Mar 6, 2022 Hot Take

One of Us! One of Us!

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

If you’ve been paying attention to the media coverage of the war in Ukraine, you’ve heard it:

“This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed every day.”

“Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!”

The shock. The horror. Won’t someone THINK of the WHITE people!

Before I go any further, let me be clear: we absolutely should be thinking of the Ukranians in this hour of dire need. Any barrier to helping them should be removed immediately. We should recognize their humanity and match it with humane treatment. We should see ourselves in them. But to state the please-God-let-it-be-obvious: we should do so not because they are European, but because they are human. And we should extend the same compassion to Congolese and Eritreans and Liberians and Arabs and Persians and Kurds and Indians and Bangladeshis and Filipinos and Martenese and Rohingya and all the other people all over the world running from conflict and collapse all over the world.

It’s the shock that really kills me. It’s rooted in this inane idea that “that” doesn’t happen “here,” not to “us.” I heard it at the height of the Ebola crisis in 2014, too. I remember “experts” smugly and callously dismissing any fears of ebola on American soil with a flippant “just don’t rub feces on your face and you’ll be fine.”* Like that’s what Africans do. But also: we should have been concerned about Ebola whether or not it was likely to make it to the United States, because it was happening to human beings!!!

Those same “experts” were completely unprepared when the COVID 19 pandemic made it to Italy—much less the United Kingdom or the United States—but couldn’t have wasted a fuck when it was “just in China.” And when Trump, a Strong Man, won the election in 2016? Or when the United Kingdom “Brexited”? Coulda knocked these fools over with a feather. This smug, dismissive narrative has a name and it’s white supremacy. These experts (usually white guys) never see it coming because they don’t see how truly unsupreme they are.

Our media has normalized the pain and suffering of people of color to the point that it barely registers as newsworthy. It’s just “a thing that happens.” And there are real consequences of that. It influences who is worthy of empathy and compassion. It’s why Nigerians and Indians fleeing Ukraine are finding closed doors instead of open arms. Because everyone is used to Black and brown people in distress.

And, yes, this is about climate change, too. The climate crisis has been tangible in the Global South for decades now, but in the Global North, so many people felt like the crisis just crept up on them in the past couple of years. Why? Because they’re supposed to have droughts and floods and storms below the equator. In other words, their suffering didn’t count. So our media looked away.

But that’s the thing: you don’t get to be willfully ignorant and then plausibly surprised. Evil has a way of finding itself on your doorstep, no matter how hard you ignore it. And to ignore the suffering of other human beings comes at a serious cost to your own humanity. What happens to the Ukranians matters because they’re one of us. So are the Arabs and Africans and Asians running for their lives and fighting for their freedom. Let’s keep the same energy for them too.

*(Sorry, it’s been a while and I can’t find the link, but those words have been etched in my memory in bloody fire for 8 years.)

Please for the Love of God, Just Hire Climate Reporters

By Amy Westervelt

As we’ve covered before, lots of big media outlets are expanding their climate coverage, and in many cases that means hiring climate reporters. Er, excuse me, hiring reporters for climate positions. Turns out, experience reporting on climate is not high on the list of requirements for these positions.

I kept noticing announcements of new hires at various outlets that are like “so and so previously covered the fashion industry, but she’s passionate about climate,” or “Joe Schmoe previously wrote the real estate column for Rich Executives Monthly.” Okay I’m sorry but what the fuck? There are SO MANY great climate reporters out there right now (and, no, I’m not simping for a job, I actually just really want to see the media get this right!). If it’s an entry-level position, sure, you gotta start somewhere. But, folks, I read a listing for the WaPo climate editor that didn’t require climate reporting experience. Vox climate editor listing? Same. A “passion” for climate sure, but no requirement to have ever actually reported on the subject.

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Of Course the War Is a Climate Story. It’s a WAR!

By: Mary Annaïse Heglar

One of the most frustrating things about working in climate media is this constantly recycled refrain that “now” is not the time to talk about climate change. We heard it at the start of the pandemic, for example. We heard it again in the summer of 2020 when protests for racial justice broke out across the country. And now again with the onset of the war in Ukraine.

It’s fucking maddening. Partially because the stakes of the climate crisis are, in a word, steep, but also because not a single story on the face of this earth is unrelated to climate change precisely because every single story takes place on this earth!

Let’s take Ukraine, shall we? For one thing, one of the reasons Russia is able to wield as much power as it does is because it is a petro-state, meaning it exports gas and oil to Europe and makes a killing doing it, literally and figuratively. Imagine if Europe had gotten off fossil fuels? Russia probably wouldn’t be able to get away with this shit!

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Why Is the IPCC Report So Inaccessible?

By Amy Westervelt

You might have heard there was a new IPCC report out this week and it was, predictably, full of bad news…because world leaders still haven’t acted on the last report and problems left ignored get worse, duh. It also delivered the message that the terrible trajectory we’re on can absolutely still be changed, it just requires FUCKING DOING SOMETHING.

I’m not here to talk about the contents of the report, though. I’m more interested in the context. I’m talking about more than 3,000 pages written in inscrutable academese, interspersed with parentheticals after every sentence that indicate how confident researchers are in it (low confidence, medium confidence, high confidence, and very high confidence). Here’s an example:

Why yes those ARE parentheticals and footnotes in the same dense paragraph! But it’s not just the document itself...

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Digest

NOTE: Most weeks, we source articles from Earther, Gizmodo’s excellent climate site – but we’re skipping them this week. Why? The Gizmodo union (which includes Jalopnik, Jezebel, The Root, Earther, and more) is on strike while they negotiate better wages and working conditions with their parent org, G/O Media, and we stand with the workers. Don’t cross the digital picket line!