In our latest Talking Shop, leading journalists discussed the role climate played in the 2020 US elections, the incoming Biden administration’s climate plans, the outlook for the Paris Agreement, seismic shifts in global finance, and much more.
We started with the breaking news that the world’s biggest climate polluters, encouraged by the UN Secretary General Antonia Guterres, now pledge to eliminate greenhouse emissions fast enough to limit global temperature rise to 2.1 degrees C. That’s tantalizingly close to the 1.5 to 2C target the Paris Agreement established in 2015, though of course those pledges now have to be implemented.
Panelists included:
- Neela Banerjee, climate editor at NPR
- Matthew Green, climate correspondent at Reuters
- Justin Worland, climate correspondent at TIME magazine
Mark Hertsgaard, CCNow’s executive director and the environment correspondent for The Nation, moderated the Talking Shop.
We encourage everyone to watch the video of this fascinating conversation. We learned a lot! Listed below are some background resources mentioned in the discussion, and we’ve pulled out key points, lightly edited for clarity, below. Also, be sure to RSVP for our next Talking Shop, on January 13, where we’ll discuss how journalists covering climate change can cope with emotional fatigue and burnout during these challenging times.
Climate change is a part of every beat in every newsroom
Justin Worland: We need to get others in our newsrooms who haven’t really thought about climate change as part of their mandate to think about how climate intersects with their reporting. I think everyone has to find the best way to make those conversations happen and to find new, innovative ways to tell those stories. For me, it’s listening to what’s happening elsewhere in the newsroom, and frankly, inserting myself into the conversation and saying, “Hey, have you thought about x, y, z?”
This could mean repackaging a story about COVID and reopening of schools to talk about the challenges of reopening a school after a climate-related disaster. I look at what stories are in the news and how to tell them through a climate lens.
Neela Banerjee: I’m working with my team at NPR to come up with a new paradigm that moves away from an “inside the beltway” mentality. This new paradigm looks at what’s happening inside Washington, DC, and then connects an action, decision, rollback or new regulation to what is happening to people in their communities and in their homes, including their health. One excellent example of this type of reporting is a New York Times story that examines how Trump administration rollbacks of Obama environmental regulations have affected various communities around the country.
For our internal staff, NPR’s energy/environment editor on the national desk, Jennifer Ludden, came up with a guidance document for how newscasts should talk about climate issues, such as hurricanes. It’s a cheat sheet, and it’s enormously useful regardless of what medium you work in. The other thing we’re doing is holding a brown bag lunch for fellow journalists at NPR, where we’re going to be answering very basic questions about climate.
Covering the next chapter of US climate policy
Neela Banerjee: During the transition, our climate team of reporters at NPR is working with the NPR White House reporters. We’re working our sources, they’re working theirs. We’re communicating with each other about who’s in the running to head the EPA or who will have this or that climate boss job? What are the implications? What’s the situation that he or she is going to inherit?
The Biden-Harris campaign talked a good game, but what are they actually going to do? I would urge all my colleagues on this call, do not take your foot off that pedal. This administration has to be held accountable in the same way that the Trump administration was held accountable. And the same goes for the business community. They’re making a lot of noise about their commitment to reducing emissions, and they also need to be held accountable.
Matthew Green: We are in this extraordinary moment. China, Japan and South Korea have recently come out with net zero announcements, which very few people in the climate world had anticipated just a few months before. We’ve seen the result of the US election and there’s a lot of moving pieces in Europe. Suddenly, the climate chessboard looks very different from how we would’ve imagined it a year ago.
How do we hold these governments to account? It’ll vary in each case. I’m keen to liaise with colleagues in Asia on what’s really going on inside Japan and South Korea, which is critical for coal power financing in that region. How do we really get inside company boardrooms to report on these developments? One way is to build contacts with middle management in these companies who really know what’s going on. We can have an absolute field day in 2021 in saying, well, you said this last year. What are you doing about it?
Justin Worland: A lot of the climate challenges that are being faced in the developing world are challenges that the US is going to face here later on. The US has the resources to protect against these challenges, but only up to a point. That is important for US audiences to know. Almost every international story has something that could be related back to a US audience to help them understand how we’re all connected together.
Follow the money: a goldmine of stories
Matthew Green: Finding a way to convey the seismic shifts that are happening in the world of finance to a broader audience is important for journalists. In the investor world, meaning the global financial centers and the people who decide where capital goes, there is this realization that everything is going to change in this coming decade. We are now entering the most disruptive decade probably in the history of human civilization.
There’s so many front lines of contestation within companies, banks, and investment funds, between regulators, within governments, that it’s a goldmine of stories for those of us who are trying to illuminate where we’re going to end up in the decades to come.
How to avoid both sides-ism
Matthew Green: The key is to know your beat. For example, in August we did a story about the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil and gas lobby in the US, on their new “Energy for Progress” campaign. In it, the API describes natural gas as a clean source of energy. We spoke to lots of scientists who unpacked all the models on why we need to reduce burning of natural gas and included that in our reporting. In our story, we had the voice of API explaining their rationale, but I think we left the reader in no doubt that the scientific consensus took a different view.
Neela Banerjee: When I was at the New York Times, I remember opinion writers would come to me as an energy reporter and say, “I want to weigh in on this, this is interesting but I just don’t want to get spun by either side, so help me out here.” I think beat reporters can give it to you straight and say what’s real and what’s not.
Mark Hertsgaard: Let’s always remember that the truth is not necessarily halfway between the contending sides. If the Sunrise Movement says something and API says something else, the truth is not necessarily right in the middle. The way we find the truth, as Matt said, is to do more reporting.
Audiences want more climate coverage
Mark Hertsgaard:Recent polling conducted on behalf of CCNow finds that over 70% of the public now wants more climate news in the US, and that is true even of people who identify as Republicans, especially if they’re under the age of 40. Anybody who’s still getting pushback from management that covering climate is unpopular is dealing in outdated information.
JustinWorland: It’s a total myth that audiences don’t want sophisticated climate stories. One of my best read stories of last year was about the European Union’s effort to implement a border carbon adjustment. If you had said that to a social media person, “Do you think this is going to light up on social or go viral?” they would say absolutely not, but it shows that there is an appetite for smart stories.
Neela Banerjee: Through surveys of its audience, NPR has discovered that audiences want more climate coverage, but they don’t just want climate coverage to be mainly about science. As for metrics, as an editor, every morning I’m on a call where we get that information about what our top stories are on digital.
Related news and resources
- Climate on a global scale: CCNow’s interview package with UN Secretary General António Guterres covers next steps for the Paris Agreement. See reporting by our colleagues at Times of India, El Pais, The Nationand CBS News. Matthew Green reported on the reaction of global leaders following Biden’s win and what this means for climate in this Reuters article.
- Georgia run-offs: The upcoming Georgia senate runoffs carry major implications for environmental policies (Here’s how to stream the Dec 6 senate debates). See this new Climate Central fact sheet for journalists on how a warming world is creating multiple threats in Georgia. Read this investigation by The Intercept on Republican Senator David Perdue, who believes climate change is a hoax, and this report from InsideClimate News on the 16 Superfund sites in Georgia that are particularly vulnerable to climate change induced flooding.
- The Paris Agreement: For a quick refresher on why it’s critical for the Biden administration to re-enter the global agreement, check out this explainer by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative and this article by InsideClimate News.
- Trump slash and burn:The Midnight Watch Project is tracking all last-minute actions the outgoing Trump administration is likely to take on environmental and energy issues ahead of Inauguration Day. And Justin Worland discusses how economic stimulus could be the bi-partisan key to unlocking climate action on Capitol Hill in this TIME article.
- Audience interest: The Yale program for Climate Communication and George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication reports on audience interest levels in climate news, including state-by-state maps of interest level among Americans.