Talking Shop: Covering Trump’s Climate Blitzkrieg

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to another Talking Shop with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now and also the environment correspondent for The Nation Magazine. Today’s subject, covering Trump’s climate blitzkrieg.

But first, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of 500-plus news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. Were organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do better coverage of the defining story of our time. Covering Climate Now works with journalists all over the world. More than half of our partners are outside the US. We convene discussions, like today’s webinar, where journalists can talk among ourselves about how to tackle common challenges. We train newsrooms in both English and Spanish, and we provide cutting edge analysis in our Climate Beat and other newsletters. We establish standards of excellence in climate reporting through our annual awards program. And if you’re interested in submitting, this year’s submission date deadline is March 31. That’s for work that’s been published or broadcast in the year 2024. All of our services are free of charge. You can find more information and apply to join Covering Climate Now at our website coveringclimatenow.org.

Now to today’s session, covering Trump’s climate blitzkrieg. Journalists and the world today stand at an unprecedented moment in the climate story. From the time climate change irreversibly emerged onto the public agenda in the late 1980s, the United States has been the world’s leading climate superpower, not only because the US has always been and remains history’s biggest climate polluter, even today, the US’s total emissions exceed those of China, but it’s also because the US’s political, economic, military, and diplomatic power have given it unmatched influence over what the world as a whole could do about climate change.

US diplomats could strengthen or weaken what got decided at UN Climate Summits, US companies and investors could redirect global investment flows. Throughout these years since the late 1980s, the United States has been governed by Republican presidents and it’s been governed by Democratic presidents, but there has never been a US president remotely like Donald Trump either in his approach to the issue of climate change or his approach to public discourse and by extension to us in the media. So how should journalists and journalism cover Trump and climate change? It’s a question we at Covering Climate Now think all journalists should be thinking and talking about together not only in discussions like today’s, but also inside our newsrooms with our colleagues, and perhaps most importantly in our actions with the public, with the people we’re reporting to and for. We want to be clear that today’s webinar is by no means the final word on this subject, the theoretical and practical challenges posed by Trump’s return to the White House are too many and too wide-ranging to resolve in a single discussion like today.

So Covering Climate Now is inviting our fellow journalists to continue the conversation including on the Covering Climate Now Slack channel that is reserved solely for working journalists. We’re confident that today’s webinar will give all of us plenty to think and talk and perhaps even argue about. For example, how does journalism, whose very DNA includes respect for verifiable facts, cover a US president who has long made it clear that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what the facts are and his public discourse therefore is littered with dangerously false or inaccurate statements? How do journalists deal with the fact that the current US president, again, to a degree unprecedented among his predecessors, is brazenly violating the law, most plainly by refusing to release funds that Congress has directed to be spent? Looking back on the Watergate scandal, Washington Post executive editor, Ben Bradlee, said that the problem the press had when covering President Richard Nixon’s wrongdoing was quote, “We could never figure out a way to say the President lied to you yesterday,” unquote. Today, many journalists in newsrooms are still struggling with that same challenge.

And finally, a very practical concern for those of us on the climate beat who recognize the roaring urgency of the climate crisis. How do we convince our editors and our newsroom colleagues not to let the climate story get sidelined amid all the chaos emanating from the Trump White House? Relentlessly flooding the zone with outlandish proposals has long been Trump’s media strategy according to his former advisor, Steve Bannon. And we’ve certainly seen that play out in the first month of Trump’s presidency and not only in regards to climate change. So how do we as journalists stay focused, stay focused on our civic responsibilities to inform the public about what their government is doing and to hold those in government accountable?

We have a superb panel of journalists joining us today to talk through these issues. In the first hour, I’ll be posing questions to them. In the second half hour, we invite questions from our fellow journalists. You can submit your questions via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Please, please, please be sure to give us your name and also the name of your news outlet. And I want to emphasize that while this briefing is open to everyone, we will only be taking questions from working journalists. Now, please allow me to introduce first Jael Holzman. She is a senior reporter at Heatmap. Previously she was an energy policy reporter for Axios and E&E News. She lives in Washington DC. Second, Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is an Indigenous climate journalist from Samoa who currently writes on Pacific issues for the Guardian. She was previously Global Climate Collaborations Editor for the Associated Press and has reported on climate change for over 20 years in the Pacific Islands. And full disclosure, Cherelle is also a co-chair of the Covering Climate Now steering committee.

And finally, Bill McKibben. Wrote the first mass market book on climate change, The End of Nature, in 1989. Since then, Bill has probably published more words about climate change than any other writer, contributing to the New Yorker, the Nation, Rolling Stone, and countless other publications. He recently co-founded Third Act, a climate activist group for people over the age of 60. Now, please join me in giving all of our colleagues a warm virtual welcome. And thanks again to all of you for taking the time, to Bill and Cherelle and Jael.

Cherelle, I want to start with you today because it’s so important for all of us to remember that what any US president says and does has enormous implications for people outside the US as well. And in the case of climate change, those implications are especially acute for the poor, for women and children, and other highly vulnerable populations across the Global South. So drawing on your 20 years of experience in covering climate change across the Pacific, what advice do you have for fellow journalists outside the United States as they try to come to grips with Donald Trump’s climate blitzkrieg?

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thank you, Mark. And also thank you to Covering Climate Now for hosting this very important discussion that we have. My advice to my fellow Global South journalists is to focus on the local impacts of Trump’s actions and of the US influence in your country and in your locality, for that’s how you can truly tell the story of how this impacts national policy, local policy, and communities on the ground. For the first two months, since January and now, I’ve been covering how the executive orders by Trump have really impacted Pacific Island countries. And it’s so, so important for our local journalists and our international journalists to focus on the Global South or in your own respective countries and your own respective languages to focus on how this impacts your country, your communities, and those who are affected in the geography that you’re covering. Don’t try to cover this as a US issue. Cover this as how it impacts your government’s economy, health, education sector, human rights, and so forth. Because you have the sources, you have the understanding of how Trump’s actions will impact your community. So my advice, Mark, for my colleagues in the Global South is localize and contextualize within your local community.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks, Cherelle. So I hear you in some ways echoing also what we say at Covering Climate Now about the three elements of any good climate story is that you humanize the story, you localize the story, and you solutionize the story. Could you say a little bit about the last leg on that three-legged stool, solutionize the story? As again for journalists outside the US, as they’re talking about what Trump is and the rest of his administration are trying to do on climate change, what’s the role of solutions reporting in that schema?

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thanks, Mark. So it’s really important to… For the way that I cover these stories, Trump’s impact on the Pacific, you don’t propose the solution but you ensure to ask what the solution is or what the fallback plan is for that community or that country. So for instance, with the pullout of USAID and its impact across the Pacific, the main question to leaders, to community leaders and those who have lost their jobs is what do you do now and what are the alternative approaches for you now? So what’s the solution at the community level? And as an example, one of the solutions that was brought forth by one of the USAID workers who has five children who’s just lost his job managing a project, and that is there’s a fabric, there’s a system within the Pacific Islands where you have a protection, where you have social safeguards that communities allow for you to fall on.

And so the solution that he had proposed was to really go back to the communities that they are from and finding solutions within the communities, whether that be returning to the land, to farming, investing back into the businesses that they own, or working back on the islands that we are from and they are from. So for solutionizing the story, it’s very difficult and it’s also I would caution also journalists to really focus first on the impact and then the solution from the perspective of those who are impacted by this, especially for frontline communities.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s Cherelle Jackson. She is writing on Pacific issues, sorry, on climate issues throughout the Pacific for the Guardian, and is also our co-chair at Covering Climate Now and provides us with such excellent leadership. I want to turn now to you, Bill. And we have been covering the climate story for many more years than we probably like to admit, literally decades. And so you’ve seen a lot of US presidents come and go in that period of time. What’s your thought and your advice to our colleagues about how do we as journalists deal with the fact that the current US president literally doesn’t seem to care about facts? He seems to tell lies as easily as he draws breath. And that is not, by the way, I’m not trying to slam President Trump here. I’m just pointing out that that’s the way the guy rolls. So how do we as journalists basically deal with that and still do our jobs and serve the public?

Bill McKibben: Well, it’s a good question because Trump in so many ways is an outlier, an outlier to our experience of how to conduct our national business, but also very much an outlier in terms of his insistence that climate change is a hoax. It’s worth remembering that this is a position not shared by any of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat. Every president of the climate era has at least acknowledged the existence of the problem. And it’s not a position shared by say the big oil companies who have made it clear at some pains over the last years that they too understand that there’s something called climate change that we need to deal with.

So I don’t think it’s good journalism to revert back to the he said, she said stuff that marked the first 15 or 20 years of the climate debate. We’re past that. I think it’s probably important to just keep pointing out how isolated he is domestically, but especially internationally in this assessment of where we stand. I also think it’s really important that we keep setting it in context. There are three things going on simultaneously here. One is, and it’s the biggest and most important underlying story all the time, is that the planet is heating out of control and continues to. January was a scary month. We’re in a La Niña now in the Pacific, so temperatures should be coming down some around the globe, but they’re not. And so that element of the story is as scary as it, it’s scarier than it’s ever been. The last two or three years have seen a head-scratching spike in global temperature.

The second moving piece is that the rapid expansion of renewable energy is very real around the globe and producing where it’s been fully applied, increasingly remarkable things. California 2024 used 25% less natural gas than it did in 2023 to generate electricity because they’ve now got so many solar panels and wind turbines up. Those two things are crucial. The Trump part of this is the third moving piece and it’s related to both of them. I think the way to understand effectively the Trump presidency is an effort to put the brakes on that renewable energy transition before, from the point of view of big oil, it gets any more out of hand. And one of the truly interesting questions for the moment is whether there’s enough momentum domestically and internationally to keep that renewable energy transition at the hot pace that it’s been running the last two years. Clearly that’s why the oil industry invested so heavily in Trump was to try and break that momentum. And in many ways, I think that’s the most interesting underlying story here journalistically right now.

Mark Hertsgaard: Bill, I’m going to ask you a second question here in a moment, but I’m going to give a heads-up to my colleague behind the scenes here, David Dickson, to get ready to run the clip that we discussed. And here’s another sort of theoretical but very concrete question I’m going to put to you, Bill. Which is along with a president who seemingly doesn’t care that he lies so frequently, we have a president who is brazenly violating US law. As I said, most obviously in refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated. The US Constitution is crystal clear that the Congress decides where money goes, where it doesn’t go. And yet just as with figuring out a way to say that the President is lying about X, Y, or Z, a lot of our colleagues seem to be having trouble talking about how the President is brazenly breaking the law. There is, I want to play a quick clip here from our colleagues at 60 Minutes, at CBS News 60 Minutes, which is a welcome exception to that trend.

CBS News: It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution. In his first 28 days, he signed an order to nullify birthright citizenship for some, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and he has closed agencies and frozen spending that Congress mandated by law. Lower courts are holding up many of the President’s priorities, but nothing has risen to the Supreme Court where these battles over presidential power could rewrite history. Presidents often push limits, FDR’s New Deal for example, and voters in this last election wanted change. But the scope and speed of Trump’s reach for power may be unprecedented.

Mark Hertsgaard: So for those outside the United States, 60 Minutes of CBS News, that is the longest running and most popular TV news program in US history. That piece just ran on Sunday night, produced by our colleague Alex Ortiz at CBS. Bill, I want to ask you, I mean that 60 Minutes clip showed that you can be very straightforward and very accurate and still say that the President of the United States is breaking the law. But that’s not what I see in most of the coverage. Can you talk about that? And in particular, is there specific advice that you might offer for all of us as journalists as we have these, these are difficult editorial decisions to come to and to execute on the air or in our stories?

Bill McKibben: Well, I don’t know if I have great advice. It is difficult. But it’s difficult, Mark, in part because as 60 Minutes indicated, we’re not a thousand percent sure what the Supreme Court’s going to say the law is. The Supreme Court has changed pretty dramatically in the last few years and they’ve rendered a series of opinions that are at odds with most of our traditional understanding of balance of powers in this country, which makes it hard to just flat out say what is legal and what isn’t. But I do think it’s very important to get across to everybody that what he’s doing is without precedent, that it’s very different from anything that’s come before. As you said, I organize people at Third Act, old people like me. And we’ve all been dispatching ourselves to rallies and things around the country. And one of the sets of signs that we’ve been holding, I had one yesterday out in the cold in Vermont, it said, “I’m 64 years old and I’ve never seen an attack on democracy like this.”

And I think that getting that simple message across is probably the most important journalistic chore of the moment, that something very, very strange is happening. And I think it’s probably no accident that’s 60 Minutes, which probably has the oldest audience of any TV program around, is better at doing this. Because one of the things that age provides is a certain perspective. If you’re younger, you may recognize that Trump is a strange character, he obviously is, but you may not realize exactly how unlike all his predecessors, good and bad, he is, and that we’re moving into a different world. So that’s one place where relying on some of the older people around may be a useful complement to the energy and insights of young reporters and analysts.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s veteran climate journalist and author, Bill McKibben. And before I go to our next panelist, I want to give a special shout out to our colleagues at 60 Minutes for having the journalistic integrity to run that story on Sunday night at a time when they are in President Trump’s crosshairs. President Trump has sued 60 Minutes parent company, Paramount, because of the interview that 60 Minutes did with Kamala Harris last October. And there have been reports in the media that Paramount, the corporate owners of CBS and 60 Minutes, are actually considering settling this lawsuit even though the 60 Minutes editorial process is pretty unimpeachable in the Kamala Harris interview. So hats off to 60 Minutes, and I think that shows the kind of journalistic grit that all of us are going to have to be bringing to the game in the months and years ahead.

With that, I’m going to go now to our third panelist, last but certainly not least, Jael Holzman. So Jael, you write for Heatmap. And people, if you aren’t reading Heatmap, you really should be. It’s a wonderful, very highly informed, tightly written and edited daily dispatch on climate stories. And in particular, I think the clean energy aspect is really where you guys have contributed so much. So Jael, could you talk a little bit… And Heatmap is relatively new also I should add. So how has the approach that you and your colleagues at Heatmap have taken, how has that approach changed in the switchover from a Joe Biden administration to a Donald Trump administration?

Jael Holzman: Well, thank you. Thank you, Mark, for having me on. My name is Jael. I write a newsletter for Heatmap that I launched late last year where I write over conflicts over renewable energy development. I have been writing about energy and climate policy since the week Trump was inaugurated the first time. I walked past the tanks on the days leading up to inauguration the first time, I remember that. I’ve come into covering these issues with that lens in mind and with the hindsight of that first go-around. At Heatmap, we’re a news outlet that formed in the wake of the IRA becoming law, the bipartisan infrastructure law being enacted, and this landmark amount of federal policy acting as a wind in the sails for the energy transition. Going into this new administration, I as a journalist who covers conflicts over renewable energy have really been focusing on and would advise other journalists to focus on this nascent movement that I liken to the Freedom Caucus movement in the states or the Tea Party movement in the states around opposing renewable energy development because the through lines can be seen in the trends that the Trump administration has taken in the immediate aftermath of their entrance to the White House this second go-around.

Let me give you an example. So covering this new administration for Heatmap, I have been watching what anti-renewable activists have been saying on Facebook and on Rumble and in these platforms where we’re used to seeing traffic in phrases known as the alt-right, the kind of 4chan locus that you’re used to seeing bandied around discussions with QAnon and internet conspiracy theories. The way in which that form of culture has melded with our national politics has become newly relevant in how we cover the energy transition because conspiracies around wind deployment, around solar technologies have never been more empowered under this current government. We’ve seen them cited in executive actions derailing the deployment of all wind energy in the United States, just as an example. And so at Heatmap, we’ve been trying to follow that trend and others.

There is a need for us to not see this administration as static or even in adherence with the all-of-the-above rhetoric that Republicans were putting forward even as recently as the last election cycle. It feels a little bit like there’s a need for journalists to treat this situation as a potential Lucy with the football, that Republicans may have said they were all of the above energy all the way up until this point and there may be some lawmakers in DC that argue to keep tax credits in place, but it is just the case that this federal government is biased against wind energy and may become biased against renewables. It’s yet to be determined. And so it’s important not to listen to lobbyists on this. It’s important for journalists to really poke around and find out how strong and firm the pace of our deployment is and the strength of its support is in Washington.

Mark Hertsgaard: I’m going to follow up in a moment, but I want to just say to everybody who is on this call that we’re going to start taking questions from the audience. So please, we have some already that are lined up in the Q&A, but your Q&A function at the bottom of the screen, and please remember we need your name and we also need to know where your outlet, what your outlet is, where you’re from. If you could provide that, we’d sure appreciate it. So Jael, that’s so interesting what you say about how quickly so many in the Republican Party have jettisoned all of the above approach. Could you talk a little bit about how that is playing out across the country? Because of course a lot of the IRA money, most of it, a majority of it was going to red districts or red states and there has been, let’s say, informed speculation in the press that some of the governors and state legislators and members of Congress from those red districts and red states would be a kind of a break against the Trump White House cutting back on all that stuff. How much reporting have you seen and have you done outside of Washington and what reflections might you have on that whole dynamic?

Jael Holzman: It is easy to assume that in a nation as capitalistic as the United States, what big business wants is what big business will get. However, if the elites in the United States were actually getting what they wanted in this past election cycle, Kamala Harris would’ve been president. Kamala Harris would’ve been president, we would’ve been in an entirely different country right now. What I’ve been seeing in my reporting on conflicts over the deployment of renewable energy in the United States is that the same cultural movements that have been the wind in the sails for anti-vax coalitions, for conspiracy theories, around healthcare generally, you can see the same sorts of seeds and stems and growth in the anti-renewables space in a way that’s grassroots. There is some dark money involved and it’s really important to note that. However, some of this quite a bit is populist.

And the issue that that presents is that as this money goes out to states, I’ve been covering examples like Oklahoma where there is this insurgent push to ban new renewables deployment in one of the leading wind development states in this country, the reason being that there’s a cultural resistance and a social friction around developing these new technologies. That issue will come to bear if the federal government is the spigot that brings these technologies into these new places. And if the development is not done in such a way where it’s not careful and sensitive to those concerns, we could wind up in a situation where the IRA actually winds up creating a kind of force that presents a backlash where communities across this country wind up locking renewables out indefinitely.

Mark Hertsgaard: Your example there of Oklahoma is a reminder of something that we at Covering Climate Now say a lot. That reporting that Jael did in Oklahoma, that’s a great story. For those of you who may be in Germany, we’ve got a number of German questions coming up here, or if you’re doing national TV work and you want to go to a place that illustrates all of these dynamics, look at the reporting that your colleagues have, your print and digital colleagues have already done, and it will give you the background that you need to go in there and then advance the story. And of course you tell the story differently on radio or TV, you use sound on radio and visuals on TV. But there’s no substitute for that kind of in-depth, on the ground, and very informed reporting of the sort that Jael Holzman and her colleagues at Heatmap have been bringing us.

So we are now past halfway through and so I’m going to switch to mainly questions from the audience, from you, my fellow journalists. I’ll just add in again though, please keep the questions coming, list your name and your outlet. And I am going to start with one from Germany and it kind of picks up on what we’ve just been talking about. And this is a question from Katharina Wilhelm of a German NPR. And her question is, what role will states like California play in combating Trump’s climate policy? Jael, do you want to start with that? And I’ll invite Bill and Cherelle if they want to comment as well.

Jael Holzman: Sure. We’re starting to see the contours of a legal opposition to the Trump administration’s actions. However, it’s important to note that there’s a bit of a lag here. We are being bombarded on a regular basis, and I’ve seen some questions nodding to this issue in effect in the chat as well. We’re being bombarded by various legal challenges for our country, questions that we’re not used to raising, new precedents being set by this administration on a regular basis. I myself am in the process of reporting out how that is being brought to bear against, for example, our wind energy industry, which was growing up until this past month and now has hit skids so dangerous that we’re at risk of seeing failures on a weekly basis of projects, of supply chain manufacturing announcements. There’s a risk of a lot of progress going away in that space, for example.

So why isn’t the state-level legal apparatus coming into bear to help? Well, part of it is because things have moved so fast that folks have been bombarded. The other issues being brought to bear include but are not limited to Supreme Court precedent that has removed as much of the teeth that agencies have to make decisions. And as well, there is a need to reckon with an administration that doesn’t seem willing to adhere to court rulings. I mean, how do you force an administration to permit projects or lease things when the courts tell people to make money free and they’re not even liberating it. There’s a serious crisis in even a respect for the judges that makes state action in this case to salvage progress in the transition, any damage being done by this administration much, much harder than I think folks are used to recognizing. And I’m not sure the press, speaking as someone who’s been in more legacy publications in my career as well before coming to Heatmap, I’m really unsure of the press’s capacity to really internalize how unprecedented this challenge in the courts really is.

Mark Hertsgaard: That is a theme that I want to alert everybody, Covering Climate Now is going to be pursuing this theme of what do you do in the face of an administration that refuses to adhere to court orders. George Conway, the Republican lawyer, who’s former husband of Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump’s spokesperson in the first term, has spoken out recently and predicted that Trump is going to ignore all court orders and would even ignore a Supreme Court order. And Conway went on to point out that the only thing that, the only entity rather that enforces court orders is the US Federal Marshals Service, which, guess what, is part of the Department of Justice where Donald Trump has installed a loyalist. So this is a question that Covering Climate Now will be dealing with going forward in another webinar and other discussions online. So stay with us for that. Meanwhile, Bill or Cherelle, do you have any thoughts on this question about California and what role California, which is the world’s fifth-biggest economy, what role can they play in pushing back against Trump’s climate agenda? Just unmute yourselves though, Bill.

Bill McKibben: It’s a very good question and it’s a good reminder that important as the US is, it’s no longer the only or perhaps the central player anymore in the global climate drama. The US is responsible directly for about 11% of greenhouse gas emissions. And I think that one story that’s going to be worth watching is that the US is clearly seeding any leadership in whatever global response to this ongoing catastrophe is. And I think it’s pretty clear that the Chinese are, this is their sort of issue and moment for a kind of ascendance where they’ll have the moral high ground when it comes to questions around energy and where they have increasingly the exportability to get that technology, renewable technology out across the planet. And I think that’s going to be one of the most fascinating things to watch over the next little while.

Within the context of the US, blue states like California, which yes is the same economy as big as Germany’s, can continue to do things. I think the most interesting state to watch in a strange way is probably Texas right now, eighth-biggest economy in the world and a place where a kind of dedication to deregulation has produced really, really rapid growth in renewable energy, even though it’s also the hydrocarbon capital of the planet. And whether or not that momentum will continue, whether or not the Oklahoma notion will drift south across the panhandle and into Texas, I mean that’ll be fascinating to see. I’ll just add that all these things play out in a lot of different dimensions. And one of the things that’s going on in California and a lot of other places now is that the climate crisis is coming home very sharply in the rapid rise in insurance premiums and the inability of homeowners and others to get insurance. And that’s going to be a difficult topic. I mean, that’s not a topic that governors or whatever can just skip over. Their constituents won’t allow that. And so it’ll be interesting to see how that starts to affect the politics too.

Mark Hertsgaard: On the insurance front, and I’ll ask my colleagues behind the scenes here to put this in the chat, I’m sure they’ve already thought of it, if you all are interested in following up on the climate insurance story, which we’ve been saying for years here at Covering Climate Now is the big economic story on climate is the way that climate change is making insurance either unaffordable or outright unavailable, check out the press briefing that we did two weeks ago on climate change and insurance. I want to switch now to a very practical question, and this is from our colleague Penny Overton at the Portland Press Herald Newspaper. She says, do you have suggestions for mirror websites where erased federal climate data has been posted and how can reporters know that the mirror data has itself not been altered? Who wants to tackle that?

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I can take that, Mark. Thank you. So I think it’s a nice practical question and I think it’s what we need right now are tools. So in my recent story in the Guardian on the impact of USAID withdrawal from the Pacific, I had a very difficult time trying to really locate all of the USAID projects in the Pacific Islands. And there were some sources that were shared with me by USAID sources, which they had themselves said from headquarters are verified and they had checked the accuracy of those. And some of the USAID folks uploaded some of that stuff directly themselves. So I will share that here I don’t have the URL directly, but on this particular platform you’ll see a lot of federal data has been uploaded on this site. Another one I would recommend, depending on what you’re going for, if there is a contractor that’s responsible for implementation of a certain climate project, their websites would have the same information or would have some degree of data related to that project.

So again, I’m going to refer, I’m reporting on Global South issues and the main contractors implementing partners for USAID or for the federal government are organizations like DT Global or Tetra Tech, ABT, and so forth. So if you go to their websites, they usually have a, they have a really good kind of data and information on the funding sources and how they’re implementing those. So I think there’s three questions that were related to that, Mark. And so my recommendation especially for, there’s been a question here from the MENA region as well on where to go for information, look for who was contracted and also UN agencies who were contracted by federal government to implement or the state department at the local or national level will have that information. Usually when anything goes up on some of these federal websites that require international interventions or partnerships, there are sites that upload some of that information. But it does require time. But more often than not, if you go to the contractors, it’s usually very accurate.

Mark Hertsgaard: Bill or Jael, do you want to add to that? Okay. And those of you who are still looking for that, Covering Climate Now has leads to various other places that are storing that erased federal data here in the US. Now a question from Portugal from our colleagues at Publico, which is the paper of record in Portugal, a long time Covering Climate Now partner. And this is from Clara Barata, who asks kind of a two-part question. Do you have any suggestions on how to cover ideas to resist Trump’s blitzkrieg on climate policy from abroad, how to cover this from abroad? And in particular she follows up to say, can we expect any sort of resistance from Congress for example?

Jael Holzman: May I take this?

Mark Hertsgaard: Please, go ahead.

Jael Holzman: Okay. Well, first of all, as someone who covered Congress for a better part of almost seven years up until last year, I can safely say that you cannot expect any fulsome resistance from Congress except perhaps with respect to conversations around specific tax credits staying in place in this coming tax package negotiation season. Although I would expect Trump to have more control over that process than the conventional wisdom in the beltway has suggested. The matter of covering resistance to this administration from abroad is deeply important because so many legacy news outlets in the United States are dealing with various complexities with respect to holding this administration’s feet to the fire. That’s the nicest way that I can possibly put that problem. So in light of that, I would like to say that there is a responsibility, I would say, for the rest of the world to try to cover the best ways possible to hold the US’s feet to the fire.

I have to assume that international bodies, as the United States becomes further enshrined as a petro state and begins weaponizing existing environmental laws and regulations against foreign national companies that develop renewable energy, there’s going to be a multitude of conversations around how the US is engaging with international companies. A good example of that, going back to wind, since I’ve been covering it so closely, I’ve seen very little coverage about what it means for some of these Baltic States to lose access to wind development in the United States. I’ve seen very little coverage of that issue. As well as what manufacturing hubs for EV batteries with these countries that were looking for a stronger market in the US, what they’re thinking right now. I’d love to see more coverage of that because from an objective standpoint, it does show more of the market impact of the kind of anti-climate policy we’re seeing right now.

Bill McKibben: Yes, and conversely, there’s-

Mark Hertsgaard: Go ahead, Bill.

Bill McKibben: Conversely, there’s good reporting to be done on the US, the Trump administration’s efforts to force countries around the world to start taking exports of our fossil fuels, particularly LNG. And there have been a series of reports in the last two weeks that country after country, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, others, have felt the need to announce that they’ll take increased exports of LNG in order to avoid tariffs on their manufactured goods, that we’re strong-arming the rest of the world into locking themselves into fossil fuels. So that’s the other half of that story it seems to me.

Jael Holzman: And then of course, there’s of course the whole matter of our current sitting president talking about taking over sovereign governments to develop them into mineral hubs for a technology sector. I would say one way to not cover the situation is to prognosticate on how it would impact local US politics. Actually the best way to write about it is to write about what harm that would do for the indigenous peoples in those countries, because usually those are first and foremost the people who are opposing developing those resources.

Mark Hertsgaard: We have a number more questions in the Q&A, and I’m going to invite people to keep putting them in the Q&A at the bottom of the screen there with your name and outlet. But I’m going to return to a question that I asked in my opening and that we haven’t really dug into yet. And it’s a tough one because those of us on this call, we all get it about climate, that it’s a huge story. We wish our colleagues throughout the news business were doing a lot more coverage. And yet it is undeniable that with this flooding the zone media strategy of the Trump White House where you just put out just so much stuff every day, it is very hard to keep climate change from being sidelined. I mean, of course if there’s mass deportations, what news organization in the world is not going to feel like they’ve got to cover that? That’s going to be the lead story tonight, right? So in that context, how do we, in very practical terms, how do we talk to our colleagues in newsrooms, to our bosses in particular, our editors, and what can we do to keep climate change from falling off the agenda? And I’m going to invite all three of your comments on that. And I think why don’t we start with Bill and then Cherelle and then Jael, and then we’ll go to other Q&A.

Bill McKibben: Well, we’ve shortlisted a bunch of different stories that one can pitch that are compelling ways in here. But I actually want to add that, and this goes to another question that’s there in the Q&A, that to some degree it also depends on activists making the case here and on people covering them. So for instance, Jael, whose work Heatmap is great and I completely rely on, is really correct about the ways in which there’s this sort of conspiracy theorizing and stuff spreading around renewable energy. The good news is that the polling still shows large majorities of people, Americans like clean energy. And it’s up to activists to try and in part to help bring that out.

So for instance, at Third Act and elsewhere, a lot of partners, we’re working to put together for the fall, the Equinox in the fall, September and 20th and 21st, this big day of action we’re going to call Sun Day. And it’s going to be all about making the case that we now live on a planet where the cheapest, safest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, and the second-cheapest way is to catch the breeze that that sun creates in a turbine. And if we do it cleverly and well, then we’ll rely on journalists to actually cover it, which is not always the case. Journalists are often wary of activists and so on. But that has often been an important dynamic in these stories, dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970 when there were enough people in the streets that it shifted the political zeitgeist in dramatic ways. Let’s hope we can capture a little bit of that lightning this time around in a kind of joyful and positive vision for what comes, not just the extremely dark and extremely accurate one that’s looming over us.

Mark Hertsgaard: Cherelle, you’ve been an editor. What thoughts do you have on that front? And you’ve been a reporter as well.

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thank you, Mark. I still edit a specific publication. I’ll first address some of the issues that have been raised here on how to cover indigenous climate issues or indigenous communities in light of some of the detrimental impact of the executive orders, especially in developing countries and in the Global South. Mark, contrary to the point you’re making on how do we keep the story relevant, I think climate will continue to be a big story for the Global South. And ensuring that we are not necessarily just… Just because the story is becoming very difficult in the US does not necessarily mean this is the case for the Global South. In fact, many Global South countries and journalists and news media continue to cover the story from the lenses of resilience, from the lenses of how it continues to impact communities.

So I think to your question of how do we address this with colleagues, with editors, I think continuing as a climate journalist or whatever beat you’re on, I just saw someone talk about the impacts on wine, or an indigenous journalist, it’s really important to continue covering those stories irrespective of how the US is impacted at the moment. And I know this might sound heartless, but just how it impacts your community should continue to be the story. So for instance, with our indigenous communities, how do the executive orders or how does Trump’s actions result in, sorry, how does it impact frontline communities? What solutions are there and how can they continue to work towards those solutions? I think it’s also important for US journalists to realize that there are global conventions related to the United Nations, environmental issues, chemicals, renewable energy, and so forth, that supersede any decisions that the US makes at the domestic level. So understanding that internationally what Trump does does not necessarily sway some of these conventions in its entirety is really important to frame and to continue asserting.

So an executive order domestically does not necessarily change the way that things operate internationally. A good example of this is if you look at the World Health Organization, yes, the funding will be impacted, but there are still other funders within the World Health Organization. It will not collapse because the US has withdrawn. And so covering how these projects are on the ground without necessarily negating the impacts or the negative implications of Trump’s actions is really important. But I would urge everyone to continue covering the story from your beats and exploring the continued impacts of Trump’s actions on your beats, especially in our Global South communities. And I really feel that moving forward, the resilience piece for frontline communities is really key in the way that we cover climate. How do these regions or how do these countries continue to be resilient against the impacts of climate change irrespective of how the US involves themselves in this in their countries?

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks very much. And Jael, do you have some thoughts on this as well?

Jael Holzman: I would really say that the greatest challenge I find facing us as journalists covering the onslaught that’s facing the energy transition from a policy perspective right now is that it’s important for us to simultaneously discuss how a decision is going to negatively impact someone in the short term whilst also explaining why that decision will also undercut climate action. And those two things must be communicated simultaneously. It is not a trade-off. So a good example of that is tariffs. We know for a fact that tariffs on imported materials used to create solar panels, automobiles, what have you, we know that that will increase the cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels. So we should communicate that and we should also communicate the fact that that’ll make everyone’s lives more expensive generally. Trade-off denial is a problem in climate journalism still with a lot of legacy media. I find this when I cover conflicts over solar and wind projects. People will talk about battery storage projects igniting on fire and not necessarily how rare that really is, in a story that should probably also discuss the need to build these things to deal with climate change. That’s a challenge we face, dealing with the onslaught while constantly needing to center the thing that really matters, the reason we all do this.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s Jael Holzman. She’s with Heatmap. And we’re also joined by Cherelle Jackson who writes for The Guardian, among others, covering climate in the Pacific, and Bill McKibben, the veteran activist and author. We have time for one more question and I’m going to let all of you answer quickly before we close, because we always try to close on time here. And this one is from our colleague at Floodlight, a wonderful investigative outfit. And this is Dee Hall from Floodlight who asks, what are the best sources within the federal government to keep up with all the moving parts when it comes to changing climate policy and spending? Also wondering specifically if anyone knows about the future of the Energy Information Administration? So how do we keep up with everything that’s going on? Jael, I’m going to throw to you first.

Jael Holzman: Sure. There’s a difficult answer here. So there are databases. USAspending is usually the first one cited. And every federal government website that is still up that lists the grants awards, et cetera, that were given out, bless their hearts for keeping those up. I’m really glad they do. Not all of them are still there. As well, if you’re trying to track permitting, I’ve found it to be a little bit more tricky than one would like. If you’re trying to track all of the solar and wind projects that may be stalled or slowed from the current administration, you actually have difficulty because a lot of those processes are proprietary until they start going through the public comment process. So what I would recommend is to familiarize yourself with the Bureau of Land Management’s website, to familiarize yourself with FAST-41, which is a dashboard that was created a few years ago by Congress under a statute that was intended to make permitting move faster, because that does include some timetables for important projects, including almost all offshore wind.

And I would also try to use whatever state-level databases, Department of Transportation, for example, that exists to help, that won’t go away anytime soon. Lastly, with respect to the Energy Information Administration, this entity has been relied on as an independent arbiter for energy industry data for many years. As of late, it has been questioned by various entities from the outside, whether it be folks in the climate advocacy space or folks in OFAC. I mean, everyone has a gripe with EIA sometimes. It is constantly kind of bandied about as part of the chaos we hear about with DOGE and Elon Musk, that the EIA’s data could come down any day and that the data could be disrupted or questioned. We haven’t seen any real movements as of yet to EIA, but it’s something we’re watching for sure.

Mark Hertsgaard: Given how comprehensive that answer was and how close we are to the top of the hour, I’m going to go to Cherelle and Bill to just offer any last short comments and advice to our colleagues.

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thanks, Jael. Thank you. That was very comprehensive. For the Global South pieces in your country, what I found, some US state, sorry, US embassies have not yet deleted some information based on country projects. So for Global South and international journalists, if you need information, go to US embassy websites and download them now. And also I’ve found that if they have Facebook pages for some of these projects, those are also a good place to go and download and screen grab some of them. Thank you, Mark. Really appreciate this opportunity to share my perspective.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. And Bill?

Bill McKibben: Yes. Just to say this question highlights the strangeness of our moment where we’re having to wonder whether or not we can trust the information that’s coming out of the federal government. I do think it’s important that people pay attention to the good sources of information and also analysis out there. Heatmap have been doing a tremendous job and keeping things up on a sort of day-to-day basis. I rely a lot on IEFA, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. I think they’re doing some of the best global work that there is. Ember, Rocky Mountain Institute, they’re a bunch of places that are doing their best to stay on top of where we are. So I have a feeling we’re all going to be finding out a lot about how to work in the strange vacuum where you can’t, where the President of the United States is no longer a trustworthy source of information.

Mark Hertsgaard: Strange vacuum indeed. But it is a real privilege and an honor for all of us at Covering Climate Now to be working in this space with all of you. And if you are interested in our big initiative for this year, we are launching the 89% Project, which is an attempt to reframe the public narrative around climate change from one of despair and retreat to one of solutions and empowerment. We’re going to be doing two weeks of dedicated news coverage starting in April around Earth Day that look at the little reported but potentially game-changing fact that 89% of the world’s people want their governments to, quote, “Do more,” unquote, about climate change. That is a global, staggeringly large global climate majority, but somewhat of a silent climate majority because that 89% does not know that they are the 89%. So we’re going to be doing news stories starting in April around that, and we invite all of you to come to the website and find out how you and your news organization can be involved.

With that, I will say a heartfelt thank you to our terrific panelists today, Jael Holzman at Heatmap, Cherelle Jackson with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now, and Bill McKibben, the veteran activist, author, and journalist, who has written more words about climate change than all the rest of us put together. So thanks very much to everybody. And with that, on behalf of everyone at Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard, wishing you a very pleasant day.