Sep 26, 2021 Hot Take

Time's Up for Climate Week

Climate week, Big Oil's race to the bottom, where are all the vegan cooking shows, and a Q&A with reporter/author Katie Worth about the state of climate education in America.

Time’s Up for Climate Week

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

You may have missed it—I certainly almost did—but this week was Climate Week. What is Climate Week, you ask? Well, girl, I had to Wikipedia that shit too. Apparently, it’s a summit “alongside the UN General Assembly and brings together international leaders from business, government and civil society to showcase global climate action.” It was founded in 2009 and focused on New York City, because that’s where the United Nations headquarters is.

The first time I heard of Climate Week was in 2019, the year of the Big Climate Strike in New York. I was living in New York at the time and had created a profile for myself. Suddenly I was a sought-after guest and speaker for all of these events I probably never would have heard of otherwise. A lot of events. In one week. It was exhausting. I didn’t think Climate Week made a lot of sense as a concept then, and it makes even less sense now.

Climate Week—much like Earth Day and World Ocean Day—are relics of a time long gone when you needed to create a “moment” or a “news hook” to talk about climate change. This was back when climate change was a niche topic and you needed a reason to bring it up. Well, the world we live in today is tangibly and demonstrably on fire. Climate change is an everyday, everybody topic. So, we don’t need these manufactured events to talk about it—because even when we do that, we wind up only talking to ourselves anyway. When I looked around at those events in 2019, I saw only familiar faces, largely from my Twitter feed. No one else knew or cared that it was Climate Week. So what was the point?

Race to the Bottom

By Amy Westervelt

While “moderate” Democrats argue about whether we *really* need to ratchet down fossil fuel development just yet, the oil majors, as usual, are several steps ahead. They’ve seen the writing on the wall for a while that in the not so distant future they won’t be allowed to drill for oil or gas anymore. But no one wants to be left holding a bunch of untapped oil reserves—stranded assets, as the industry calls them—so there is currently a worldwide rush to extract as much as possible while they still can. Not so much in the Permian Basin or the North Sea but off the coasts of Guyana, Côte d’Ivoire, Angola, and Ghana, throughout Namibia and Gabon...countries where, for the most part, the allure of oil profits outweighs the risk.

While the industry talks a big game about how "cheap" fossil fuel energy will lift the world, and particularly Africa, out of poverty, oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, Italian giant Eni, Chevron and more are not coming into Guyana and Namibia and showering them with oil riches. It's good old-fashioned oil colonialism, same as it ever was. ExxonMobil's contract with Guyana, for example, will actually cost the country billions, while exacerbating climate impacts that will erode other parts of the country's economy. And that's before we even talk about the risky nature of the deepwater offshore drilling they're doing there, which people are already calling Deepwater Horizon 2.0.

Big Oil isn’t actually concerned about global poverty, of course, but about shareholder profits. And in their global game of extraction musical chairs, we're the ones left out when the music stops.

Cooking Shows—But Make Them Vegan

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

I love a good cooking show. When I’m having a hard time getting up the motivation or the inspiration to get my ass in the kitchen, I turn on MasterChef. When I’m having a bad day (or week), I turn on the Great British Baking Show. It’s comfort food and comfort TV. But the thing is… I’m vegan, and I rarely see things I can actually eat on these shows. Every once in a while, there will be a vegan or vegetarian challenge, but mostly, I’m left to use my own imagination to veganize the food on the screen. At the same time, the pro-vegan content out there is usually found in the form of shoddy, preachy documentaries like Seaspiracy that pin the blame for everything from the health crisis to the climate crisis on individual people’s diets.

As annoying and off-putting (and poorly researched) as those documentaries are, it is true that animal agriculture, at the scale it’s practiced now, is cruel and unusual, and unsustainable. It is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. And we would do well if more people went vegan.

What if—hear me out—we split the difference and had vegan cooking shows instead? I feel like it would do a lot more to get people to change their diets if they could see how easy and fun vegan cooking can be. So many people are intimidated by it because they think they have to eat manufactured meat substitutes or that everything has to be organic, read: expensive. People don’t understand how accessible vegan food truly is. Of course they don’t. No one has ever shown them!

Here’s just a couple of ideas for how it could work:

Veganize It: Get a bunch of vegan chefs together. Every week, assign them one traditionally meat and dairy-heavy dish (meatloaf or jambalaya or birthday cake) and see who can come up with the best vegan version.
Vegan Persuasion Theory: Have some of the top vegan chefs in the world compete to convert some of the most hardline anti-vegan chefs out there to give vegan cuisine the respect it deserves. This format, in particular, would be a great opportunity to interrogate why the culinary world has been so hostile to veganism, with notable chefs like Gordon Ramsey and Anthony Bourdain being vocally critical of vegans. If you wanna learn more about this, can’t recommend our podcast episode with David Tamarkin enough.
Vegan Kitchen: What about a regular old cooking show, in the mold of Rachel Ray or Barefoot Contessa, but with a vegan chef? Extra points if said chef does tutorials on how to build a vegan pantry, how to replace proteins, how much more salt and seasoning you need for vegan food. Even more extra points if there’s good music in the background. Yes, I’m thinking of Bryant Terry.

Q&A with Katie Worth, author of Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America

By Amy Westervelt

A few years ago, investigative journalist Katie Worth was working on a project for Frontline in the Marshall Islands, and was struck by how much kids there were learning about climate change. Some of the kids she talked to had family members who had immigrated to the U.S., some thought their families might head to the states soon, too, and that got Katie wondering what those same kids would be learning about climate change in the U.S. That prompted another year or two of research, the result of which is the book Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America. Katie talked with us about what she found.

Amy: You have this example in the book about this one school you visited in Arkansas, where an oil and gas representative came to speak to the class, and how she presented this idea that basically getting off of fossil fuels equals poverty… and a whole lot more. What did you think when you heard that? And was there any pushback from the teacher, or questions from the kids?

Katie: None of the kids asked any questions. The only question I remember them asking was how much they might be able to make if they worked for the industry, and she said it might be $100,000. And they were just like, whoa. Also that part wasn't set up for questions. She just kind of railed through: do [you] want pristine nature? Do you want humans to prosper? Which one would you choose? Thankfully, we don't have to choose. Let's move on. So there was this major question raised and then resolved immediately. And then she moved on and the teacher was very deferential to her. So, of course, the students were, too.

Amy: Did you get any sense of why or how schools became so willing to let this kind of stuff into classrooms?

Katie: Well there are definitely time and budget constraints. These are things that are meant to look professional and some of them are like outright climate denial, but there's a lot of materials that are much subtler and you wouldn't necessarily catch it if you weren't really looking for it. There's an organization called the National Energy Education Development Project, for example, and they talk about all kinds of energy, including renewables. But the vast majority of their budget comes from fossil fuel companies, and if you actually look at the materials they produce, they're really industry-friendly. There's a paragraph about all the great things that petroleum products do for us. But there's a trade-off because there can be some oil or water pollution. And then there's a paragraph that reads, "The petroleum industry works hard to protect the environment. Gasoline and diesel fuel have been changed to burn cleaner and oil companies work to make sure that they drill and transport oil as safely as possible."

Amy: Wow.

Katie: Yeah. So it's like, don't worry about it because the petroleum industry cares so much about it and they're working really hard to protect the environment. And so everything's fine. Basically every nonrenewable resource discussed in these materials is presented that way. Yes, there's problems. You might have heard about them, but don't worry. It's all being taken care of, and that has this effect of leaving children with the feeling like it almost inoculates them. So when they hear about an oil spill, they're like, oh yeah, I learned about that. But fortunately, there's ways to take care of it. And there's no discussion of regulation, there's no discussion of climate change. It's just, here is this product that does so many things for us. And fortunately, the people who make it are really concerned about doing it in a way that's safe.