Oct 31, 2021 Hot Take

More Ways to Fix Climate Coverage

Two More Points for Our Platform on Climate Coverage

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

As we mentioned a couple of newsletters back, Amy and I are doing a six-week guest column at The Nation. For our first column, we rounded up our top recommendations to fix the way climate change is covered in the mainstream press. Amy and I never wanted to imply that this platform was exhaustive, and as soon as it was published, I thought of at least two other things the media needs to do, post haste, to give the climate crisis the attention it demands.

Think Local: The horrors of the climate crisis hit you where you live, so the mainstream media needs to get better at partnering with local media outlets to tell those stories. Our media is dangerously concentrated in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, where extreme weather has not become as severe as it has for those of us who live on, say, the Gulf or West Coasts. In much of the country, local media has been devastated by disinvestment—a crisis in and of itself. At the same time, there have been great models for media partnerships. (Looking at you, ProPublica.)
This Isn’t a Game: The same day that we published our piece, one of Politico’s newsletter’s published a blurb about the “winners and losers” of the Build Back Better bill. Manchin won; environmentalists lost…. BITCH THIS AIN’T NO GAME!!!! This ain’t a mess you can come back and clean up when you damn well feel like it. This is life on earth—not just as we know it, but period. If you live on this planet, if you need oxygen to live, this is a problem for you. A fatal fucking flaw, if you will. It’s not biased to act like it.

P.S. As a reminder, the Nation column is a lot of work! So we’ve decided to take the newsletter to a bi-monthly publication schedule until January. Make sure to follow our work over there, though. We've included the first couple of pieces in this week's newsletter as well!

Sami Grover on Ditching Climate Purity

By Amy Westervelt

In his new book We Are All Climate Hypocrites Now, Sami Grover argues for individual action that moves beyond consumerism and plugs into mass mobilization on climate. I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that, to borrow a phrase, more and more people are saying this. So, I sat down with Sami to talk more about the book.

1. I know you talk about this in the book, but what prompted you to write this book?

The book started as an attempt to debunk the idea that individual action was central to tackling climate change. I had been writing about 'green living' for years—everything from composting to e-bikes to which way you should hang toilet paper to create the least amount of waste—and was profoundly disillusioned with the notion of 'lifestyle environmentalism.' Yet the more I dug in, the more I realized that I was wrong. Behavior change and individual action are crucially important. They just matter for entirely different reasons than we've been told. Rather than each of us obsessing over every aspect of our carbon footprints, we need to learn to see them as acts of mass mobilization—and be strategic about where we invest our time and energy. Not only does this lens help us to get the biggest impact for our efforts, but it also provides a pathway to going a little easier on ourselves—and each other.

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To Build a Better World, You First Have to Imagine It

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

It’s been a heavy week for those of us who want to preserve life on earth. Somehow, the latest, greatest hope for a livable future is in the hands of one man—a senator, not even a king! Given how few Americans voted for him, it’s absurd that Joe Manchin has so much national influence. But when you factor in the scale of US power and its historic and current responsibility for the climate crisis, it’s downright grotesque.

When Senator Ed Markey joined climate activists outside of the Capitol on October 7, he said, “There’s no middle ground between a livable and an unlivable world.”

But there is a world in between—and we’re in it now. It’s a world where everything feels tenuous, like if you touch anything, it might all crumble. It’s one where you feel uneasy making plans months in advance, because you can’t picture the future. Today, coming up with a 10-year plan feels ridiculous—like building a house on quicksand.

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There Can Be No Compromise on a Burning Planet

By Amy Westervelt

Earlier this month I spoke to a group of climate activists about what I call “information pollution”—the use of various PR tactics to shape the public’s understanding of everything from how the economy works to what can be done to fight climate change. The day before, at the TED Climate Countdown event in Glasgow, Scottish climate activist Lauren MacDonald had accused Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden of being personally responsible for the deaths of thousands. A video of the standoff had gone viral, and one of the activists I was speaking to wondered if, MacDonald’s bravery aside, this was really the best tactic. “Shouldn’t we think about bringing these companies into these discussions more?” she wondered.

It was not the first or even the 100th time I’ve been asked that question. Quick answer: Companies are not people; they do not have moral compasses. But also, these nonhuman entities have had a seat at the table on environmental and climate policy for a century or more, and what they’ve done with that seat is flip the table over and throw their chair at us (see, anthropomorphizing can work both ways). But there’s a longer answer here too, and it has everything to do with the subject of the talk I was giving: information pollution.

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