The Climate Beat
On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News published one of the great headlines of all time: “Ford To City: Drop Dead.” US president Gerald Ford had just announced that the federal government would refuse to bail out New York if the city government went bankrupt. Ford later said that the headline and ensuing popular outrage helped cost him the 1976 presidential election.
Today, Donald Trump is inviting similarly damning headlines for his willingness to let New York flood from climate-driven disasters. “Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops and buckets ready!” the president tweeted on January 18. He was responding to a New York Times article describing a possible plan to build a sea wall to “protect the city from floodwaters during fierce storms like Sandy,” the 2012 hurricane that killed at least 285 people and displaced thousands more.
The proposed 6-mile-long barrier, extending from Queens to New Jersey, was to cost an estimated $119 billion. Now, as Gothamist reported on February 25, the Trump administration has “abruptly halted” the Army Corps of Engineers’s study of storm defense options for New York. The administration’s elimination of funding for the study is “dangerous and unprecedented,” Robert Freudenberg of the Regional Plan Association, an urban research and advocacy group, told Gothamist.
The move is only the latest in a series of harsh environmental policy rollbacks from the Trump team. Grist reports that the rollbacks are “deeply unpopular” among swing voters, but there’s a problem: many don’t know anything about them. As we argued in The Climate Beat last week, with the stakes for our planet so high, the climate crisis must be a central focus of 2020 campaign coverage. As the incumbent president campaigns for another four years in office, his cavalier attitude towards the crisis deserves much more attention and scrutiny by the press. So do the climate platforms of Democratic candidates. (Sadly, the moderators of CBS News’s February 25 debate in South Carolina asked not a single question about climate change, a noticeable contrast to the 16 minutes of climate discussion during NBC’s debate in Nevada on February 19.)
With Election Day eight months away, there is still time for national and local news outlets to give the climate crisis the visibility that science demands and opinion polls say voters want. With the president tweeting about mops and buckets, there should be no shortage of opportunities for great headlines.
Now, here’s your weekly sampling of the latest in climate news, from across the Covering Climate Now collaboration. When there are major developments in the climate story, we make sure to highlight them here. But our main goal is to provide inspiration to journalists everywhere, with smart examples of creative, outside-of-the-box climate coverage. As always, you can find climate coverage “best practices” on our website.
- JP Morgan has announced a step back from the fossil fuel industry. Per The Guardian, the bank will “end loans for Arctic oil drilling and phase out loans for coal mining,” offering $200 billion to environmental and economic development initiatives instead. The move brings JP Morgan in line with its competitor Goldman Sachs and a host of other major financial institutions which at long last are migrating away from fossil fuel support.
- Next week’s Super Tuesday elections carry huge climate implications, and not just for the Democratic presidential race. HuffPost reports that a down-ballot race in Texas—yes, Texas—could decide “how aggressively—not whether—to crack down on the oil and gas industry.” The Railroad Commission of Texas oversees drilling permits, pipeline safety, and emissions levels for the state’s globally significant oil and gas operations. Like at the national level, some Texas Democratic candidates favor “reining in the industry’s worst pollution,” Alexander C. Kaufman writes, while others want to end oil use altogether. (Available for republication by CCNow partners. See guidelines below. )
- Farming communities around the world are grappling with climate change. In many, this has led to waves of migration. In the piece “When climate change drove all the men away,” Canada’s National Observer offers a harrowing and beautifully rendered look at one community in Mexico’s Oaxaca state where the effects of climate-driven migration are particularly acute. In San Bartolomé Quialana, drought and crop failure have forced fully 60-90 percent of the men to migrate north for work. Left behind are women, children, the elderly, and broken families. (Available for republication by CCNow partners. See guidelines below. )
- Mother Jones covers a new study showing that use of ride services like Uber and Lyft significantly increases the total number of car trips taken by Americans in major downtown areas—and, in doing, causes an estimated 69 percent increase in emissions compared with the rides they are meant to displace. But if ride-sharing companies were to expand electric vehicle use and emphasize “pooled” rides, they could “be part of a low-carbon transportation future,” the study’s co-author tells MJ. (Available for republication by CCNow partners. See guidelines below. )
- As the coronavirus spreads to Europe and Latin America and fears of a pandemic escalate, The Nation examines a potential cause that goes beyond simple human contact with animals like bats and pangolins. Rampant habitat loss across the globe crams animals into closer quarters with each other, “scrambles” species’ population sizes, and increases the frequency of their interaction with humans. “It’s this kind of repeated, intimate contact that allows the microbes that live in their bodies to cross over into ours,” writer Sonia Shah explains, “transforming benign animal microbes into deadly human pathogens.”
- In Scientific American, the authors of a new study published in Nature outline the large, beneficial effects that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies could have for the climate. Despite interests that have suggested otherwise—and journalism, sadly, that has parroted that skepticism—the authors’ study shows that an end to subsidies could yield 500 million to 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions reductions—about a quarter of the energy-related emission reductions pledged by all countries party to the Paris Agreement. “Once upon a time, it made sense for countries to support their fossil fuel industries,” the authors conclude. “But that time is over.”
- Parenting can be tough enough, but today’s parents have the added, “unprecedented” burden of equipping children to cope with the physical and emotional effects of a warming planet, writes Yes! Magazine. To help “brace” kids for “the direct physical impacts of climate change and the humanitarian crises they will trigger,” the magazine offers a few tips from experts for raising “climate-resilient kids.”
- On the heels of Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion pledge to fight climate change, Wired gives a run-down of some of the best technologies the Bezos Earth Fund might support, including space-based solar power, enhanced geothermal energy, and sustainable hydrogen production. “There are plenty of problems with a billionaire single-handedly dictating how the world community will fight climate change. But it’s also true that there are a host of promising climate technologies that lack the resources to scale fast enough to be effective in meeting the UN’s climate goals.”
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And finally, a reminder to CCNow partners that from April 19-26 we will host a second “week of coverage” focused on Climate Solutions! If you plan to participate but haven’t gotten in touch, please let us know with an email to editors@coveringclimatenow.org! Not a partner? We hope you’ll consider joining our collaboration.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!