Climate on the Ballot: The Stakes vs. The Horse Race

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to day one of Covering Climate Now’s Climate on the Ballot Summit. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now and today we kick off three days of online events where we, as journalists, discuss how we can elevate the climate crisis, and crucially, it’s solutions in our coverage of the 2024 US elections.

For those who don’t know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets reaching a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do better coverage of the defining story of our time. You can go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org, to learn more about our newsroom trainings. You can sign up for our newsletters and apply to join, and it’s all free of charge.

Now, roughly half of the world’s population this year has been eligible to vote in 2024 elections, and all of those elections will have a profound effect on whether our civilization survives the accelerating climate crisis. But no election is likely to be more decisive than that of the US, the world’s top historic climate polluter and its biggest economy. Yet, climate change is rarely mentioned in most US elections coverage.

The discussions Covering Climate Now is sponsoring over the next three days aim to identify concrete steps to correct that shortcoming. How can we, as journalists, tell stories that both engage audiences and hold candidates to account? How can we be accurate and honest about the climate emergency, while also guarding against allegations of partisanship? How can we emphasize the stakes, not the odds, to quote media critic Jay Rosen, and help voters understand that these elections at the national, but also the state and local levels, will decide if their elected officials do or do not embrace the twin scientific imperatives of one, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, and two, dramatically strengthening preparedness against the impacts that are now unavoidable.

Today’s session tackles these questions at the national level. Tomorrow, two sessions, the first of which at nine AM eastern time US offers lessons from colleagues around the world. The second session at noon US Eastern digs into US and state local elections. Thursday we conclude with a live interview with John Podesta, president Biden’s top climate advisor, taking questions from Chase Cain of NBC News and Joan Meiners of The Arizona Republic.

Please alert your fellow journalists that there’s still time to sign up for tomorrow’s and Thursday’s sessions. To be clear, these discussions are intended primarily for working journalists. The general public is welcome to observe, but only journalists will be permitted to pose questions and offer comments.

Okay, let’s get started with today’s session, the Stakes vs. the Horse Race. It’s now my pleasure to introduce the moderator, Kyle Pope, my fellow co-founder of Covering Climate Now and our Executive Director for Strategic Initiatives. Kyle.

Kyle Pope: Thank you, Mark. Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for being here. This is a great conversation and a great kickoff to what Mark mentioned is three days of conversation about how to cover climate and politics together and effectively.

Before we get rolling on this discussion, I just want to flag everybody to look at your bottom of the screen, look at the Q&A button. It’s in these questions. We’ve reserved a ton of time, about the last 20 minutes to get to those. So please, throughout this conversation, put your questions in. We’ll be taking a look at them, we’ll be getting to them, as many as we can, but thank you so much again.

Let me quickly introduce folks and then we can get right to the conversation. We’ll start with Neela. Neela Banerjee is Chief Climate Editor for NPR and a former colleague of mine. It’s so good to see you again. She manages NPR’s Climate Desk, made up of the editors and reporters around the country. Prior to NPR Neela led the Inside Climate News team that broke the Exxon news story.

Chase Cain is a meteorologist and the National Climate Reporter for NBC News. This Thursday, as Mark said, Chase will be one of the two journalists interviewing John Podesta. Be sure to tune in for that.

Lisa Friedman is a climate reporter at the New York Times, writing about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

Adam Mahoney is the Climate and Environment reporter for Capital B News, a nonprofit outlet reporting for black communities across the US. Earlier this year, Adam was named, we are very proud to say, an emerging journalist of the year in the 2024 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. For those of you who, just a quick plug, take a look at, there on our website, all those award winners’ amazing work going on across the world, and you’ll see Adam’s work as well.

So thanks to all of you for being here. This is an important conversation and I ask all of you who are watching to give them a warm welcome, however you do that. Let’s start with Neela. First question goes to Neela. Again, Neela, so good to see you. You are in an interesting spot because you work for an outlet that has not only a big national/international presence, but a huge network of local reporters across the country. How have you seen a difference, an identifiable difference in the way that national and international reporters cover the climate story versus your local colleagues at stations around the country?

Neela Banerjee: First of all, thank you for having me. I’m delighted to hear what everybody else thinks about this enormously consequential election. The short answer is yes. So one of the things that I should clarify, because I didn’t know this either as a long time NPR listener until I started working here four years ago as an employee, is that NPR network where I work and our hundreds of member stations, it is almost like a franchisee relationship. We do not have the power or the authority to tell people at member stations what to do. So that relationship needs to be navigated.

What we do have to build the relationship between NPR and member stations all over the country are what are called collaboratives. Sometimes they’re regional, like we have a newsroom in the Gulf states. We have one in Texas. Sometimes they’re topic based and we have one on climate. Then there’s 40 plus member stations that are part of that collaborative. We communicate a lot. We meet weekly, we talk about story ideas.

I think the challenge is that, what we find in working with our member stations, is for them to home in on what the relevant ideas are. Sometimes I think there’s so much discussion about elections that they feel like, “Well, how can I talk about Harris versus Trump? Like I am here in upstate New York, and does that really matter?” So I think the challenge for us as national reporters working with our colleagues at member stations is to communicate that there are all sorts of elections that are relevant, and there are all sorts of ways to cover this.

I think one simple way that we saw with WBUR in Boston was that they looked at what, sorry, what the stakes are. They did a story about what the stakes are for New England and the Boston area and compared the candidates, Trump and Harris, and their policies. So that is the challenge and that is the difference between what we do on the national level versus the member station level.

I think there’s a lot of work that we need to do as network reporters to build confidence in… That they have the right to cover this, right? That they should be covering this and to back them up with information so they feel authoritative in their coverage. That’s an ongoing process and it starts long before any election.

Kyle Pope: Yeah, that’s super interesting. I think it’s a theme that I’m going to be talking to other folks about, this idea that… Because everybody who we’re looking at right now on this panel, they are the sort of climate experts in their newsrooms. How do you take that knowledge and empower other people? Because there’s only four of you here and you represent news organizations that have dozens or hundreds of people. So how do you-

Neela Banerjee: Yeah.

Kyle Pope: Go ahead.

Neela Banerjee: So just one last thing about that. I think people feel fine covering climate and making the connections between some extreme weather event. But it’s more like connecting policy to what’s happening in people’s backyards. I think getting folks to do that is hard. Again, I mean, it’s hard for us on the national level, you’re trying to cover the IRA or something like that. You’re like, well, where is it really happening and how do we tell if it’s working or not?

The other thing to remember about at least our member stations, and I think this is true, but a lot of local news, is that those staffs are small. They’re stretched thin. So deepening that knowledge to cover something with confidence is really hard because they’re being pulled away to do a whole bunch of other things too. So there are real challenges that local journalists face, I think, anywhere given what’s happening with media all over the world. The question is, how do people who have more resources or who have more access work with their colleagues and member stations to bolster them?

Kyle Pope: All right, thank you very much. That’s a great segue to Lisa because the Times has a pretty robust, I think, climate team, but you collaborate a lot with other desks at the outlet, the politics desk, the business desk, the international desk. Which is partly what we’re talking about here, making sure that the climate story isn’t limited. I mean, we’ve even referred to it as being siloed within just the climate team.

Can you talk a little bit about how that collaboration works at a place like the Times, and maybe even point us to a piece or two that you can say, “Yeah, this was a result of this kind of working together that really benefited the audience.”

Lisa Friedman: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, and it’s a huge honor to be here with reporters that I admire so much. Let me take a step back, and I don’t want to bore you with how the Times works. But when the Times created its climate team, it’s more than a team, it’s a desk, right? The New York Times works on desks, the International Desk, the Metro Desk, the National Desk, and that the New York Times made climate a desk, I think, don’t hold me to this, I think it was the first subject area desk, and may still be.

It meant that not only were we a team that could be siloed, for example, but that we were immediately integrated into the process of putting out the Times every day. That when in the morning meetings, when they’re figuring out what’s going on, in the A1 meetings in the afternoon, the masthead editors are saying, “Okay, international, what do you have? Metro, what do you have? Climate, what do you have it?” It ensures that our stories not only get on the front page, but that we’re not competing for attention from an editor between other policy reporters who cover other things.

In some ways, it gives it a huge opportunity to collaborate with reporters on other teams and desks. So pretty much every day, whether it’s the reporters or editors in their morning meetings are talking with our colleagues about what they’re covering and how does climate have a place in it? Stepping away from the election for the moment, but in a natural disaster, what is the climate team’s first day story? Do we step back and let the national reporters who are covering whatever it is, the wildfires, take the lead and we offer some context for the story about climate change and wildfires? Do we come back with a second day story?

When it comes to the election, I work with the politics team, and we look for ways to work together. Some things that come to mind, maybe this is a little old, I should have had my list with me. But when Doug Burgum was likely going to… when folks thought he was going to be the vice presidential candidate, we did a lot of joint stories looking at his interesting approach on climate, without talking about climate in his state, and what policies he might support. We kind of look for opportunities on every story. We’re talking to each other all the time. And now going forward, right, I mean, if we’re looking at stories together between politics and climate in Pennsylvania, around Harris and fracking and some of those energy issues there. I’ll stop there. But that’s kind of the broad way that we operate. Our teams are talking all the time.

Kyle Pope: Thank you. That’s super helpful. So let’s talk a little bit about where we are today in 2024, and where the climate story is in terms of the ranking of everything that’s going on in this campaign, which just gets more… It morphs every day. I mean, we did note that in this last debate, the climate story was the very last question asked, and actually it was asked after the allotted time for the debate had ended in overtime, and there was very little time to answer.

We’re not presenting that debate as a stand-in generally for coverage, but I don’t think it’s a bad indicator. The truth is that climate does have a big battle for attention in this campaign. So Chase, you work in a business where time is super constrained. That is the resource that is incredibly scarce in TV. Talk to me about… and your job is to try to get climate stories on the air every day. Talk to me about how you see this particular… especially this particular presidential campaign, but even other state congressional or local campaigns in terms of how hard it is to make that climate case at NBC.

Chase Cain: I mean, I think if you look not just at NBC, but at any television network, newspaper, radio, I mean, I think we’re all sort of in the same group, that you can have a candidate, a former president, say something outrageous about eating pets, and now that’s driving the narrative. And even if we’re not talking about climate change, we’re also not talking about immigration, inflation, healthcare, a lot of the other issues that Americans say they want to hear about. And so there’s that old struggle between the steak and the broccoli. People say like, “Oh yeah, I need to eat my broccoli,” but what do they choose? They choose the steak, or they choose the cheesecake, the things that can be more tasty.

And so that’s definitely a challenge that I think every journalist faces in terms of how do we get climate change up there when 60 million people watched the debate and heard the former president talk about that. But then probably way more people than that on Instagram and TikTok have watched autotuned videos of turning that into a song. So that’s kind of the dynamic that we’re in. And I certainly don’t believe that me or even an individual journalist can change that.

So one of the things that I try to do is look for things which are in the news or will be in the news, and this requires a little bit of prediction and guessing, but what is in the news that I can make a climate connection to? And I think that almost anything that’s in the news, you can find a climate connection if you look hard enough. I mean, last week we had Francine threatening the Gulf Coast. At the same time, there are massive wildfires raging here in California, and there’s a clear climate connection to both of those. So a story I did last week was saying like, hey, you might think that a hurricane and major wildfires are completely different ends of the climate spectrum, but there’s actually one phenomenon, one piece of atmospheric physics that’s influencing both of these things.

And so that was a way to make sure that we were talking about climate change when you had flooding on the Gulf Coast, wildfires burning homes and evacuating communities in California. So I think it just requires us as journalists to be a little bit more creative about the way that we approach climate change.

Kyle Pope: Thank you. We’ll come back to that because I think this is something that everybody who is either reporting or wants to report on climate change is up against. How do you make that style internally and how do you make sure that you’re connecting it with your audience? But first I want to ask. I mean, Adam, sort of a similar version of the same question. I mean, you’re in a somewhat unique situation in that your outlet is dedicated to serve a very focused audience. I mean, has that changed your approach to the climate story in a way that gets around these difficulties that Chase is talking about?

Adam Mahoney: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I think everyone always likes to say every story can be a climate story, which I 100% agree with, and that these connections can be made broadly. But when you’re on the ground in Black or rural or more marginalized communities that are already feeling the brunt of these issues, they might not be articulating it in the exact same way.

So a lot of it is about getting to the second and the third point behind whatever ill is that they’re facing at the time. So just like a couple of examples. Recently, I was in Memphis earlier this year reporting on climate migration. But one of the big things that kept coming up was water bills going up for the first time in the city’s history, and the city going through regular water boil notices, and people not necessarily knowing how to face those situations. But people weren’t talking about the climate connection or the fact that the city’s aquifer is being depleted at the same time.

Or in Beaumont, Texas and Southeast Texas, a lot of folks that I talk to there, the biggest thing on their mind is health issues, but people aren’t necessarily making the connections to the massive oil refinery in their backyard, or the fact that ExxonMobil is funding a big part of the city budget and the local hospital there and health clinics and how that dictates life there. So I think one of the ways that we have got around that at Capital B is, like I said, we focus on the issue at hand for people that they believe is the issue, whether that might be economy or access to housing or jobs, and try to take a step back and make those climate connections, which is not always the easiest and honestly is always… our audience is not always the most receptive to it, but it’s something that we try to continue doing.

Kyle Pope: You said sometimes those connections aren’t obvious. Do you think that there’s a sense that the other issues, whether it’s jobs or health or housing or immigration, with your audience there’s a sense that those are more important, and climate is a kind of almost… I mean, I don’t know if this is the right way to use the word, but almost kind of a luxury issue down the road, or… Is that your perception?

Adam Mahoney: Yeah. I mean, it is interesting because if you look at the polls, Black folks actually view climate change and environmental issues as a more intensive threat than the general population. And when you have conversations with people, and I’m based in Louisiana, and I think folks here have a… are more exposed to those issues than maybe the average American because of the constant onslaught of those threats.

But at the end of the day, it’s like we are working with a population, a disenfranchised population that is facing issues that supersede any election inequities that are hundreds of years in the making. And those issues about just putting food on your table, having a roof over your head, those are always going to be number one on the docket. But those connections to climate change are there and obvious whether we’re thinking about the insurance crisis in the Gulf Coast right now, the property insurance crisis, or even our food map in the way that that has been impacted by contamination and storms and whatnot.

Kyle Pope: Thank you. Let me ask all of you about how to handle disinformation when covering climate and politics. When Trump says climate change is a hoax, when he talks about windmills causing cancer, there’s an immediate response, an immediate sort of fact-checking apparatus that kicks into play. And I can see a lot of the coverage we’re struggling with like, do we do that every single time he says these things? Is there a fact-checking obligation every single time? And how is that sort of landing with the audience? Just because that’s the information environment that we’re now living in, I’m wondering how you think about disinformation and fact-checking when it comes to the distortion of facts around climate. Who wants to take that? Lisa, go ahead.

Chase Cain: Go ahead.

Lisa Friedman: Sure. I mean, we think about it all the time, right? And you’re right, Kyle. One of the immediate things that we and a lot of other outlets do, are fact checks. So during a debate, during a convention, we will in real time, or sometimes the day of a rally, and we’re hearing about sea level rise only rising… What’s the phrase? We hear former President Trump a lot say sea level rise will only… it’ll only rise like an eighth-

Neela Banerjee: More beachfront property.

Lisa Friedman: … 500 yeah. We will do that in real time. I think the harder thing, and this is something that we sort of think about all the time, and it ebbs and flows, but is in situations where… like take us back to the Trump administration. In a typical climate story, we would not quote many climate skeptics, right? We don’t give or amplify space for people who are denying climate change.

Also true though, though we might think of those folks as extremists, they became the establishment in the Trump administration. Do you not quote someone who is openly a climate skeptic but is the administrator of the EPA? You can’t not. Right? So we are constantly thinking about how do we fairly quote someone, acknowledge misstatements of fact immediately? Do we let that quote go through or not because is this person saying something that is demonstrably false?

It becomes stickier when you’re addressing… when you’re not talking about climate change directly, but the economic costs or benefits of addressing it. And that is… I wouldn’t put that in the disinformation pile. I would put that in the “There are lots of opinions and this is difficult, and we should explore all.” If the case is being made that clean energy policies from the Biden administration are driving up inflation, let’s report that out and see if that is true or not and tell our readers and our viewers.

Chase Cain: Yeah, I was just going to add, Lisa made two really good points there, and I think we can even connect the dots if we’re going to use the windmill example. Could we directly combat the disinformation by saying like, “This isn’t true.” Sure, we could do that. And I was part of the NBC fact check team on the debate last week, and we were finding articles from five, six years ago where we had already fact checked that. So we could go back and do that again, but what if we think about these economic issues that are driving so many people to vote?

We have federal data to show that solar and onshore wind are the two cheapest forms of electricity. So what if we go one step forward and say, “Not only is it not causing cancer, actually these forms of power are a lot cheaper. So if you care about your energy bill, this is something that you should be supporting and should embrace.” So I think there’s a way to even jump ahead one step if we just pause and think about the disinformation and maybe why he’s even saying that in the first place.

Neela Banerjee: There’s also, I think, part of the trickiness is that climate journalists often know the misinformation like the backs of their hands, but political reporters might not, or they’re just really busy and they’re just trying to bang out a story and get it online and get it on air.

To Lisa’s point earlier, and I think all of us, that we work closely with our colleagues on politics desk, like I work closely with Ximena Bustillo on the NPR politics desk because she’s personally interested in climate change. And so part of it is to everyone’s point that somebody says something and you just fact check them immediately after they say it in print or in radio. But the other thing too is to dive down into misinformation campaigns. Ximena did a really good story right before the RNC about these ads the American fuel and petrochemical manufacturers are running that are getting great traction online, but also on air in swing states.

And it’s basically saying that Biden is going to … And during the RNC, Biden was still the nominee, right? That Biden is going to get rid of your gas cars. And the point was that more strict fuel economy standards that certain states like California have and other states will follow, first of all, it’s not going to get rid of your gas car. But secondly, the swing states aren’t at all affected. So she drilled down into that and we worked together to show what was going on.

And so it’s getting harder to report the origins of misinformation that we’ve been finding out because American political donations have gotten murkier because of the Supreme Court ruling more than a decade ago. But you can go a certain distance to map out the origins of misinformation. I think what we found is audiences really respond to you pulling back the curtain and showing not only what is being said and it’s wrong, but why are people saying this? What are the interests promoting certain narratives? And our audience data show that people really respond to that. They want to understand like, where is this coming from?

Kyle Pope: By the way, I want to just flag the fact that we’ve got some great questions going in the Q&A, which I’m going to turn to right after this. And I also want to bring your attention to the webinar chat where my colleagues covering Climate Now are putting in links. If somebody, one of the panelists, mentions a story, we’re putting the link in there so you can see it.

But let me just quickly follow up on this disinformation fact-checking question, which gets broadly to this fear that we hear that some journalists have when they fact-check climate stories or other stories, but especially climate, that they get tagged or that there’s a fear that they’ll be tagged as activists or advocates or part of the climate movement. Does that ring a bell to anybody here? Is this something that you worry about or do you think that that is something that doesn’t affect your newsroom? No?

Neela Banerjee: As many of you know, NPR has been in the crosshairs of certain vested interests out in the world right now, because of what a former editor wrote about us, which wasn’t true, including in the climate space.

NPR has a climate desk and we’re relatively new. We’re only about two years old. Because our audiences told us that they wanted more climate coverage. And so I often talk to audiences and donors and such, and we get two things. Sometimes people try to push us to take more of an advocacy position, and I’m like, “I’m not here to preach to the choir. That’s not what I do.” And other times people are like, “Well, what can we do to get back a greater conservative listenership?” And what that doesn’t take into account is that a lot of the conservative media ecology has a certain take on climate and other issues that runs counter to science. So we’re not going to distort science to get a bigger audience.

We don’t really run into that. And what people really respond to, like I said, is accountability. Science. Just explaining … I don’t know. We had a story about how humpback whales create bubble nets. And then solutions. So we just had a climate solutions when we focused on food. And people really want sophisticated solution stories that give them a sense of agency and not a Pollyanna sense of hope or something like that. And so at NPR we don’t get that kind of pushback. We do get questions and we try to answer them.

Kyle Pope: Let me, in the interest of time, I just want to circle back to something. I think an incredibly important point that Adam made when he talked about making the climate connection to everything else. So just almost a lightning round question for all of you, let’s start with Adam. What is the climate story in this election season that’s not being told, do you think?

Adam Mahoney: I think the story that I think hasn’t been told enough, and something that we’ve been trying to hamper in on is what the fallout of a potential Republican administration, Project 2025, or even recent Supreme Court rulings will have on some of the climate justice environmental justice work that the Biden administration has put forth. Whether we’re thinking about Justice 40 and some of the programs that have been implemented. The EPA is in a race to get rid of the two, three billion dollars that they outlined for that program this year.

But what does it mean for communities on the ground that have already seen some improvements, whether that be with toxic contamination cleanup or climate resiliency hubs and whatnot. What does it mean if they will be under attack and as it is another mode of disinformation or even just physical violence that we can see in these communities if they continue to push forth these more “progressive” climate ideals under a regressive administration? And that’s something that we’ve been trying to cover. How the groundwork has been laid and what that will look like going forward.

Kyle Pope: Great. Thank you. Quickly, Chase?

Chase Cain: I think if we look at the issues that most voters say in various polls that they care about, if we look at immigration, I think we could all probably do a better job of exploring the root causes of immigration, some of which are linked to climate change with famine, with extreme weather, lots of root things there.

The other thing I would mention is if we think about healthcare, it’s a concern for a lot of Americans and climate change is impacting our healthcare as we see more people ending up in the hospital from heat exhaustion and heat stroke. And again, some of the same food impact. The cost of food is being driven by climate change. Really think all of the top issues in this election do have those strong links to climate change.

Kyle Pope: Neela or Lisa? Story that’s not being told?

Neela Banerjee: Sorry. I agree with what Adam said. I think that’s a big one.

Kyle Pope: Lisa, you’re muted.

Lisa Friedman: Four years of Zooms and I still can’t figure it out. Sorry. Yeah, I too. I agree with everything Adam said. And to Chase’s point about how climate change really is an economic story that could be told that way in this election, I would love to highlight just two stories that my colleague Coral Davenport did. One just recently, how climate change is affecting bridges all over the country.

And last year she wrote about climate change is affecting the cost of tampons and other cotton goods because of the natural disasters and droughts in Texas. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big part of the reason. And I think to the extent that we can help our readers and viewers think about the things that they don’t think climate change is … they don’t see as a typical climate change story. That this is not just about island nations at risk, but the things we buy and the insurance we pay for our homes. I think that helps bring it home as an economic story that is relevant in the election.

Kyle Pope: Great. Thank you all. I’m going to turn to these questions from the folks who are watching this webinar. I’ll get to as many of them as I can. Let’s start with one from Clint Wilder who talks about, he says that almost worse than squeezing the one climate question in at the end of the debate was in presenting it as, here’s an issue that’s an important to young people. In election coverage, he asked, how can we help break out of the framing that climate is just another siloed issue for candidates to target a particular demographic? Who wants to tackle that? I think it’s a good question.

Lisa Friedman: I would just say briefly-

Kyle Pope: Adam? Adam, you want to weigh in?

Lisa Friedman: I’m sorry. No, no. Adam, please.

Adam Mahoney: I would just quickly say that I think over the last couple of years, the onslaught of climate disasters that have touched every corner of this country have made it very clear that it’s not an issue that is only impacting particular groups. It may be disproportionately impacting our marginalized communities, but it is hit home virtually everywhere. So it shouldn’t be too difficult and we do have a duty to make those connections and show that.

Kyle Pope: I’m sorry I jumped in on Lisa. Or Neela, go ahead. Go ahead.

Neela Banerjee: No, I mean, Adam, we have a duty and we do it, right? But we’re not the politics reporters. It’s kind of like how do we get our colleagues in the newsroom, and it varies from person to person, editor to editor, right? And yeah …

Kyle Pope: Lisa, we started with you talking about working with other desks like the politics desk and the business desk and whatever. And we don’t want to assume that everybody thinks the same, but do you have a sense of, for the people who are leading the campaign coverage and are covering the campaign trail, do you have a sense of where climate, where they sense climate is in terms of the mix of stuff that they need to be asking candidates about?

Lisa Friedman: Sure. Just a side note on the debates. My only note of optimism there is that I do think the questions are getting better. Yes, this debate was a disappointment. It was the last question. It was framed as something that young people think about. But one thing that I think that we are seeing are climate questions routinely and we’ve come a long way from, “Oh, do you want to ban plastic straws? Is that…” Right? The moderators are asking, “What is your plan? We’re starting with the premise that this is a problem that needs to be addressed. What is your plan for addressing it?” They’re not following up, for the most part, and that’s a problem. But I would just strike one note of optimism, that I think we’re doing better than we used to.

I think climate change is widely recognized as an important policy issue. I think most political reporters here at the time probably at all of your news outlets are more horse race focused than policy focused. And it is not their first top-of-mind issue. It is also not the first issue of either of these two candidates. I mean, the political reporters tend to focus in some ways, on what the candidates are talking about and flesh that out. We just don’t hear Kamala Harris talking about climate change. And so, that is one of the struggles.

Kyle Pope: Right. And I think the question is, would Kamala Harris be talking more about it if she was getting more questions about it on the trail? Let me go to a question in the chat from Josie Abugov. And I’m sorry if I mispronounce your name. But she’s a reporter for the Louisiana team for the Times-Picayune, and has a question about, how do we think about covering climate stories in more conservative parts of the country? And to some extent to a demographic of readers who might understand immediate climate risks like flooding or coastal issues, but bristle at times on certain terms or buzzwords around climate coverage? Chase, you have a thought about that?

Chase Cain: Yeah. I mean, I guess I sort of reject the notion that just because someone is conservative or maybe votes for Republicans, that they are a climate denier. I still think there’s a lot of data from Yale and George Mason that shows that it’s what, like 10% of the United States, which means it’s still even a minority on the conservative side. I mean, it was President Nixon who signed a lot of important environmental legislation, President Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, who created the National Park system. So, I don’t think that we can just say that because someone’s conservative that they’re going to reject climate solutions, and that they’re automatically a climate denier.

But I do think we as journalists sometimes face that, that we’re like, “Oh gosh, well, the right or the conservatives are going to react to this particular story or the framing of this story.” I think the most important thing is just to stand on the side of the truth and the facts and the science. And the science is on your side. Cornell found 99.1 or more than 99% of all peer-reviewed science shows that climate change is real. This is not a debatable issue. So, stand on the side of science and don’t worry what a few people send you on Twitter or X. Because that’s not representative of your actual audience.

Kyle Pope: Neela.

Neela Banerjee: Can I tackle that ’cause I grew up in Southeast, Louisiana? And I subscribe to the Times-Picayune still, even though my family’s no longer there. And Adam lives in Louisiana now. And we’ve seen this with member-station reporters, actually, not WWNO so much in Louisiana. But for example, a member-station reporter in Idaho, where I take your point, Chase, but then there’s the reality on the ground of a news director saying, “You really can’t say this. We can’t lose audience, we can’t lose donors.” So, there’s a kind of rubber-meet-the-road moment when people report on things.

So this colleague of mine who was in Idaho, what she did was she looked at issues that people cared about. In Idaho, people really care about habitat loss. Right? Or water. And the science was maybe in the middle of the story, but the impacts. And there are code words that people use that don’t get folks’ backs up. I mean, I think there’s realities that journalists face. So I think it’s a way of covering both the impacts and the solutions.

And then I think talking to your staff, especially more experienced journalists within your newsrooms or journalists in your region, you’re at the Times-Picayune talking to your colleagues at WWNO about, how do you frame this in a way that doesn’t alienate people? And I think Chase is right. It’s a tiny minority that’ll rail at you and send you angry notes. But still, your news director sees this and it puts people on the back foot. Adam, I don’t know if you have some thoughts about this, like writing out of Louisiana.

Adam Mahoney: Yeah, I mean, I think I would kind of find myself in the middle of both of y’all, in the fact that ultimately people are at the center of this work. And if we are reporting on communities that are facing massive destruction because of climate disasters or environmental pollution and whatnot, telling the story as it is in a way that kind of bridges the gap, which is difficult. But it depends on actually building relationships with the communities that you’re reporting on, and not just dropping in and then doing one story. But if you are someone that can actually have conversations with folks over periods of time, usually does get easier, even if people don’t see it the same way that you might.

Chase Cain: I would also just say, Neela, I appreciate the healthy disagreement ’cause that’s why we’re doing this panel. But at the same time, maybe you lose five people because you did a story about climate change, but there’s also the potential that you earn new fans and earn new followers because you were being honest about something. So, that’s why I just-

Neela Banerjee: Right.

Chase Cain: I’ve challenged managers uncovering some of this. And it’s like, “No, we need to be more forceful about that.”

Neela Banerjee: Right. No, I take your point, but I think the dynamics are really different when it’s on a local level. There are tensions that we hear about all the time that I’ve been hearing about for a really long time where your news director, your editor may not have your back. And it’s not about losing people, it’s just about, it’s not those five people that you might have lost, it’s this fear that you’ll lose more people. And a lot of local media might not have the resources to see what they’re gaining and losing. So, I think they feel like their hold on audiences is so tenuous that they’re afraid to alienate. And so, I think that’s a reality that we try to deal with on the network level too.

Kyle Pope: I mean, just jumping in here from our perspective, and we work with a lot of local stations around the country and helping them. And what we find is that the ghost of trolls and the ghost of climate deniers is actually much bigger in people’s mind than the reality. We hear again and again that once they start reporting on climate change, the backlash they get is much less than what they thought they were going to get, generally.

We only have time, amazingly, for one more quick question. This comes from somebody, Cynthia Astle, who runs a journal focused on, it’s called United Methodist Insight. And it’s about how to talk to faith-based organizations and covering climate. And it sort of gets to the question of, to me, there’s that going to the faith-based community, but also just expanding our list of or our notion of who are experts on climate. Which I think is really critical, and to get us out of this kind of sense that there’s this silo. Who wants to tackle that?

Chase Cain: I mean, I can just say quickly, I grew up in Georgia, I also grew up Southern Baptist. And I am not the best person to speak to this, but there are people like Katharine Hayhoe who wrote an entire book about how to engage people of faith about climate change. And she frequently comes back to the Book of Genesis. It’s like, “Well, if you read the Bible and you believe that God gave man charge of caring for the Earth, then you should be on the front lines of climate change.” So, I think there are other people who could probably provide more specific guidance there. But I certainly think it’s something that we should be talking about and engaging those folks on. And she’s someone who’s, I think, done a good job of that publicly.

Kyle Pope: Anybody else have a thought on that, or just this general idea of thinking more creatively about who we talk to about climate stories?

Neela Banerjee: Well, I mean… Go ahead, Adam.

Adam Mahoney: I’ll just quickly say, even just with Hurricane Francine, when my neighborhood lost power throughout the city of New Orleans, that’s in like community lighthouses, which were being powered by solar panels, and were able to stay on, were all churches, faith-based institutions. And that’s where folks gathered. And across the country, we’ve actually reported a couple stories this year about churches running community farms and trying to implement climate solutions at the very local level within their institutions. So, there’s always those stories to uplift. And I mean, particularly in the south and amongst Black folks, religious institutions still hold a lot of weight. So, that’s something that we cannot put to the wayside.

Neela Banerjee: And I think a lot of times when people think about religion, they’re just thinking about white evangelical Christianity. And religion in America is much, much broader than that among white people, among non-whites, among non-Christians. And a lot of people are doing really interesting things. And I also think there’s a generational difference, even among young conservatives too, about climate change and what to do on it. So, there are all sorts of ways. And even if it’s not a political story, if it’s a story about climate action, climate solutions.

Kyle Pope: Lisa, last word.

Lisa Friedman: Oh. I mean, we started the conversation of how we talk to faith-based groups, but I think these are organizations and groups that I think we should be elevating more and hearing from more. One of the things that I really appreciated on this panel was all of the different ways to think about climate change and how it is intersecting with the economic issues that we know voters care about and all the rest. And I think the more new voices that we can get into our stories and the more that we talk to new people about how they’re thinking about climate change, it’s an obvious benefit to readers.

Kyle Pope: Adam, Neela, Chase, Lisa, thank you all so much. This was super helpful and really, really interesting and inspiring and hopeful, which is great. So, this is the end of our first panel on this Covering Climate Now, Climate on the Ballot Summit. Join us tomorrow at nine A.M. Eastern time for another panel about how journalists in other climate critical countries, including India, Mexico, and the U.K. covered elections this year, and how journalists abroad can think about covering the implications of the U.S. election. Then tomorrow at noon Eastern, we’ll hear from local journalists across the U.S. from Florida, Arizona, Maryland, and Texas, how they’re exploring the stakes of the election for audiences in their areas. And on Thursday, as Mark mentioned, 11am Eastern, a conversation with John Podesta in a conversation with Chase and Joan Meiners.

So, thank you all so much for being here. You’ll find links to RSVP to all of those events, if you haven’t already done so, at coveringclementnow.org. Check up our Climate on the Ballot newsletter. We’re going to have daily updates every day this week, that way you’ll have links to stuff that people talked about. We’ll have some videos, so that’s going to be something that you all can use as a resource. That’s it for now for Covering Climate Now. I’m Kyle Pope. Thanks again for joining us and hope to see you soon.