Climate on the Ballot: The State & Local Climate Election

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard (00:00): Hello, and welcome back to Covering Climate Now’s ongoing Climate on the Ballot Summit. I’m Mark Hertsgaard, I’m the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now, and also the environment correspondent for The Nation Magazine. This is day two of our three-day event at Covering Climate Now, where we’re focusing on how all of us, as journalists, can elevate the climate story in our coverage of this absolutely historic election season. For those of you who may not know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets, that reach a total audience of billions of people around the world. We’re organized by journalists, for journalists. We’re dedicated to improving the coverage that all of us are doing, of what we call the defining story of our time. You can go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org, and there you will find everything you could want to get, in terms of our background resources.

(00:58): You can sign up for our regular newsletters, including a newsletter called Climate on the Ballot, it comes out every Monday, and can keep your climate coverage informed. Also, Climate Beat is our signature newsletter, that comes out on Thursdays. You can also find out about our trainings for newsrooms, our awards, the Slack channel, you can join, and also how you and your news organization can join Covering Climate Now, all of these services free of charge, so please get in touch when you can. Now back to today’s summit, really this week’s summit. We’re putting this on, Climate on the Ballot, because the 2024 election is going to have a profound effect on how the United States government, at all levels, national, state, local, addresses the climate crisis. We know from polling, that a clear majority of the American public cares about climate change. They want to know more about it, especially the solutions.

(02:02): So how can we, as journalists, tell stories that capture our audience’s attention and drive public discussion in a news cycle that moves very fast, but also holds candidates to account, asking them not “Do you believe in climate change?” But rather, “What are you going to do about climate change?” How can we be accurate and honest about this problem, while also guarding against allegations, or perceptions, of partisanship? And how can we demonstrate to audiences the connection between this election and climate action. And also. Specifically for this session, what our audiences are seeing in their own backyards?

(02:44): Today’s panel is called the State and Local Climate Elections. So of course, state and local officials, all across the country, many of whom are up for election this November, play pivotal roles in championing or blocking climate action. So how do we cover the climate politics at play for our local audiences, and what can we learn from our colleagues who’ve been doing it well? To moderate that discussion today, we are very happy to have our longtime friend and colleague from the Miami Herald, Alex Harris. She’s their lead climate reporter. And before I turn it over to her, I just want to emphasize that this session, like this entire summit this week, is open to the public as observers, but we ask that all of the questions only be asked, and the conversation engaged in, and only by working journalists, please.

(03:39): And with that, I’ll turn it over to Alex Harris. Alex, thanks again for being with us.

Alex Harris (03:43): Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Always a pleasure to be here with Covering Climate Now. This is, as everyone attending knows, a crucial, crucial topic. It’s the future of the world around us, and the livelihoods of everyone on it. And I think that journalism is one of the best possible ways to address this problem, and to get people engaged into the solutions. And I think some of our panelists today are going to have really great things to say about how they can draw that connection when it comes to politics. Before I introduce the rest of our panel, I want to encourage everybody, like Mark said, we are open to questions from journalists only. And if you’ve got questions, at the bottom of your Zoom window, you can look at the Q&A button, which that, you can use throughout the webinar, to submit questions. So please let us know when you submit your question, what your name and your outlet is, and we will do our best to address as many of these as we can, and we’ll do that in the second half of our discussion.

(04:33): But first, I’d like you guys to meet Aman Azar, who is the Maryland reporter at Inside Climate News, covering Baltimore and the Greater Chesapeake region. Aman is previously a broadcast journalist and producer for the BBC World Service and Voice of American News, among other outlets. We also have Joan Meiners, the Climate News and Storytelling reporter at the Arizona Republic and Azcentral.com. Her work has additionally appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, and ProPublica. And before becoming a journalist, she earned a PhD in ecology from the University of Florida, my alma Mater as well. So go Gators. And Brian New, an investigative reporter for CBS News, Texas, in Dallas, Fort Worth. Brian’s work has appeared on CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, and local stations in Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and elsewhere. Thanks everybody so much for joining us and give them a warm virtual welcome, everybody.

(05:21): We’re going to start with Aman first. You cover Maryland, you’ve got a very competitive Senate race there that has gotten quite a bit of national attention, between Republican Larry Hogan and Democrat Angela Alsobrooks. How do you approach that race in a way that’s not just the regular horse race reporting that we see from national politics? How do you bring climate into it, and how do you make it matter to local reporter, or local people?

Aman Azhar (05:45): Hi, thank you. First of all, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Important and timely conversation. You would think that Maryland is a deep blue state, and probably some of the political choices exercised should be quite obvious. It should be pro-climate, just clamping down on greenhouse gases, or fossil fuel infrastructure. Actually, the reality as I see it, and I’ve been covering it now, for over two years, is far more nuanced and complex. For one, and when I did my latest story about this Senate race, I realized that it really just started to matter who is going to make themselves available or not. Alsobrooks, who’s a Democratic candidate, was more open to the idea of having a conversation with me, or reporter like myself, rather than Larry Hogan. And it’s almost comical that when I sent my questions to the Larry Hogan team, and this is all that I reported in my story as well, they referred me to an article which was published in Heatmap.

(06:46): They said, “Oh, we’ve already kind of covered that, so you can look at that, and just import it in your story,” which is what I referred to and had to do. So I think when we talk about, or when I look at my stories in terms of accountability and transparency, which is kind of paramount to what I do, the first thing is of course, who is making themselves available for scrutiny, and that’s where everything starts. Everything else really is about how the state and people are exercising their choices. I still feel, having covered this story, and I’m still covering it, that despite that a state like Maryland has so many climate issues and climate challenges, and yet some of these choices are not really translating into political choices, and it’s still a little bit marginal to more immediate issues of medical care, health, housing, abortion rights. So there’s still that much of a difference, and I feel that’s where it’s really important for organizations, news organizations.

(07:53): And Inside Climate News is very dedicated to climate issues, so I don’t have to make that connection. It’s just that finding those connections, which are already implicit in a lot of stories that we do, I think making that obvious to our readers, that this is not something new that we are importing into our stories, the climate connection and environmental issues. They’re just metaphors and conceptual devices that allows us to talk about same issues of justice, of equality, and everything that we have been talking about all along, in terms of important public matters and political choices. So it’s an ongoing story for me. I’m still finding ways to kind of draw those connections, just so people, and this is a very razor-thin Senate raise as we know. So of course, everything is going to be consequential to the point where people are able to exercise their informed political choices.

Alex Harris (08:46): You brought up a lot of stuff I think we’re going to come back to there, the marginalization of environmental issues compared to healthcare, or war abroad, or all the other issues that voters are tuning in for. But also I love that, that’s a new one, “I already spoke to a climate outlet, just quote whatever I told them.” I haven’t gotten that one yet. But on that note, I want to move over to Joan, because I think what you mentioned is obviously, you have a lot of readers who are very tuned in on climate issues in Maine, it’s a blue state. Arizona, not so much. How, Joan, do you approach climate stories there, in ways that can show readers the stakes with this upcoming election in the place they live?

Joan Meiners (09:25): Yeah. I mean, obviously, we have a lot of climate issues in Arizona, extreme heat, drought are the ones that are top-of-mind for most people, and there’s a pretty big divide in how people feel that we should be addressing that. We do have a lot of climate activism in the state, but we have also some thriving climate denial. And I think it’s really exciting that a lot of these nonprofit climate-focused outlets have been reporting, and putting all this information out in recent years, and growing their audiences. But I think it’s also important to have these longstanding local outlets getting in on that subject because we sometimes have the attention of readers that might not otherwise go searching for that information. And so I try to think about those readers when I am crafting my stories, and what information gaps do I need to fill it for them.

(10:32): I get a lot of email responses to my stories, about how every single time I write about heat, I get an email from somebody that says, “Well, it’s always been hot in Arizona, so what’s the big deal?” So I think sometimes, you can take an approach where you try to speak to these readers at many different levels within the same story, and other times I try to take an approach where this story is for the people who have been emailing me, saying “It’s always been hot in Arizona,” and this story is for the people who were way past that, and they want to know what we can do about it now, and what their elected officials are doing about it, and which elected officials are not doing anything about it, and maybe don’t deserve their reelection vote.

(11:21): And so I guess, my answer is I try to take a smorgasbord approach, of sometimes I’m targeting this, I have this audience’s voice in my head, and sometimes I have this audience’s voice in my head. And I think it’s a privilege at the largest newspaper in the State of Arizona, that’s been printing since 1890, to have this platform to try to introduce some of these ideas to people that are maybe a little bit more resistant to them. But it’s a very critical topic in a very critical state of course, and so yeah, I try to use that position as much as possible, having the ear of some of those people.

(12:05): One example that comes to mind, is last year, there was a report that came out, late in the year, that said that the last 12 months have been the hottest month on record. And it listed the hottest cities, and Phoenix was not even on the list. And we went to immediately cover that report, and then I realized if we cover this report, just as a straight news story, it’s going to seem like we are contradicting our own reporting over the past few months about Phoenix being the hottest and breaking all these heat records. And that could potentially fuel climate denial, where people are like, “Look, they’re all over the place. It’s back and forth. Nobody knows for sure, scientists are confused.”

(12:51): These are all the things I hear from people, that are the ways that people are clinging to these science denial, or climate denial concepts. And so we kind of took a step back, and did a more in-depth approach of what are the reasons why you might see conflicting news reports about heat, and what are the different ways of measuring heat, and how do the different ways of measuring heat possibly result in different answers? But how is that not an indication that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, but rather an indication that this stuff is just complicated? And on the one hand, the fact that average temperatures are going up globally, is very simple, but on the other hand, there’s different ways to measure urban heat. There’s different ways to think about it. There’s different time windows to do this analysis.

(13:50): Last year, we had… So the story that I’m talking about was in response to 12 months from the end of 2022, through most of 2023 being the hottest 12 months on record. But within that 12 months, we had an especially cold winter, so that was why Phoenix didn’t come out overall, in that whole period as making the top of the list for cities that were the hottest globally. But it doesn’t undermine… I think sometimes people need a little bit of hand-holding to understand why these things are not contradicting themselves, why all of the science is very aligned. And so that was an example of a story that wasn’t necessarily hard-hitting journalism, or anything, but was, I think, something that filled a gap for our readers.

Alex Harris (14:40): No, I love that. And I really resonate with what you had to say about trying to reach multiple audiences, in both your reporting, or even in a single story. So my audience is like yours, I think there are different layers of folks. I try to remember every single time I write a story about climate change, especially climate and politics, that this may be someone’s first time understanding what climate change is, what it means, what’s going to happen to them, what’s going to change in their community, so I try to always include a very, especially if I’m writing politics, because I’m trying to reach a different audience than I normally reach, and I try to include some very simple language, just catching people up, like “Hey, here’s what we’re talking about. Here’s what’s at stake, and here’s what these various electeds are talking about doing.”

(15:20): But then also sometimes you have people reading the stories like, “Yes, I know that. Yes, I know that. Tell me what else I can do.” They want to address a much higher level. But I think that the audience levels you’re seeing there reflects something I know Brian looked into, and something he’s been working on for a while. I know Brian, you don’t normally do climate work, but your new project really addresses the issue, I think we’ve heard from both Amon and Joan, of that disconnect between voters and what they want about climate action, and what elected officials are actually doing. How did you decide to do this project? How did it come about?

Brian New (15:51): Yeah. So first off, I appreciate you inviting me to this panel. And yeah, unlike the other panelists here, my experience on reporting climate is a lot less limited. But the project that we are set to roll out next week with several of our other CBS stations, all the CBS networks, really looks at the disconnect between public opinion when it comes to climate, and what our elected officials locally, say and do. And the reason we wanted to do this is, especially with local television news, we wanted to move past the soundbite from candidate A on climate, followed by the soundbite from candidate B. And so what we’ve done, is we’ve used the Yale Climate Polling, which you can find online. And what they look at is… And with this polling, it can be divided into states, it can be sorted down to county, even congressional districts. So we wanted to look at our local, and it talks about in the data, how people feel about climate. They’re concerned about climate, but also their stance on different policies.

(17:06): And so we use that data, and then we were able to use that to kind of set up accountability interviews with our elected officials. I’m in the Dallas, Texas area, so a conservative area, and a very red state. But we were able to see the data, and see that in many cases, in congressional districts that were very red, that a large percentage of those constituents are concerned about certain climate issues, and they would be supportive of certain policies. And we took that, and were able to sit down with Republican elected officials, and say, “This is not the quote-unquote liberal media coming to you with an agenda, this is your constituents who are saying that they’re concerned about the climate, and they would support these policies. And so then why aren’t we seeing those? Or why don’t your actions and your words, especially on social media, why does there seem to be a disconnect?”

(18:11): And so that’s the project, and I know different markets are kind of seeing different results in this project. But one thing that we found, and I think was important in our project too, was we did find a lot of Republican voters who are concerned about the climate. And I think those voices for my audience, is important to hear from. And I think it’s also using that polling data also helps, because it sets up, “Hey, this is an issue that people do care about, and this is why we’re doing it.”

Alex Harris (18:52): And do you have any takeaways from that? I mean, obviously, anchoring your reporting with the soundest source of data you can find, and bringing in readers, and voters, and also the politicians themselves, bringing to account for those poll numbers is a really great way to do a project. But have you found anything, or learned anything through this that you think would help local reporters in other communities replicate this, or do something similar?

Brian New (19:16): Yeah, I think one, whether it’s a Yale Polling data, I know there’s Pew Research, I think polling data helps with establishing stories. I think it also helps to get into interviews with elected officials that may have questioned climate change in the past, so they don’t feel like you’re attacking them right away. You’re just bringing data to them, from their constituents. I also think it’s important to have different voices, not just your environmentalists, or not just your typical activists, but we were able to find a lifelong Republican who is really at a crossroads with what he’s going to do this election because climate is very important to him. And he’s hearing his congressional members openly question whether they believe in global warming, and so I think that’s important as well.

(20:16): The other thing I did kind of learn, or a takeaway from this, from someone that doesn’t report on this very often on climate, is when I’m in these accountability interviews with elected officials that have a history of questioning global warming, and so forth, I think focusing on policies, and I think kind of refocusing them on those particular questions, lead to more productive interviews. And I also think that, I know Aman touched upon this as well, of the importance of transparency in the interviews and process journalism. We went to a town hall meeting put on by Congressman Pat Fallon. And in this town hall meeting, he was asked a very specific question about climate change, and then he kind of went on a tangent for several minutes talking about his views, and what he calls it, the alarmists coming from the left, and so forth. And so I think in the way we present it in our reporting, is “Here’s the question he was asked and here’s how he answered.” And I think that transparency is important to show.

Alex Harris (21:43): Absolutely. Yeah, and being able to connect someone directly to, “Here’s the specific question. Here’s the specific wording you responded. We inform, you decide,” sort of style. And I want to come back to Aman and Joan a little bit, and ask your top tips or takeaways for folks who are trying to tell this story in their local communities, or draw people’s attention to the climate political impacts that they may not know about. And I want to start with you Aman, think you have a different way of approaching it since you are climate first, and then you’re attaching, and trying to find unique angles on politics. How do you go about approaching these stories, and then how do you think other local reporters should do the same? You are muted.

Aman Azhar (22:26): Thanks for that, yes. But one of the things is that what helps me is to just understand that I’m not trying to draw a connection which is out in the ether, and I’m just kind of importing into a story, which kind of makes it sound as though it’s arbitrary. My approach really is that climate issues, the heat wave, and Joan has talked about it, everybody does, the flood-related insurance, and coastal erosion, frontline communities, these are everyday things. We have issues. Our debates are about our cars, the choices in our cars, and electricity, so it’s much more immediate than probably even a lot of people realize. And I think that’s the kind of a connection, that immediacy is what I try and draw into the stories that I do. Maryland, of course, has the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which is a huge issue. There’s so much of economics and culture that comes around that watershed, that kind of makes it, in a way, a very straightforward thing for me to write about.

(23:36): And also that the amount of storm water going into the watershed, and the kind of a nutrient pollution that is going in, then we have had troubles with algal blooms. I did a story where recently, where Potomac had a very thick mat of algal blooms, which kind of washed into the filtration plant of Washington, DC, just on the night of July 4th, when a lot of fire suppression activities require water. And on that same day, just prior evening, we had this boil water advisory. Now that’s a huge story, and that story tells us that, “Okay. Well, these issues…” I mean, the warming temperatures, the nutrient pollution, they’re intersecting, and creating and posing new challenges that we need to take care of. So I think the idea really is that how people, and which is where I feel that in my stories, the focus on people and communities bring those elements in the starkest light that I can draw on.

(24:41): What have people feared in the process, when they’re looking for flood-related insurance, when their properties are at risk, or when an elderly person is looking, just trying to avoid heat waves for that matter, or a worker out in 99 degree heat, and we had a death in Baltimore as well. So all these issues kind of make it very apparent that this is a problem that needs to be talked about, needs to be articulated, and they need to be drawn into the policy debate, so people can understand that there’s an immediate connection between what they do and what is happening, so that they can exercise their political choices. I think this is the only way I can think of, and I feel that my reporting makes it kind of a mediation point for those articulations to happen. So I think for everybody who’s doing their bit, it’s just to pay attention, I guess, to what kind of environmental factors we’re getting used to what’s happening. It’s just really that awareness that helps us to bring those points into our reporting, if I’m able to articulate my point.

Alex Harris (25:57): Yeah. And I hear you completely, and I think you really hit the nail on the head there, with a lot of these environmental quality of life issues are bipartisan. I know I always tell folks down here, that if you went and grabbed a random person off the street and said, “Hey, do you want to pass out from heat exhaustion while you’re waiting for your bus? Do you like it when your house floods? Do you like it when you go fishing and your fish has a normal number of eyes and gills?” Everybody says yes, everybody wants clean air, clean water, and a stable atmosphere. I think the differences become on what we want our politicians to do about it, or how fast and how intense and how expensive we want those solutions to be.

(26:33): And Joan, coming to you to ask about some of this stuff. I know you’ve mentioned before that you don’t really like to write stories about what politicians say they might possibly, potentially do, you like to focus your reporting on what they actually have done, or their track records. Talk to me more about that, about how when you’re approaching these stories in Arizona, how can you ground them on, like “Here’s what we know they’ve already done, maybe that’s a hint of what they might do,” or your style of approaching these climate political stories.

Joan Meiners (27:01): Yeah. It’s funny, I just published this morning, a story about the Arizona context to climate-related debate content. And so that was against what I had said before, about not giving a lot of airtime too, just because politicians can say anything, right? But I think it’s good. On the one hand, it’s good to have that record of things that they said, that we can then come back to later, it’s almost more just like putting in place for future accountability reporting. But yeah, I’ve tried to take an approach of looking, of shining light on what leaders have actually done in Arizona, on climate, on both ends of the spectrum.

(27:44): So I published a story about a month ago, looking at all of the environment-related legislation that has been introduced in the Arizona State House and Senate, and then what happened to it. Which was a lot of work, but I think… And then I wrote a data story about that. So kind of another thing about, I try to mix up… Sometimes we want to tell the human interest stories of the frontline communities and how they’re suffering, and other times I think we want to just put a data story up that says, “Here’s all the bills that have been introduced, and here’s a data viz graphic that shows you how the vast majority of them went absolutely nowhere. And I’m going to tell you why, it’s because of the voting records of these people. And so if you don’t like how this played out, maybe these are the names that you want to vote yes on, and these are the names that you want to vote no on, on the reelection ballot.”

(28:50): And so we published that about a month ago, it had the names of the legislators that had introduced the most pro-environmental legislation, and then the names of the legislators that had introduced the most legislation that was opposed by environmental groups. I had help from the Sierra Club, working on that to kind of identify the bills that they felt aligned with their interests, so that it wasn’t just kind of me editorializing that. But yeah, it was… I think coming from a science background, I always want to quantify things as much as I can. And so being able to show that, “Look,” I can’t remember the exact number, but four dozen bills related to the environment got proposed, and only one of the ones that an environmental group supported, passed, and a bunch of the ones that environmental groups opposed passed. And here’s why. The legislator who is most responsible for introducing the bad environmental legislation, she’s also the Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, so just shining some light on that.

(30:07): But then on the other end of the spectrum, I think… So in Phoenix, in Arizona, we have obviously, very interesting dynamic political landscape. In Phoenix, we actually have a mayor who runs on a sustainability platform, and seems to genuinely care about that issue. I sat down with her for an end-of-year interview last year, and talked to her about those priorities. And then just a few months later, I came across a report that found that her office had ignored really high methane emissions coming out of soil samples, evidence in soil samples at a site that they owned. And so I collaborated with our Phoenix city reporter to write a story kind of holding them accountable on that, in the sense that it’s not even necessarily that the amount of emissions coming from this site are going to dramatically change the climate problem, it’s more of does this action align with what you’ve said your priorities are?

(31:10): It doesn’t seem that it does. It seems like if you really had a City Hall office where people were educated on the issue of climate and were making that a priority in their day-to-day operations, these methane samples in this environmental report that came back to the city from this assessment of the site that they own, it would’ve stood out to someone, and instead they totally ignored it until we started asking questions about it. And when we started asking about it, they originally just straight up told us, “This is not a climate issue. We don’t need to deal with this.” And we’re like, “Well, I have seven research papers and two experts who say otherwise.” And by the time we published that story, they had retained a contractor to deal with the emissions at that site.

(32:04): So I think it’s important not just to point out the very worst people, but to also show where the people who are actually leading the way, are maybe not following through in every way that they could be, which might seem a little bit mean in a state where sometimes the bar is so low, but I think we got to do both ends.

Alex Harris (32:26): I think you bring up a really interesting, like the elephant in the room when it comes to climate and political reporting. No one wants to be accused of bias, no one wants to be perceived as being biased, but there is just a mountain of facts showing that one side of the aisle has prioritized climate action and does something, not enough, not the right policies, not the right thing every single time, but they do something, and they deserve accountability reporting to keep them honest with it, like you were doing. But the other side, they’re more likely to not pursue climate action, or stand in the way of it.

(33:01): Brian, I know this is a newer topic for you, diving into climate, did you worry more about the perceptions of bias on this topic than you have anything else you’ve approached politically? You talked a little bit about how you approached doing this project by trying to front-load as many of the facts as possible, and not put anything in your own words, but yeah, how do you deal with the potential perception of bias? I mean, your project sort of pointed out which representatives are the ones that are acting very different on climate than their voters want, it’s usually the Republicans. How did you approach that?

Brian New (33:36): Yeah, so I’ll admit that that was my first hesitation when the network kind of approached, just knowing the political environment here in Texas. But I will say that I felt more comfortable as a reporter with it, having the polling data. And I also think having… We started our project with, “Okay, let’s find, we know based upon the polling data, that Republican voters do care about this issue, and do support many climate policies, so let’s go find them. Let’s hear their voices.” So that’s where I started with, because then I think it’s easier when you get to those accountability interviews, and you get to where you’re not coming across as partisan by, “Hey, it’s not my voice, this is a voice of a Republican in our community. We’re taking his concerns, and we’re taking them to elected officials.”

(34:39): And so that was my approach, and I think that’s even in the way we structure our story, having the data, hearing from a voice, that a lifelong Republican who’s concerned about that, and then I think it’s easier to get in. But I also think that you can’t… I mean, the facts are the facts of which party, in their actions, or just elected officials, which ones act on certain policies, and which ones have said, I guess, questioning global warming in statements and in interviews. And I think you got to be careful not to… It is what it is. I mean, it is one party not try to so balance it out, if that makes sense, where you’re misleading the audience of where the different parties stand on this issue.

Alex Harris (35:47): Right, you don’t want to lean too hard on objectivity, that you flatten it out, and make it seem like, “Well, one side said this, and one side said this,” and false equivalency, right. No, and I think exactly, you said it perfectly, which is that the facts are the facts, but it is important to try to work in as many folks as you can, on many different voices and views, so that you can offer a more balanced perspective. I think the work you guys did to find lifelong Republicans with these concerns that bear out, the human voices that bear out the polling you’re citing, really does strengthen that story, and make it something that is harder to accuse it of being biased, or having a skewed perspective.

(36:23): I did want to share with you guys one story that I worked on, that I thought was like, when I think about how I talk about climate and politics, and how I try to get my readership, which is not as blue as Aman’s, and not as red as Joan’s, it’s somewhere in the purple-y middle, depending on what polling you look at in Florida. For us, it can be kind of tough to tell these stories. I think stories about how we should prepare for hurricanes, or flooding, or heat are usually received well. Stories about how we address the actual cause of climate change and fossil fuels, those are not as well received. But one exception to that, which I’m very proud of, is a story I did a couple years ago with our Republican mayor of the City of Miami, Francis Suarez.

(37:05): The city had put forward some new plans for how it was going to get to net zero, and an earlier draft version of one of the meetings, I remember noticing a line talking about how, “Hey, we’re going to move forward with a ban on natural gas hookups in new construction, multifamily buildings, condos, apartments, large commercial spaces.” They were looking at potentially blocking people for new construction, making them be only electric, which we all know is something really important for getting rid of fossil fuels in as many sectors of our economy as we can. That was a pretty progressive policy suggestion from the City of Miami, and I was very impressed to see it.

(37:42): I’ve seen it in Austin, I’ve seen it in Berkeley, but I thought, “Oh, I wouldn’t have expected that from here. I’ll keep up with it.” And then a couple months later, when they announced their full version of the plan, I noticed that line wasn’t there. So I reached out to some sources, asked for some records, and found via email, what had happened, which is that our local natural gas company, TECO Gas, had sent the mayor a very aggressive email, redlining the reports saying, “We don’t want that. We don’t want anything that’s going to touch our business. Take that out. We’re a partner of the city. You have multiple contracts with us, how dare you do this,” And then donating $10,000 to him, his political campaign, and poof, the sentence was gone, the policy was gone.

(38:21): So we published that story, and I got great reaction. Normally, when you write about the state of Florida and its leadership is actively not pursuing any policies that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, those stories are not really well read. They’re read by, you know, you’re preaching to the chorus, they don’t really resonate. This one did, because it was accountability, and I found that folks on the right side of the aisle really came to me, and said, “I am mad. I don’t care about fossil fuels, but I am mad at this because I don’t like seeing money influence political decisions. I don’t like the big business has a say in what happens in my community.” And I really was encouraged by that, because I thought that it was a really nice way to take accountability journalism and reach a broader sector of the audience.

(39:02): So I would encourage anyone who’s trying to find those stories, I mean, they’re a little harder to find than getting the candidates to actually tell you what they want to do, but if you can dive in the records, there’s some great stuff there to be found. I am going to turn to our Q&A at this point, and ask all of you guys, from Marcus Burham, what types of climate concerns, local pollution, extreme weather, flooding, most prompt voters to connect those concerns to actual policies and get to the polls. So what have you noticed in your reporting? Go ahead, Aman.

Aman Azhar (39:33): Well, yeah, so I think excellent question, and just what you said briefly, Alex. I think, absolutely. I think the accountability lens is so important, and it kind of draws people in. Because when you’re telling people, or asking politicians questions that they made commitments on, and when you ask them, “What have you done,” everybody wants to know that. So I think that’s truth telling, fact-checking, and accountability journalism, is the best way to, I hate to say it, but import that climate environmental angle into the stories, which are pretty much the policy concerns. With Maryland, I think everything that has anything to do with the Chesapeake Bay watershed, we have a lot of coastal erosion as well happening. We have a problem with pollution. For instance, in Baltimore, there’s a problem with sewer, a huge problem with kind of sewer backups for that matter. There’s a problem with industrial pollution, especially in South Baltimore.

(40:35): So I think if you try and go by such segmentation, you realize that everyday issues is really what motivate people, motivate a lot of activism, and those are kind of materialized themselves into political choices, local elections. And I feel that in Maryland right now, it’s such an intense debate, because it’s a very state-oriented debate at the same time, but it really cuts through all the way to local issues of air pollution issues, of whether we should have a dirty energy in our clean energy portfolio standards, for that matter, is a huge, huge problem. And that’s prompting statewide legislation, or these attempts for it for the last seven years. And at the same time, both the candidates have their own agendas, but Larry Hogan continues to say that, “Well, I’m not a Trump-er,” which kind of muddies the water a little bit, as he moved from center to center-right for that matter. And now we have Angela Alsobrooks, who’s much more a pro-climate person, and yet they’re neck and neck.

(41:42): So it’s important how these personalities, and their political narratives shape issues. But I must say that issues of issues of pollution, everyday living, coastal erosion, heat, are the things that really concern people, and get them to move the needle.

Alex Harris (42:06): Joan or Brian, do you guys want to weigh in on some of the issues you feel make that connection?

Joan Meiners (42:12): Sure. So we have a pretty robust environment reporting team here at the Arizona Republic, which is awesome. And we tend to… Obviously, there’s overlap, but we tend to kind of divide up topics. So water is something that is frequently very important to our readers, that’s mostly covered by my colleague, Brandon Loomis. I do a lot of heat accountability, science stuff. Heat is very polarizing, but very important. And one of the stories I recently published about heat, that got the most pushback, was when I wrote about Biden’s proposed OSHA rule for protecting workers from extreme heat.

(43:01): And kind of highlighted… I mentioned a few minutes ago, that it was important to hold the City of Phoenix accountable for where they slope up on their sustainability platform, but that story was an example of highlighting where these are the leaders in the state who are actually doing something about this issue that’s important to all of you, and bringing legislation to the floor to deal with it, which was then voted down by these other people, and kind of showing people that something that is very obviously effect… I mean, we’ve had just skyrocketing heat-associated deaths in the county in recent years, lots of people have written about that.

(43:42): And so I got a lot of pushback to that story, for being very polarizing, like “Oh, Democrats good, Republicans, bad.” But I think sometimes it’s like, well, I get accused of being partisan, but when those readers email me those things, I usually generally do respond, and say, “If you spent 40 hours a week talking to people and reading things, and having them all tell you that these are the problems, these are the solutions, and these are the people doing something about it, and these are the people blocking something about it, I think a balanced assessment would come out the same way.”

(44:24): But I think it’s also part of our job to not only react to what readers are already interested in, but to tell them maybe what they should be interested in. And so we also have an Indigenous Affairs reporter on our environment team, Deb Krol, who highlights the issues that are affecting Arizona’s 22 federally-recognized tribes. We have Clara Migoya who looks at agriculture. And so all of those things together, I think, are kind of trying to give people a picture of the whole thing. Because I don’t think we would want to just react to what people already think is an issue, obviously, part of our platform is to tell them what the real issues are.

Alex Harris (45:12): I love that you guys are able to approach that from so many different angles, and really partner up to find the climate angle in everything. I did want to ask one last question from our Q&A, for all three of you guys. Maybe we can start with Brian, if you’ve got an answer off the top of your head about what language you try to avoid for fear that it sounds too partisan. I know this is controversial in the climate world, but I don’t use the phrase climate crisis very often. If someone says it, I’m going to quote it, of course, but it’s not our primary way of referring to the issues of global warming, or climate change, or all those other issues that come with it in our reporting at the Miami Herald, which I know is not the standard everywhere else. I know the Guardian famously calls it the climate crisis. Curious about how all three of you look at language. What phrases do you definitely use, or definitely not use?

Brian New (46:00): Yeah, climate was one that we… And we were very intentional in our story, that because we’re linear, we’re broadcast, people, they’re not clicking on our story because they’re interested, we’re kind of presenting it to them. So we want to be very careful not to, especially early on, throw out a term that may get someone to click, because we hope that they stay and watch the story. So crisis was one that we avoided. And just very little things, I think, with broadcast, just the not going… Because a lot of what our story did was, “This is what public opinion says, this is what elected officials had said,” and not even using the word “But,” or something in between, connecting anything that would give the idea that we were partisan, or we were favorite. It was just this and this. So I think even little details, we even talked about, with broadcast, just the words that we would emphasize. And we tried to… Crisis, and any of those words, we try to take out because we really wanted as broad of an audience to be receptive to our story.

Aman Azhar (47:33): Yeah. It’s a good. I think coming from Inside Climate News, which has kind of proudly present itself as a climate-oriented news organization, and at the same time, we do have these robust conversation within the team as well, what to do about this, as Brian has said. My take really is that there are clearly some false equivalents that we need to avoid as well, as journalists. Like if the idea is to move economy beyond fossil fuels, and on to clean sources, then how can, at the same time, we pose this as a question, that whether the fossil fuel build out in Gulf could be a good thing or bad. It just cannot happen, if you know what I mean. The dirty coal energy for that matter, or incineration, which is trash-based energy, could anybody say that there could be a choice for people to say whether they like one or the other? No.

(48:36): So I think in my approach, I feel that there are also some things which needs to be clearly told, of course, backed by science, and there’s a lot of science. It’s not a matter of not having science. And I feel the rest is really about the editorial policies, and how editorial choices weigh upon reporter’s choices, and the stories and in the editing process. But I feel that, like I said, that going from accountability, truth-telling, facts-based reporting, there are some things which you can just make a point, and forcefully so. And I’m really in favor of doing that, and I think some of my stories kind of prove that point.

Alex Harris (49:18): Thank you so much, Aman, for that. And thank you to everybody for your great comments and great stories that we shared. I’m going to pass it back to Mark Hertsgaard.

Mark Hertsgaard (49:26): Thank you, Alex. And thank all of you, panelists, this was a very rich and fascinating conversation. And I shared with you in the green room, before we went on, to try and be as constructive and concrete as you could in your suggestions, and you really were. I think all of us who cover the story, whether at the local or other levels, would’ve learned a lot from this conversation, especially about this aspect of how the audience really does care about accountability journalism, and it kind of crosses over a perceived ideological divide. So anyway, very, very glad to have you, and I’m just sorry we couldn’t have this conversation go on for a lot longer. But we will be back again tomorrow, everybody, for the final session in this Climate on the Ballot Summit, brought to you by Covering Climate Now.

(50:18): You won’t want to miss this. It’s at 11:00 U.S Eastern Time, and it will be a Newsmaker interview with John Podesta. He, of course, is the top climate advisor to the Biden White House. And he will be questioned by Chase Cain, who’s the National Climate Correspondent at NBC News, and also Joan Meiners, who you just watched here from the Arizona Republic. And also you, as journalists, will be able to add your own questions to Mr. Podesta, so please show up for that. Talk about accountability reporting, there’s a lot that the Biden administration has done, of course, with the Inflation Reduction Act, but also they’ve been the biggest oil and gas driller in US history, and the US is now the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, so these are clearly questions that need to be sorted out.

(51:09): You can link, you can RSVP to attend that conversation tomorrow, in the chat, but we’re going to be shutting that shortly. So please go to our website, coveringclimatenow.org, to save your spot for that conversation tomorrow. And with that, I’ll leave it there. But just to say on behalf of everyone at Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard, wishing you a very pleasant day.