faulty assumptions, focusing especially on Biden’s pledge to “transition from the oil industry” to renewable energy. Following Trump’s lead on stage, post-debate coverage portrayed Biden’s position as economically risky and a political liability. Welker’s own NBC News suggested Biden’s comments “could be costly in battleground states.” The Washington Post wondered “how politically damaging” Biden’s comments were; a second story called them “a debate-night stumble.” Even E&E News, an outlet that focuses exclusively on energy and the environment, asked, “Will Biden’s end-oil pledge work magic for Trump?”

Let’s get one thing straight: If humanity is to have any chance of avoiding the worst of climate change, America, like the rest of the world, must transition away from fossil fuels. That’s not politics—it’s science. The United Nations climate science panel says humanity needs to cut emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. Accordingly, a speedy transition away from fossil fuels has been central to all serious climate advocacy for years. Such a transition, via heavy investments in clean energy, is central to the climate plan Biden put forward in July.

And yet—science be damned—most news outlets fixated on the hay Republicans sought to make of the former vice president’s remarks. Journalists quoted liberally from dubious sources echoing Trump’s claim that Biden’s plan would tank the economy, when the plan in fact promises to create millions of jobs. At times, outlets lent further credibility to the attacks by dressing them up in their own strong language. (Conservatives, Politico wrote, were “accusing the Democratic nominee of being callous with the economy in his proposals for tackling climate change” [emphasis added].) Meanwhile, as climate journalist Emily Atkin observed in her newsletter Heated, the vast majority of coverage “[ignored] the fact that Trump doesn’t have a climate plan at all.” Of 30 stories that Atkin analyzed from mainstream outlets, all mentioned the potential consequences of strong climate action, but “only five discussed the cost of doing nothing.”

The coverage’s negative framing was also remarkably ill-informed about public opinion. Nearly 80 percent of Americans favor investments in alternative energy over fossil fuels, according to a 2020 poll by Pew Research, with two-thirds saying the government should do more to fight climate change. In Pennsylvania specifically, where pundits have centered the “post-debate political fallout” narrative, perspectives have shifted against fossil fuels. Recent polling shows residents overwhelmingly favor strong climate action; moreover, a slight majority opposes fracking, which Trump and many in the media have framed as a wedge issue in this election, despite Biden’s repeated insistence that he does not intend to end the practice.

Tellingly, it was climate reporters who cut through the political noise and leveled with their audiences on these matters. Referencing this year’s cascade of extreme weather events, Bill Weir, CNN’s chief climate correspondent, called out Trump’s “insistence that the US remain reliant on fossil fuels, despite the overwhelming evidence that the hell and high water of 2020 is just the beginning.” Alex Kaufman, at HuffPost, observed that “Trump’s ongoing push to deregulate the oil and gas industry has actually cost jobs in regions badly hit by the sudden plunge in oil prices at the start of the pandemic.” By overlooking facts like these, the political press instead gave the climate discussion over almost entirely to right-wing talking points.

For decades, the press’s greatest failure when it came to climate change—beyond its indefensible silence—was casting the story primarily as a matter of partisan politics, when in fact climate change is a science story with political implications. It’s clear many journalists have yet to kick the bad habit.

That’s a shame, because, broadly speaking, mainstream coverage of the climate story has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. Major outlets including The Washington Post, CNN, and Time have issued truly landmark pieces of climate reporting; The New York Times, Bloomberg, and, as of this month, The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, and El País have launched impressive new brands and climate sections; and we at Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration led by The Guardian, The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review, have worked with hundreds of news organizations at every level of the industry to strengthen their coverage.

Time is short, however. This election, regardless of who wins, marks an opportunity for news outlets to recommit to the climate story, which will only become more important and all-encompassing in the years ahead. To get the story right, newsroom leaders must encourage their journalists—not just climate reporters but reporters on every beat, as well as assignment editors, headline writers, copy staffs, and social media teams—to deepen their understanding of the climate crisis and its solutions and incorporate that knowledge into every facet of their work.

In the few days that remain before the election and in the months that will follow, journalists must ask themselves if they’re truly conveying the gravity of the climate crisis to their audiences, as well as all the challenges and opportunities it entails. To do so means ditching the horse-race obsession and catching up with the facts. It also means resisting partisan narratives and assumptions and insisting on the climate story as a matter of life and death. It’s increasingly evident what makes good climate coverage; the question, as ever, is whether journalists will deliver it.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/election-2020-climate/
What Amy Coney Barrett Means For the Climatehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/supreme-court-climate-barrett/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark HertsgaardOct 21, 2020Roe v. Wade and Obamacare aren’t the only things endangered by Republicans’ rushed Supreme Court nomination.]]>

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

magine any serious adult saying they don’t know whether gravity is real. That, in effect, is what judge Amy Coney Barrett testified to the US Senate during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week. After denying that she had any “firm views” about climate change, Barrett told California Democrat and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris that she would not comment further because climate science is “a very contentious matter of public debate.”

It’s not, of course. “There is as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity,” Michael Mann, one the world’s leading climate scientists, recently told 60 Minutes. And Barrett’s views about climate science matter enormously.

The Supreme Court plays a decisive, if often overlooked, role in shaping US environmental policy. The Obama administration was able to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, that greenhouse gases qualify as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act of 1970. Next year, the court will hear a case in which state and local governments are suing fossil fuel companies for the climate damages knowingly caused by the companies’ activities.

Much has been said in the press about the potential consequences of Barrett’s nomination for Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act, and rightly so. But the press also needs to make clear the implications of a Barrett appointment for the climate crisis and, specifically, the US government’s legal authority to address that crisis. Given Republicans’ determination to rush this process—the final Senate vote is reportedly scheduled for Monday, October 26—newsrooms will have to work fast.

A handful of good early stories on this subject can bring journalists up to speed and inform further reporting. The New York Times explained how putting Barrett on the court could imperil not only Massachusetts v. EPA but also the EPA’s subsequent “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare—the finding that provided the legal authority for the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan. E&E News quoted Jason Rylander, an attorney with the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, who suggested that Barrett’s inability to “admit climate change is real” casts doubt on how she could “fairly assess the validity of law and regulations enacted to address it.”

InsideClimate News published the most instructive piece to date—a detailed examination of how Barrett’s legal views, especially with respect to government regulation, clash with the very notion of government action against climate change. The author, Marianne Levell, interviewed environmental law scholars who described Barrett’s grooming by the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that abhors government regulation as an infringement on economic liberty and has propelled scores of alumni onto federal courts. A close reading of Barrett’s writings, the scholars said, reveals an originalist view of the Constitution that would likely make her “inclined to chip away at or overturn Massachusetts v. EPA.”

The scholars were especially concerned that the Supreme Court could, with Barrett’s help, limit the right of individual states to sue under the Clean Air Act. To date, Lavelle reported, “115 multi-state lawsuits [have been] filed to block or reverse Trump administration actions like repeal of the Clean Power Plan, the weakening of fuel economy standards and the elimination of requirements to control methane emissions at oil and gas industry facilities.” She added that “more than a third of the cases are still pending, and most will be headed for the Supreme Court.”

The so-called #ExxonKnew lawsuits, which seek to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the damages their products have caused, as well as for the companies’ decades of knowing and lying about those damages, could be at particular risk. The Supreme Court has already put on next year’s docket a case in which BP and other companies are appealing lower-court rulings in suits filed by five cities—Baltimore, Md.; Boulder, Col.; and Imperial Beach, Richmond, and Santa Cruz, Calif.—as well as three California counties. The oil companies argue that the cases should be heard in federal court, a contention that the local governments dismiss as a legally baseless delaying tactic.

Covering Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination illustrates a core principle of good climate journalism: Every beat in the newsroom—from weather and the economy to, in this case, politics and the law—is part of the climate beat. Granted, unpacking the climate implications of this story is no simple task, especially given Republicans’ haste to vote on Barrett’s nomination before Election Day. Given the stakes, however, newsrooms must somehow rise to the challenge.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/supreme-court-climate-barrett/
Journalists Must Demystify the Green New Dealhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/green-new-deal-media/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardOct 14, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

n the first presidential debate, in September, Donald Trump was eager to attack his opponent’s $2 trillion plan to address the climate crisis. “He’s talking about a Green New Deal,” the president said, talking over Joe Biden. In the vice presidential debate, Mike Pence likewise assailed the Green New Deal, invoking the term 11 times as a threat that “literally would crush American jobs.”

While the Biden climate plan is indeed informed by Green New Deal principles—Biden calls it a “crucial framework”—its goals and methods are narrower in scope. Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have stated repeatedly that they do not support a Green New Deal.

Nevertheless, Republicans’ efforts to demonize Biden’s climate plan as a Green New Deal inadvertently highlight how superficially many mainstream news outlets have covered that foundational proposal to date. Except for Fox News, which has devoted lots of airtime to trashing the idea with wildly inaccurate claims, most news outlets have covered the Green New Deal solely in horse-race terms and uncritically internalized Republicans’ negative framing of the idea. Some post-debate commentary, for instance, focused on whether Trump and Pence’s attacks on a Green New Deal could cost Biden votes in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the public has been left largely in the dark about the basic, underlying questions of what a Green New Deal actually is and what it would aim to achieve.

No matter which candidate wins the US presidential election, the Green New Deal is likely to remain central to debates about climate policy. If Trump wins, the climate movement and other opponents of his policies will continue to press for a Green New Deal in Congress and across the United States. If Biden wins, the Green New Deal will be the standard by which progressives in his party judge the new president’s approach. It’s past time for media coverage to spell out what a Green New Deal is and is not, how the various versions of it would work in practice—including the closely related Biden planand, above all, what it would mean to people’s daily lives.

In a word, journalists must demystify the Green New Deal. The public and policy-makers alike need a foundation of accurate information and fact-based analysis before they can intelligently decide whether to support this response to the climate problem, not to mention the ongoing economic contraction driven by coronavirus lockdowns.

That Republicans’ efforts have succeeded in making the words “Green New Deal” political poison is dubious. Polls show the general idea is actually quite popular with Americans, and more than 70 percent of Americans reject the notion that strong climate policy will hurt the economy. What seems most accurate is, as one poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found last year, that many Americans simply don’t know enough about the Green New Deal to form an opinion one way or another.

In this regard, the press has not helped. More than three in four Americans in the Post poll said they had heard “little or nothing” about the Green New Deal. Multiple studies from the research organization Media Matters for America have found that the Green New Deal is mentioned frequently on Fox News, typically in mocking terms, but almost never on CNN, MSNBC, and the major networks.

Even if the Biden plan is not exactly the Green New Deal, the latter is here to stay as a political idea, and not only in the United States. Versions of a Green New Deal have now been advocated by governments in Europe and Asia, as well as by various state and local governments in the US. And some congressional candidates have made a Green New Deal central to their appeal to voters. A new campaign ad for Mike Siegel, a Democrat in Texas’s 10th district, features a gravel-voiced worker saying that he and his fellow union members want Siegel “to bring our vision of a Green New Deal to Congress.”

To oversimplify, a Green New Deal aims to combat the climate crisis by creating an abundance of green jobs and business opportunities through targeted government investments. In that sense, it resembles the original New Deal of the 1930s, which combated massive unemployment creating jobs through government spending. Today’s Green New Deal, as outlined in the congressional resolution cosponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey in early 2019, is more an ambitious statement of goals than an assemblage of fine-tuned policy proposals. It envisions a broad mobilization of government resources, creating millions of jobs and corresponding business opportunities, to curb greenhouse gas emissions while building up renewable energy and green infrastructure.

The differences between Biden’s plan and the Green New Deal are important and deserve attention from reporters. It’s worth remembering that Biden’s plan emerged from negotiations between members of his campaign and progressives in the Bernie Sanders camp, following Biden’s victory in the primaries. The core of the Biden plan is its pledge to decarbonize America’s electricity sector by 2035. Borrowing from the Sanders approach, the Biden plan also stipulates that 40 percent of federal climate spending will occur in communities of people of color and the poor, who historically have endured the most damage from fossil fuel pollution. The Biden plan leaves out some of the Sanders camp’s other social-equity goals—on health care and housing, for example—but the focus on the economy remains central. “We can get to net zero, in terms of energy production, by 2035…creating millions of good-paying jobs,” Biden said during the debate.

Meanwhile, the science is clear: Avoiding catastrophic amounts of temperature rise demands rapid, far-reaching decarbonization of the world’s economies. Emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, the scientists of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2018 in their landmark Global Warming of 1.5 C report. Achieving this goal will require transforming economies at a pace “unprecedented” in human history, the scientists said.

This moment—arguably America’s last to get the climate issue right—demands that the press do a much better job of explaining these scientific and economic realities to their audiences. Trump, according to his own words and actions, has no plan on climate. Biden does have a plan, one that is informed by, but ultimately different from, the Green New Deal. Rather than contributing to an environment in which the words “Green New Deal” are treated as a political liability, good journalism should assess both candidates’ plans on their merits and inform the public accordingly. That means also finally telling audiences the truth about the Green New Deal.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/green-new-deal-media/
‘60 Minutes,’ ‘The Guardian,’ and Game-Changing New Climate Sciencehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/60-minutes-climate-michael-mann/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardOct 7, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story.

n Sunday night, America met Michael Mann on 60 Minutes, one of the country’s most watched and influential television news programs for nearly 50 years now. A professor at Penn State University, Mann is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, and also one of the most outspoken. The 60 Minutes segment, titled “Cause and Effect,” focused on climate change and California’s ongoing record wildfires, which have burned more than 4 million acres to date. After showing the viral clip of Donald Trump telling state officials that Earth will “start getting cooler,” correspondent Scott Pelley asked Mann about the president’s additional assertion that “science doesn’t know.”

“The president doesn’t know,” Mann retorted. “And he should know better.”

The geophysicist explained to the roughly 10 million viewers of 60 Minutes that all the world’s leading scientific institutions, including the US National Academy of Sciences, have reached a consensus. In a sound bite that journalists across the United States should quote in their own climate reporting, Mann kept it simple enough for an 8-year-old to understand: “There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”

In most other countries, such an elementary statement would be unnecessary in a major news outlet. But in the US, where only one person in five understands how overwhelming the scientific consensus about climate change is, it makes sense to spell it out.

Covering Climate Now was happy to work with our partners at CBS News in developing this 60 Minutes story. CBS broadcast it two days after The Guardian, Covering Climate Now’s lead media partner, published a companion interview with Mann, in which he delivered a rarity: pathbreaking climate news that isn’t depressing.

There has been “a dramatic change in [scientists’] understanding” of the climate system in recent years, Mann said. It’s a change many journalists may be unaware of, he added, noting that the scientific community hasn’t done a great job of explaining it. Humanity, it turns out, may have a bit more time to prevent climate breakdown than previously believed.

Mann is well positioned to explain this shift in scientific understanding. He directs the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, none more famous than 1999’s “hockey stick” study that showed, as 60 Minutes put it, that “today’s rate of warming began with the Industrial Revolution.”

Until recently, Mann explained in The Guardian, scientists believed the climate system—a catch-all term for the interaction among Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and other parts of the biosphere—carried a long lag effect. This lag effect was mainly a function of carbon dioxide’s remaining in the atmosphere and trapping heat for many decades after being emitted. So, even if humanity halted all CO2 emissions overnight, average global temperatures would continue to rise for 25 to 30 years, while also driving more intense heat waves, droughts, and other climate impacts. Halting emissions will take at least 20 years, under the best of circumstances, and so humanity was likely locked in to at least 50 more years of rising temperatures and impacts.

Research over the past 10 years, however, has revised this vision of the climate system. Scientists used to “treat carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as if it was a simple control knob that you turn up” and temperatures climb accordingly, “but in the real world we now know that’s not what happens,” Mann said. Instead, if humans “stop emitting carbon right now…the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The actual lag effect between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise, then, is not 25 to 30 years but, per Mann, “more like three to five years.”

In short, this game-changing new scientific understanding suggests that humanity can turn down the heat almost immediately by slashing heat-trapping emissions. “Our destiny is determined by our behavior,” said Mann, who finds that information “empowering.”

Of course, this glimmer of hope is empowering only if humans—especially those with governmental and policy-making positions—actually act. Mann has said before, and he reiterated in the Guardian interview, that a second presidential term for Trump would be “game over” for the climate. That’s not Mann’s partisan judgment, he insisted. It’s straightforward math.

To prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature, humanity must cut emissions in half by 2030, Mann said, citing 2018’s landmark report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That will require a rate of change “unprecedented” in human history, according to the IPCC scientists: emissions had to fall by 5 percent year after year. But if a reelected Trump spent an additional four years pushing the world’s biggest economy in the opposite direction, hitting the 2030 target would become “essentially impossible,” Mann said. If emissions don’t begin falling until 2025, they would have to decline by roughly 15 percent every year over the following five years. “That may be, although not physically impossible, societally impossible,” Mann said. “It just may not be economically possible or socially viable to do it that [quickly].”

Just as The Guardian has long been the gold standard for print coverage of climate change, so 60 Minutes is now setting an example of how broadcast journalists can cover what Mann calls “the greatest crisis that we face as a civilization.” In fact, this was the second consecutive Sunday that 60 Minutes ran a segment covering climate change; last week, Sir David Attenborough, the legendary naturalist and BBC filmmaker, described how human activity over the past 60 years has not only overheated the planet but driven many plant and animal species to the brink of extinction, in turn threatening humanity’s own future. (Attenborough’s new autobiographical documentary, A Life On Our Planet, premiered on Netflix on October 3.)

That future is on the ballot in the United States this election year. Between now and Election Day, November 3, newsrooms should make abundantly clear not only what’s at stake but what voters can do about it. As Mann said in the Guardian story’s kicker, “The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/60-minutes-climate-michael-mann/
What Is Chris Wallace Thinking?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/debate-chris-wallace-climate/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardSep 29, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

t tonight’s presidential debate in Cleveland, moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News will doubtless ask Donald Trump about the blockbuster New York Times report that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017 and no federal income taxes at all in 10 of the last 15 years. Wallace would be laughed out of the journalistic community if he failed to question a sitting president about such an obviously newsworthy revelation. But why isn’t Wallace planning to ask Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden about an even more urgent, subject: the climate crisis that is well on its way to rendering the earth uninhabitable in our children’s lifetimes?

On September 14, Trump visited California as the state suffered its worst wildfires in recorded history. Governor Gavin Newsom and other California officials implored Trump to recognize the scientific consensus that rising temperatures and drought were making such fires worse.

“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” Trump responded.

“I wish science agreed with you,” said Wade Crowfoot, the secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump shot back.

In fact, the science is unequivocal: There is zero chance of the earth “getting cooler” anytime soon. Once emitted, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for many decades. Even if all CO2 emissions were halted overnight, global temperatures would keep rising “for about 25 to 30 years,” Sir David King, the former chief science advisor to the British government, has explained.

As the presidential race enters its final weeks, will journalists challenge Trump’s dangerous inaccuracies about the intensifying heat waves, wildfires, and other impacts that are locked in for decades to come on this planet? Will they help the public understand the facts, perhaps by reporting that 11,000 scientists have warned that humanity faces “a climate emergency”? Will they reference United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’s statement that even in this time of a global pandemic, ensuing economic contraction, racial justice protests, and other front page news, “the climate emergency is the central question facing the world”?

The upcoming three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate offer an excellent opportunity to ventilate these questions, but don’t hold your breath. Wallace has made clear that climate change is not one of the subjects he plans to discuss with Trump and Biden tonight. And while climate change is intrinsically connected to each of the six subjects Wallace does plans to address—most obviously, “the records” of each candidate—Wallace’s ambition to be “as invisible as possible” during the debate makes it unlikely he’ll ask about those connections. If climate change is to be discussed, it’s Biden who will have to raise it.

It’s tempting to ascribe Wallace’s omission to the climate denial that pervades Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, but unfortunately it’s also true that much of the US mainstream media has long maintained a kind of Climate Silence. Moderators asked not a single question about climate change during the 2016 presidential debates. Or the 2012, 2008, or 2004 debates. (One must go back to 2000 to find 14 minutes of discussion between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush.) And this summer, US television networks were shamefully reticent about reporting how climate change was contributing to the fires in California and the hurricanes pummeling the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Only one of the 93 news segments that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC aired during the week after Hurricane Laura slammed Louisiana connected the storm to climate change, according to a study by the watchdog group Media Matters. Of 46 segments ABC, NBC, and CBS aired on the California wildfires between September 5 and 8, only seven mentioned climate change, though later reporting, especially on NBC as part of a special week of “Climate Politics 2020” coverage coordinated by Covering Climate Now, was significantly better.

For years, many journalists have shunned plain-spoken coverage of climate change for fear they will appear partisan. That fallacy reflects the media’s single greatest error in covering climate change: treating it as a political story more than a science story. But the science of carbon dioxide is indifferent to political partisanship; it remains true whether presidents—or journalists—accept it or not.

The 2020 elections will shape whether humanity will “keep driving off the climate cliff or take the last exit,” Justin Worland wrote in July in Time, one of a growing number of news outlets finally doing justice to the climate story. Just as Americans deserve to know before they vote whether their president pays his fair share of taxes, so they should know whether all candidates seeking public office—for the presidency, Congress, state, and local offices—respect climate science, understand what’s at stake, and have real plans to address this onrushing emergency. But voters can’t easily do that without journalists’ help. It’s our job to separate truth from fiction and the important from the trivial. The press should be asking the climate question at the presidential debates and every opportunity from now through Election Day. Anything less is a betrayal of our civic duty as journalists.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/debate-chris-wallace-climate/
These Races Will Shape What the US Elections Mean for Climate Progresshttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-progress-candidates-elections/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark HertsgaardSep 24, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

hat follows are not candidate endorsements. Rather, this nonpartisan guide aims to inform voters’ choices, help journalists decide what races to follow, and explore what the 2020 elections could portend for climate action in the United States in 2021 and beyond.

Will the White House Turn Green?

Whether the White House changes hands is the most important climate question of the 2020 elections. President Donald Trump rejects climate science, is withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, and has accelerated fossil fuel development. His climate policy seems to be, as he tweeted in January when rejecting a US Army Corps of Engineers proposal to protect New York City from storm surges, “Get your mops and buckets ready.”

Joe Biden, who started the 2020 campaign with a climate position so weak that activists gave it an “F,” called Trump a “climate arsonist” during California’s recent wildfires. Biden backs a $2 trillion plan to create millions of jobs while slashing emissions—a Green New Deal in all but name. Equally striking, his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, has endorsed phasing out fossil fuel production—a politically explosive scientific imperative.

The race will be decided in a handful of battleground states, five of which already face grave climate dangers: Florida (hurricanes and sea-level rise), North Carolina (ditto), Texas (storms and drought), Michigan (floods), and Arizona (heat waves and drought). Public concern is rising in these states, but will that concern translate into votes?

Will Democrats Flip the Senate, and by Enough to Pass a Green New Deal?

With Democrats all but certain to maintain their majority in the US House of Representatives, the Senate will determine whether a potential Biden administration can actually deliver climate progress. Democrats need to pick up three seats to flip the Senate if Biden wins, four if he doesn’t. But since aggressive climate policy is shunned by some Democrats, notably Joe Manchin of coal-dependent West Virginia, Democrats probably need to gain five or six Senate seats to pass a Green New Deal.

Environmentalists, including the League of Conservation Voters, are targeting six Republicans who polls suggest are vulnerable.

  • Steve Daines of Montana, who denies climate science
  • Martha McSally of Arizona
  • Thom Tillis of North Carolina
  • Susan Collins of Maine
  • Joni Ernst of Iowa (bankrolled by Charles Koch)
  • John James of Michigan (also a Koch beneficiary)

Republican Senators are even at risk in conservative Kansas and Alaska. In both states, the Democratic candidates are physicians—not a bad credential amid a pandemic—who support climate action. In Kansas, Barbara Bollier faces an incumbent funded by Charles Koch. In Alaska, Al Gross urges a transition away from oil, though his openness to limited drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve dims his appeal to green groups. He faces incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, who receives an 8 percent lifetime voting record from the League of Conservation Voters.

In the House, environmentalists are working to elect these candidates, in one case over an establishment Democrat:

  • Beth Doglio of Washington state
  • Georgette Gómez of California
  • Marie Newman of Illinois
  • Cameron Webb of Virginia
  • Mike Siegel and Wendy Davis of Texas

We rightfully focus on federal climate policy, but climate action must also be made at the state and local level—and there are plenty of races and initiatives to pay attention to.

Will Local and State Races Advance Climate Progress?

The Climate Hawks

Under Democratic and Republican leadership alike, Washington has long been a graveyard for strong climate action. But governors can boost or block renewable energy; the Vermont and New Hampshire races are worth watching. Attorneys general can sue fossil fuel companies for lying about climate change; climate hawks are running for the top law enforcement seats in Montana and North Carolina. State legislatures can accelerate or delay climate progress, as the new Democratic majorities in Virginia have shown. Here, races to watch include Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Colorado.

The Climate Policy Makers

Perhaps the most powerful, and most overlooked, climate policy makers are public utility commissions. They control whether pipelines and other energy infrastructure gets built; they regulate whether electric utilities expand solar and energy efficiency or stick with the carbon-heavy status quo. Regulatory capture and outright corruption are not uncommon.

A prime example is Arizona, where a former two-term commissioner known as the godfather of solar in the state is seeking a comeback. Bill Mundell argues that since Arizona law permits utilities to contribute to commissioners’ electoral campaigns, the companies can buy their own regulators. Which may explain why super-sunny Arizona has so little installed solar capacity.

In South Dakota, Remi Bald Eagle, a Native American US Army veteran, seeks a seat on the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, which rules on the Standing Rock oil pipeline. And in what HuffPost called “the most important environmental race in the country,” Democrat Chrysta Castaneda, who favors phasing out oil production, is running for the Texas Railroad Commission, which despite its name decides what oil, gas, and electric companies in America’s leading petro-state can build.

Will the Influencers Usher in a Green New Era?

The Uncounted

The story that goes largely under-reported in every US election is how few Americans vote. In 2016, some 90 million, roughly four out of every 10 eligible voters, did not cast a ballot. Attorney Nathaniel Stinnett claims that 10 million of these nonvoters nevertheless identify as environmentalists: They support green policies, even donate to activist groups; they just don’t vote. Stinnett’s Environmental Voter Project works to awaken this sleeping giant.

The Sunrise Movement

Meanwhile, the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement are already winning elections with an unabashedly Green New Deal message. More than any other group, Sunrise pushed the Green New Deal into the national political conversation, helping Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey draft the eponymous congressional resolution. In 2020, Sunrise has helped Green New Deal champions defeat centrists in Democratic primaries, with Markey dealing Representative Joe Kennedy Jr. the first defeat a Kennedy has ever suffered in a Massachusetts election. But can Sunrise also be successful against Republicans in the general elections this fall?

The Starpower

And an intriguing wild card: celebrity firepower, grassroots activism, and big-bucks marketing have converged behind a campaign to get Latina mothers to vote climate in 2020. Latinos have long been the US demographic most concerned about climate change. Now, Vote Like A Madre aims to get 5 million Latina mothers in Florida, Texas, and Arizona to the polls. Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayak, and Lin-Manuel Miranda are urging mothers to make a “pinky promise” to vote for their kids’ climate future in November. Turning out even a quarter of those 5 million voters, though no easy task, could swing the results in three states Trump must win to remain president, which brings us back to the first category, “Will the White House Turn Green?”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-progress-candidates-elections/
The Media’s Climate Coverage Is Improving, but Time Is Very Shorthttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-media-coverage-election/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle PopeSep 23, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

n this autumn of horrific fires and deadly floods, it’s easy to overlook one bit of promising news on the climate front: Some major US media coverage of the crisis is finally getting better.

We’re seeing the evidence this week as Covering Climate Now—a collaboration of 400-plus news outlets, with a combined audience of 2 billion people—publishes and broadcasts a profusion of stories about climate change and the 2020 US elections. Climate change has been largely overlooked in general-election coverage to date, with one exception: September 14, when Donald Trump said of California’s record wildfires, inaccurately, that “science doesn’t know” whether the earth will keep getting hotter and his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, warned that reelecting a “climate arsonist” to the White House would ensure worse blazes in the future.

Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage, which runs September 21 through 28, aims to give climate change the attention it deserves. The collaborative, cofounded last year by CJR and The Nation in association with The Guardian, aims to help news organizations increase and improve coverage of the crisis as well as its solutions. Even amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the looming Supreme Court battle, and the other huge news stories of 2020, “the climate emergency remains the central question facing the world,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in a September 8 interview with Covering Climate Now. As Justin Worland wrote in a landmark special issue of Time magazine on July 7, the US elections will shape whether we “keep driving off the climate cliff or take the last exit.”

NBC News, which joined Covering Climate Now in April, kicked off this current week of joint coverage by launching a new series, Planet 2020. Al Roker, the network’s chief climate correspondent and longtime weather forecaster, has been talking about climate change on the Today show for months, describing its links to wildfires and hurricanes without wiggle words or alarmism. Now, Roker and cohost Savannah Sellers, the host of NBC’s daily digital news show Stay Tuned, are connecting the dots between extreme weather, climate change, and the 2020 elections where, as Sellers reported, “millenials and Gen-Z will make up 37 percent of eligible voters and concern over climate change is…shaping up to be more important to all voting blocs than ever before.” Also this week, Agence France Presse delivered a story to its hundreds of newsroom clients around the world that puts the Paris Agreement goals in a new light, reporting, “The richest one percent of people are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the poorest half of the world’s population.”

Good climate coverage by Covering Climate Now partners is begetting good climate coverage among the media as a whole. More of America’s leading newspapers are speaking more loudly and plainly about climate change, notably The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Arizona Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. The latter headlined a September 14 story about the state’s wildfires “A Climate Apocalypse Now.” Among magazines, Bloomberg has launched a new digital outlet and accompanying print edition, Bloomberg Green, that is a must-read for the far-reaching economic aspects of the climate story.

On television, Covering Climate Now partner PBS NewsHour continues to set the pace for sustained, informed climate coverage. And on August 8, CNN rebroadcast climate correspondent Bill Weir’s “The Road to Change, a documentary that we praised in April as perhaps the best piece of climate journalism ever done by a mainstream US news outlet.

The problem is, these and other examples of first-rate climate coverage remain the exception.

Despite recent orange skies over the West Coast and fearsome storm surges in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the 32 years since NASA scientist James Hansen’s US Senate testimony that man-made global warming had begun, the climate crisis remains a marginal afterthought in most US news coverage. Chris Wallace of Fox News has announced the topics he’ll cover when moderating the first presidential debate between Trump and Biden next week—and climate change is not on the list.

No better examples exist than the truly scandalous absence of climate change from most coverage of the wildfires, Hurricane Laura, the Iowa derecho, and countless other extreme weather events of 2020. Only one of the 93 news segments that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC aired during the week after Laura slammed the Louisiana coast connected the storm to climate change, according to a study by the watchdog group Media Matters. Of 46 segments ABC, NBC, and CBS aired on the California wildfires, only seven mentioned climate change.

This is media malpractice. It is also, from a business point of view, foolish: The public actually wants more, not less, climate coverage. According to a poll released today by our partners at The Guardian and Vice Media, 74 percent of likely voters want the moderators to ask climate questions at the upcoming presidential debates.

We are heartened by the progress Covering Climate Now has made in helping the media rise to the existential challenge of the climate crisis. Yet even as we celebrate that progress this week, we recognize how far there is to go, and how little time we have to get there. The first presidential debate takes place in less than a week, on September 29, and five weeks later is Election Day. Between now and then, newsrooms should follow the advice of Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan: “This subject must be kept front and center, with the pressure on and the stakes made abundantly clear at every turn.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-media-coverage-election/
Can the Climate Youth Tip the 2020 Election Against Trump?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-vote-youth-trump/Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,The Nation,Mark Hertsgaard,Saleemul Huq,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Andrew McCormick,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Mark Hertsgaard,Kyle Pope,Mark HertsgaardSep 21, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

oday, The Nation and other Covering Climate Now partners are holding a “First-Time Voter Youth Day” to highlight the voices of the generation most affected by climate change as we launch a week of joint coverage of Climate Politics 2020. More than any other group, the Sunrise Movement put the Green New Deal on the public agenda. Compelled by the climate emergency, its members, mostly in their teens and 20s, have organized protests (sit-ins against both Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republican Mitch McConnel) but also helped write legislation (the Green New Deal resolution cosponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey). In a new book, Winning The Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, Varshini Prakash, the group’s executive director, says the key to Sunrise’s success is the group’s use of both protest organizing and electoral organizing to build political power.

—Mark Hertsgaard

Mark Hertsgaard: The very first line of your new book says, “Young people have got to rise up.” Lots of young people have indeed risen up this year with the Sunrise movement to help Green New Deal champions defeat centrists in Democratic primary elections—Jamaal Bowman in New York, Cori Bush in Missouri, and, most famously, Ed Markey beating a Kennedy for the first time ever in Massachusetts. What’s your secret—how are you winning all these races?

Varshini Prakash: Teenagers on Zoom! I kid you not. In Jamaal Bowman’s race [in New York’s 16th congressional district], young people with Sunrise made 800,000 of his 1.3 million calls. In the Markey race, when Joe Kennedy announced, he was leading in the polls by 17 points. But Sunrise Movement students ultimately were victorious because we bring movement energy to electoral politics. We treat elections as an opportunity not just to get another person elected but to build our movement in the process.

For a really long time, we have seen leftists and progressives have a real aversion to political power, a real fear of what it means to get in the mucky muck of politics. For us, we realized that what legislation is passed is based on who [an elected official] feels accountable to. I think that what’s made Sunrise different from many climate organizations that proceeded it: We’re not afraid to marry civil disobedience and protest organizing with hard-nosed electoral organizing.

MH: Sunrise was not a big fan of Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries, yet when Biden won the nomination, you didn’t pick up your ball and go home. You’re now working hard to elect Biden. That must have been a tough decision for a lot of your members.

VP: It was a depressing, painful time after Super Tuesday when it became apparent that our endorsed candidate, Bernie Sanders, was not going to be the nominee. But especially in recent weeks, with all the wildfires, and storms, and frankly criminal negligence of Donald Trump denying climate science, many of our members, particularly in the swing states, are recognizing the importance of youth turning out in droves to defeat Trump. Because that is the only way that we have the political terrain we need to make progress on a Green New Deal.

MH: Politicians traditionally have discounted the youth vote because young people in the US tend not to vote as much as older folks do. In 2016, only 46 percent of eligible voters under the age of 30 cast a ballot. How does Sunrise get young people to believe in electoral activism?

VP: Sunrise activates young people by making electoral work about our larger mission, not about the political candidate. Our mission is to enact a 10-year transformation of virtually every part of our society to tackle the climate crisis. A politician ultimately is a tool towards achieving that end. We often say that defeating Trump is just the first step to passing a Green New Deal. And even if Biden is elected, we will need a movement force unparalleled in recent history both to ensure that he keeps his campaign promises and to fight the fossil fuel industry and the GOP, who will do everything in their power to stop us from taking action.

MH: Sunrise is competing on a very different political terrain over the next six weeks. After your democratic primary victories, now you face not just Democratic voters, but also Independents and Republicans. How are you adjusting your approach, both for the Biden-Trump race and the 18 congressional candidates you’ve endorsed?

VP: We’re planning to make 2.5 million phone calls to voters to help elect Green New Deal champions [to Congress] and defeat Donald Trump, particularly in three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. We will reach out to folks that the Democratic and Republican parties often fail to reach, particularly young voters and voters of color, and make sure they understand how this election could affect their communities. And there’s a few other races that we decided to prioritize from the beginning—for example, Mike Siegel’s race [in Texas’s 10th district] and Cori Bush’s race [in Missouri’s 1st district].

MH: Looking towards Election Day itself, there is a strong possibility of voter intimidation and even violence at the polls, along with a president who is openly indicating that he won’t accept results showing he lost. How does Sunrise analyze the situation from now through Inauguration Day in January, and what are you preparing to do?

VP: It’s terrifying. We’re aware that we need to be ready to snap into action if and when the president attempts, essentially, a coup. We’re planning to send thousands of young people to the polls on Election Day to protect the right to vote. We’re looking at what direct actions we could do alongside what I assume will be thousands of other progressive organizations to target in particular Republican governors and elected officials who might comply with a power grab on Trump’s part. We need to make it extremely clear that this isn’t a fight just about counting votes but about the future of our democracy. Will there be equal representation for all in this country or will we traverse towards authoritarianism?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-vote-youth-trump/