Talking Shop: Digging Into Donald Trump’s Climate Record

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard (00:00:01): 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. Our subject today, how to cover Donald Trump’s climate record. But first, for those who might not know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do a better job of telling the defining story of our time. You can go to our website at coveringclimatenow.org where you’ll see a list of our partners, you can apply to join us, you can sign up for our newsletters and our trainings and all of our background resources, all of which are free to our fellow journalists. So we look forward to seeing you there.

(00:00:51): Now to today. So 2024 was always going to be a climate change election in the United States. But the death and destruction inflicted by hurricanes, Helene, and Milton have made that unmistakable. US has always been the world’s leading climate superpower. It’s emitted more heat trapping gases historically than anyone else, and it is second only to China in annual emissions. It’s the world’s biggest economy, and thus it exerts a decisive influence over global trends in investment, production, consumption, and technological innovation. It also exercises enormous diplomatic influence as will be on display next month at the COP29 UN climate negotiations. And finally, it’s a cultural superpower whose music, movies and social media spread ideas and shape tastes, especially among young people all over the world, all of which for journalists makes the US elections perhaps the biggest climate change story of 2024. Who Americans elect this president and what kind of US senate and House of Representatives they give that president will have unmatched influence over humanity’s climate future.

(00:02:04): And let’s bear in mind that this election is already underway. Early voting has begun in 12 states, including the battleground states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia. So how do we as journalists and news organizations best fulfill our civic responsibilities in this election season? How do we give the public the information they need to make informed choices? How do we help them understand what the various candidates and political parties’ positions on climate change would mean for their daily lives? Equally important, how do we hold candidates accountable for their past records and their future plans to address the climate crisis? Today’s Talking Shop focuses on the climate record and future plans of the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. But let me note that Covering Climate Now has already hosted in August a corresponding session examining the climate record and plans of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

(00:03:04): We’ll put a link in the chat for anyone wishing to access the video and transcript of that earlier Talking Shop. To state the obvious, the differences between Trump and Harris on climate change could hardly be more stark. As President Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the roadmap for climate progress signed by virtually every other country on earth. He threw out more than 100 environmental regulations and had climate change removed from the EPA’s website. And in a story broken this May by one of today’s panelists, he reportedly asked big oil executives for a billion dollars in campaign donations while promising that he would reverse President Joe Biden’s climate policies. So lots to chew on here. Let’s get started. As usual, in the first half hour, I’ll post questions to the panelists, and then in the second half hour we broaden the conversation by inviting questions from you, our fellow journalists.

(00:03:59): You can submit your questions via the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. I’ll read them out for the panelists to answer. Please include your name and the name of your news outlet. And we’re taking questions only from working journalists, please. And now let me introduce first Maxine Joselow. She covers climate change and the environment for the Washington Post with a focus on US climate policy and politics. Prior to the Post, she spent nearly five years at E&E News where her investigative reporting won a Society of Professional Journalists Award. And Oliver Milman, he’s a veteran environment reporter for the Guardian US. He’s also the author of the book, the Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. You’ll find a review of that book in Covering Climate Now’s Climate Beat newsletter that you’ll find a link there in the chat to that.

(00:04:52): And so now please join me in giving both of our colleagues a warm virtual welcome. So Maxine, I’d like to start with you and that extraordinary scoop that you co-authored with your Washington Post colleague, Josh Dawsey. Josh, sorry, Dawsey. Now we’re in a webinar here with other journalists. So the obvious question is, how did you guys get that story? Can you walk us through the reporting and also highlight any lessons that might be useful to our fellow journalists who are wishing to report on Trump climate and the 2024 election?

Maxine Joselow (00:05:26): Yeah, well thanks Mark for throwing me the first question and for the kind words about that scoop. I should give credit where credit’s due. My colleague Josh Dawsey was instrumental in nailing that scoop down, and obviously he’s not on this webinar, but just wanted to make sure I’m not claiming all the credit while he’s not here. But it was a team effort, and Josh and I actually teamed up first on a different story about a month before that scoop. And that story was focused on offshore wind and Trump’s continued disdain for offshore wind dating back to his crusade against an offshore wind project near one of his golf courses in Scotland. And that story actually opened by describing this dinner at Mar-a-Lago with oil executives where Trump was railing against offshore wind and said, “I hate wind.”

(00:06:27): And when one of my sources read that story, they said, “I heard about that dinner, I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. And it’s important to note the scale of the ask, right? Trump wasn’t just railing about wind while asking for campaign contributions. I heard he asked for a billion dollars.” And I was like, “Josh, we got to go back and do more reporting and see if that’s true and nail that down.” And so with a huge assist from Josh, we were able to confirm that Trump did in fact ask for a billion dollars from these oil executives to be steered toward his campaign, and simultaneously promised to take a range of actions to overturn President Joe Biden’s Climate legacy, not just on offshore wind, but touching many other facets of that legacy.

(00:07:22): So that’s how we nail down the story. And I think, Mark, you asked about lessons learned. I think a big lesson for me was not to think about each story you write as a one-off article that you’ll never touch again or do anything on that subject again, but really to think of it as a continuous thread of reporting that you can keep tugging at or a gift that keeps on giving. And sometimes it takes coming out with an initial story for a source to read it and reach out and say, “Hey, I think you missed something.” And then you can come back and take a bigger swing at it. And sometimes that’s how you might ultimately land that bigger scoop in the end.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:08:02): That’s such a valuable lesson. And having spent a lot of my career as an investigative reporter, I’ve had that same experience where you do story A and then somebody reads it and says, “Ah, there’s really story B, C, and D. If you just look a little deeper.” One follow up there, as you look deeper, and if you can say, so how many people in the room did you and Josh Dawsey talk to? And were your editors at the Washington Post, how many sources inside the room did they require you to have? Because a billion dollars, I mean, that’s a story, that number gets your attention.

Maxine Joselow (00:08:37): I think generally at the Post, I don’t know if it’s an official rule, but unofficially, I think editors generally feel comfortable having three sources to back something up. Two is better than one, but three is better than two, and three generally feels like a solid number. So I do remember that we talked to at least three people with direct knowledge of that dinner, and we obviously reached out to the Trump campaign and made sure that this wasn’t something that they were going to vehemently dispute the accuracy of before we went to print.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:09:17): So one more question before I go to Oliver Milman at the Guardian. I want to talk about the after effects of that scoop. Of course, I read it that morning and I noticed that a number of serious news outlets did follow-ups. The New York Times, the Politico, the Guardian, USA Today, Mother Jones, New Republic and others. Congressional democrats launched an investigation into the alleged quid pro quo. But most of the American public does not read those relatively serious news outlets, they watch television or their online news feeds. So do you have a sense, Maxine, of how much pickup your story got in those venues?

Maxine Joselow (00:09:56): That’s a great question, Mark. Media Matters actually did an analysis of this exact question of how much broadcast TV networks covered this story. And unfortunately, they found that broadcast TV networks largely didn’t cover this story with the notable exception of MSNBC, which devoted a big segment to it that evening after the scoop had come out that morning, and they did invite one of the New York Times reporters on to describe her follow-up story, which was able to confirm many of those details of the meeting. But that was the exception, a lot of other TV networks didn’t really cover this story, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Fox News devoted about three minutes to it in the weeks after the story broke. And that three minutes was an interview with the head of the American Petroleum Institute saying that this meeting was nothing problematic, nothing out of the ordinary, just an example of a political candidate having a normal engagement with an industry that his administration could regulate.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:11:09): Nothing to see here folks. So our TV colleagues who are on this call, this episode echoes something that unfortunately, happened also about 10 years ago when there were the initial rather, Exxon knew investigations by the Los Angeles Times, by Inside Climate News and the Columbia Journalism School when they first broke the news in a detailed way that oil industry scientists had known since the 1980s, if not earlier, that basically big oil’s business model was going to fry the planet. They told the executives of their companies and they executives of big oil decided to lie about it. When that came out in 2015, there was not a single story on television, nor, I’m sorry to say, were there stories in the New York Times or the Washington Post. But TV is what really moves the needle in terms of public opinion. So if we’re talking about the election here, and Donald Trump and climate change, we really need our TV colleagues to step up here.

(00:12:11): And there’s still ways to incorporate that into your reporting because as Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post has just been describing, that story is pretty rock solid at this point. So let’s go now to Oliver Milman at the Guardian. Oliver, you worked for the US edition of the Guardian, but your stories often appear in the papers UK and European and Australian and international editions as well. Bearing in mind the enormous influence that a US president has over what people all over the world will experience on climate change and of course, a lot of other issues, bearing that in mind, how much audience interest do you find overseas in the climate angle of the US elections? Everybody’s following US elections, but do people care about what those elections will mean for climate change?

Oliver Milman (00:13:01): Yeah, and hi to everybody as well. And thanks for having me here. I mean, I think the broad answer is yes. I mean, I think it depends a lot of where you are around the world, of course. I mean, I speak a fair bit to people who represent small island nations in the Pacific and they are intensely glued to what the US is doing because, obviously what the US does on a global stage in terms of diplomacy and how it uses its soft power is immensely important as well as its sheer emissions and economic might, which drives a lot of the pollution that is causing the climate crisis. I remember speaking to Saleemul Huq, who’s a Bangladeshi scientist who sadly passed away last year, who was a longtime kind of climate champion for the least developed countries. And he was telling me a regular person in Bangladesh could tell you who Joe Manchin is and can talk to you about the Supreme Court.

(00:14:00): I mean, there is this intense interest in certain parts of the world, many parts of the world, of the US political system and how it’s working on all sorts of things. And I think climate change, if you’re in a vulnerable country like Bangladesh, a Pacific Island nation, I mean where isn’t vulnerable these days, but these places they’re suffering the most extreme effects of the climate crisis, they certainly do pay a keen attention to it. I think I’m originally from the UK, there’s long been a kind of fascination with the extreme polarization of climate change in political discourse given that doesn’t really exist so much in Europe. I mean, it does in Australia, it’s an English speaking world problem around climate denialism, political polarization around the issue.

(00:14:56): So there is still that intense interest around that. I think there is a certain fatigue with it as much as there is here in the US around some of the things that have been said and how the discourse has gone. But certainly, I think that the world does still look to the US, and certainly at the higher level when you speak to diplomats from other countries, negotiators at COP and so on, what the US does is extremely important and they have a presence in the room for sure when it comes to those negotiations at these big meetings.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:15:35): That’s Oliver Milman with the Guardian. And I’ll just remind everyone, you are invited to submit your questions starting now into the Q&A at the bottom of your screen. Please list your name and your news outlet. Oliver, continuing with you, you also covered Trump’s climate policies during his first term as president. Then this February you co-wrote a piece with your colleague, Dharna Noor that described how Trump’s approach to climate change might actually be quite different in a second term. And I wonder if you could just summarize the differences and specifically perhaps suggest how our fellow journalists can make those differences clear to their audiences, whether they’re reporting at the local level, national level, or what have you.

Oliver Milman (00:16:20): Sure. So you may remember the first term of Trump’s presidency. He went into it, obviously infamous for calling climate change a hoax and bullshit. He set about dismantling environmental regulations. As you mentioned, over a hundred were done, but it was done in a slightly chaotic fashion. You had a lot of knockbacks from the courts who saw that deregulation was done in a very rushed way. You had the heads of various top agencies resign in disgrace through various ethical violations. You think about people, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior who rode in on the first day on a horse and then proceeded to make various mistakes. It was done in a kind of haphazard way, and we spoke to various Trump allies, people who worked for the administration at that time, and they saw it as quite a sloppy period in terms of enacting their agenda that they wanted to do.

(00:17:22): This time around, there is a general sense in Trump’s orbit that there will be a more concerted deregulation attempt. The most obvious physical manifestation of that of course, is Project 2025, which is this huge compendium of right wing theories and policy proposals that’s to be enacted as soon Trump takes office. Obviously, the Trump campaign and Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, disavowed it, said that this is not our campaign material, but there’s obviously lots of former officials who wrote this.

(00:18:02): So people who allied to Trump said this is a decent guide to his thinking. So we will get a far more rigorous take down of various pollution rules around for cars, trucks, power plants that were enacted during the Biden administration, a major reorganization of the Environmental Protection Agency. You’d likely see numbers there drop, certain offices be completely demolished. Donald Trump’s talked about repealing Joe Biden’s insane EV mandate. There is no kind of mandate specifically to force people to buy electric cars, but there are pollution standards that nudge people to do so. And there’s obviously, the Inflation Reduction Act incentives for people to buy them too.

(00:18:54): And he’s also talked about, “Drill, baby, drill.” Talked about the liquid gold under our feet in terms of oil and gas. He wants the Alaskan Arctic to be opened up for drilling. Could go further still in terms of more political influence in terms of scientific reports, that’s something that a lot of these allies want, political appointees to have more sway over scientific output of federal government agencies. NOAA, the main scientific agency, could be broken up with a forecast, privatized, that’s a Project 2025 proposal. FEMA shrunken as well, which we would’ve seen that impacts of that in the recent hurricanes, less federal support grants have gone, that kind of thing.

(00:19:44): So more methodical, more surgical, hopefully fewer, they’re thinking, hopefully fewer court setbacks. In terms of repealing the big advance of the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, that’s going to be obviously far more tricky, depends far more on the composition of Congress. And even if the Republicans do hold the Senate and the House of Representatives, there are a lot of Republicans now, a growing number of Republicans who are seeing the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act money coming to their districts and have already voiced their concerns about a full repeal of that given the jobs and investment and so on.

(00:20:24): I think that’s a good avenue for localized reporting. And there’s all kinds of things going on around battery, electric vehicle, solar wind manufacturing, that kind of promises renaissance in areas that Trump has promised a comeback for places in the Rust Belt and so on. So I think there is an interesting tension there if he does win, what will happen to those projects in some of these districts? He’s promised to claw back the money that hasn’t been spent. Will that happen? Will local Republican members of Congress push back against that?

(00:21:02): So I think that that’s a kind of interesting avenue to look at when it comes to localized stories. But overall, I think you’ll see this kind of another tension in terms of the inner workings of the federal government politicized appointees trying to push out those dissenting voices who checked some of Trump’s impulses in the first period of his presidential tenure. So I think that’s going to be another key feature of a second Trump term if we do see that.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:21:37): Oliver, I have to ask you, it’s really quite remarkable that the Guardian, which full disclosure, is the lead media partner at Covering Climate Now, partly because your paper has such a long and distinguished record of very strong climate reporting. My question is, how did you get so many Trump allies to talk to you at the Guardian? It must be suspicious. And I’m asking this not to flatter you, but rather on behalf of, I’m thinking about our colleagues who are listening to this call and are thinking, “Yeah, but I’m not working at the Guardian. How do I get access to those people?” Is it fairly easy to get access to those people? Did you find that they’re willing to talk? And any sort of practical suggestions for how our fellow colleagues can do a similar kind of reporting?

Oliver Milman (00:22:25): That’s a fantastic question. I mean, there’s a broad sweep of former officials, people who influenced the first administration. So you can go out seeking the sweep of people and by odds, some of them are going to speak to you, some of them aren’t. I think there’s certainly a feeling amongst some of them that I spoke to that they want to impress this agenda quite early on, get this idea into people’s minds of this radical reorganization of how federal government operates. Obviously, there has been this tension around Project 2025 that they don’t want to be too closely associated with it at all. But I think there is a thinking that seeding these ideas is actually helpful for their purposes in terms of normalizing them ahead of time. So speaking to some of these people, there is that sense.

(00:23:24): There’s also this sense that obviously, Trump acts in a different way to a lot of other leaders in terms of his impulses. He does things in a quite solo way when it comes to decision making. It’s not like there’s, a lot of time, a coherent plan. So influencing Trump himself through the media, things he sees, things he hears, that kind of thing, I think is also something that they’re thinking about, is a kind of jockeying for position, I think at this stage ahead of the election of a potential second Trump administration. So yeah, I think there’s people now who are looking to assert influence, and I think this window of time is maybe a kind of interesting one to be speaking to them.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:24:14): That’s Oliver Milman at the Guardian. We’re also joined today by Maxine Joselow at the Washington Post. And I’ll remind everyone there’s some Q&A questions already filling in the Q&A. Please keep those coming, we’ll get to those in a few minutes. But first Maxine, I want to ask you and Oliver, I’m going to ask you the same question in a moment. We’ve seen and reported on how online harassment, even death threats have been directed at meteorologists and at first responders at FEMA in the wake of hurricanes, Helene and Milton. These seem to be the latest evidence that climate change has become a culture war issue here in the United States.

(00:24:57): Now, the Washington Post is a national newspaper, prestigious national newspaper, headquartered in a quite a blue part of the country. But some of our journalistic colleagues who are working in red states or purple states are cautious about reporting, frankly about climate change, and perhaps even cautious about using the term climate change. So what advice do you have for how our fellow journalists can do justice to the realities of climate change in these final three weeks of the campaign, while also meeting their audiences where those audiences are? How do you thread that needle? So first you Maxine and then Oliver the same question.

Maxine Joselow (00:25:42): Yeah, well, first of all, my heart goes out to the meteorologists and the FEMA workers and all the other folks who are facing harassment or even death threats just for doing their jobs. It’s a really tough situation to be in and tough consequence of some of this information that we’re seeing spread about both hurricanes and that I’ve been covering. And I should say thankfully, just in my own experience, I haven’t personally experienced that. I’ve just gotten some nasty reader emails from climate deniers or people just generally unhappy with the post. But I digress. I think my advice to cover climate change but also meet readers where they are is, I always think about not just parachuting into a community and not really spending time with folks and then writing a story that doesn’t really reflect the sentiments on the ground. So when I do a reporting trip, I really try to spend time with people and go to the local places where people are actually hanging out and get a feel for what people are actually thinking and talking about.

(00:26:59): I did that when I went to southwestern Pennsylvania to cover a community where the state’s largest coal plant had shut down, and it was a story about the energy transition. But for a lot of the people who live there, that’s not how they’re thinking about it, they’re thinking about putting food on the table and not about what this means for the country’s climate targets. And so meeting those people as sources where they are not just meeting readers where they are, I think is really important in the approach that I try to take to my reporting.

(00:27:31): And then I think in terms of meeting readers where they are, not all readers are going to be familiar with climate science and know what IPCC or IRA stands for. You might know those acronyms, but just explaining it in a way that’s accessible, you’re not talking down to people, you’re just explaining, is something I definitely try to do as well. And you can connect climate change and climate science back to the impacts that they’re seeing in their own lives. Maybe they’re a farmer and they’re seeing weird weather patterns wreaking havoc on their crops. You can explain that climate change is playing a role in those changes, precipitation and temperature patterns. So yeah, I’ll stop there, but I won’t pretend to have all the answers and I’d love to hear what Oliver and the Guardian are doing too.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:28:27): Go ahead, Oliver.

Oliver Milman (00:28:30): Yeah, I’d agree with Maxine about meeting people where they are, and kind of trying to really reflect where they’re coming from. Because we are thinking about climate a certain way, but people aren’t out there generally aren’t thinking about climate in terms of parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and so on. So you really need to reflect that. I mean, I think there’s two ways of looking at this, I think in terms of being worried about mentioning climate change, I would say the encouraging thing at least is that we don’t have this kind of overt climate denialism as being the lead-off moment for most mainstream coverage. Now, I mean, I was so thankful in the presidential and vice president’s presidential debate, there was a climate question in each, and it wasn’t, “Is climate change real?” So beyond that point, I hope now that we are kind of debating whether it’s real, even those who are trying to block action, it’s more around, “Too expensive, we can’t do it.” That kind of thing, rather than climate change isn’t real.

(00:29:34): So I feel if you’re reporting locally on this issue, you can almost jump beyond that whether climate is real or not and go to these are their impacts, this is the way it’s affecting your assurance, this is the way it’s affecting your property damage, this is the way it’s affecting your crops. What can be done about it? What are the solutions? What are the things that are being done to build resilience and so on? And almost kind of bypass that. Florida is a really interesting example of that, isn’t it? Where you have Ron DeSantis who he’s no climate champion, is he? He’s kind of denied the science. He attacks climate scientists, people who campaign on climate, but he’s building seawalls and he’s trying to protect the Everglades and he’s doing these things that you would do to try and build resilience without mentioning why you do that, which is a strange game to play, but certainly one that seems to pay off for him politically at least, I suppose.

(00:30:34): My other more visceral thought about it is, though, that our job as journalists is to speak truth to power, but also to regular people. It’s not to hide facts from people, even if they are inconvenient, even if they are politically polarizing, we can’t pretend these things aren’t happening just to save people’s… to fit in with people’s worldview or prejudices they might have. I think it does a disservice to readers, it does a disservice to people making decisions about their lives because climate change is a huge factor now. We’re seeing more and more people moving to climate-vulnerable areas. It’s the kind of areas where there are jobs and cheap housing, but it’s the areas most vulnerable to severe heat waves and flooding and storms.

(00:31:24): So people need to be factoring in these decisions amongst all the other decisions you make in your life. And I think it’s a disservice if we try to hide that or try and frame our language in a way that’s politically palatable but misleading. I think that’s the wrong thing to do. So I would encourage people not to shy away from mentioning the climate crisis. I realize it’s sometimes hard. I just like Maxine, I get some nasty emails, my colleagues do too. It’s not fun. It’s less fun if you are face-to-face with people like this on a day-to-day basis. I understand that, but hiding the truth from people isn’t going to help that situation in any way.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:32:14): Thanks so much. And this reminds me that here at Covering Climate Now, we say that the key to good climate solutions is to have your stories do three things, to humanize the climate story, meaning make it about people and not parts per million, to localize it, to put it in a place that the people reading or watching that story can identify with either their local home or someplace that they know and to solutionize it, to talk about what can be done about it. And what Oliver Milman was just saying there about giving people the power that knowledge gives is one of our key roles as journalists so that they understand, “Hey, this is affecting your crops, this is affecting your insurance, et cetera.” And I’m going to give a shout-out to the Washington Post had a fascinating story, I think it was yesterday, Maxine, about how climate change is already changing but quite in an almost hidden way, it’s already changing people’s ability to get insurance and even to live in certain places.

(00:33:18): The costs of it are going up. Fascinating look, a lot of data-driven journalism on it. Hopefully somebody on the Covering Climate Now staff can find that, it was on the front of the home page yesterday. I’m going to ask one more question here and then we’re going to start to take questions from our colleagues. So I’ll just remind folks, put your questions in the Q&A with your name and your news outlet please. And this is again as a question to both. I’m going to go to you first, Maxine, and it’s sort of a general question, but I think again, something that will be useful for our colleagues. Which is, both of you have been on the climate beat for a while, but for people who are journalists who are relatively new to covering the story, can you point them to a couple of places, sources of analysis or information or individual sources?

(00:34:04): I know journalists sometimes have to be careful about sharing their sources, but if you can talk about some of the places that you go in order to be informed about climate change, to think about where your reporting needs to be going in the days ahead. Of course, Covering Climate Now is an important source for that sort of thing. We’ve got a lot of background resources that I invite everyone to avail themselves of, just come to our website. But again, thinking about the three weeks between now and election day, for journalists who want to try and say something about climate change as part of this election, are there a couple of places that you would recommend going to to sort of get themselves up to speed? So first you Maxine.

Maxine Joselow (00:34:47): Yeah. Well, I may be a little biased, but I think the Washington Post has a helpful resource on this topic. During the Republican presidential primary, when Trump was vying against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others for his party’s nomination, we actually put together a guide of where all of the candidates stood on all of the major issues. So not just climate change, but abortion, the economy, immigration, gun control, et cetera. And I think the climate section is pretty instructive. It has a lot of information about where the candidates stand on tax credits for electric vehicles and clean energy that are in the Inflation Reduction Act based on what Trump and the other candidates had said publicly up until that point. And if you’re covering the election, it might be a little bit out of date since we did it when the primary was going on and we’re now in the general.

(00:35:46): But I still think it has some helpful info on Trump and DeSantis if you’re doing a Florida story on his climate policies. And then I would just shout out, there have been a lot of really good analyses of what a second Trump term would mean from an emissions’ perspective, and a couple that come to mind are from Carbon Brief and Energy Innovation. They both looked at this question of if Trump were to win a second term and roll back or significantly weaken many of the Biden administration’s signature climate initiatives, so greenhouse gas emission standards for cars, trucks, power plants, so on and so forth, what would that mean for the planet?

(00:36:34): And I think I always come back to this idea that physics doesn’t care about politics and greenhouse gases or greenhouse gases, it doesn’t matter if they were emitted under a Republican or Democratic president. And so I think those analyses are really helpful just to ground your reporting in, here’s what the science actually says, the politics will translate into.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:36:59): Thanks so much. Oliver.

Oliver Milman (00:37:03): Yeah, I’d echo a lot of that too. I think there’s some really fantastic climate writing around now. It used to be quite hard to find really high quality writing on the climate crisis, but we seem to be spoiled by it now, it’s hard to get through the amount of it. A lot of it seems to be centered on the print media, unfortunately. I think with a few notable exceptions, TV isn’t quite there yet. But there is a lot of good stuff to read. Increasingly there are some really good newsletters to really good substacks. I’m thinking about Heated, Heatmap, Bill McKibben’s newsletter too is fantastic. Dr. Volts, I mean there’s a number of them. In terms of good resources, I think Yale has got a really good climate arm in terms of their polling, showing what people are thinking.

(00:37:58): It’s very granular. It goes down to very localized levels on what people are thinking about climate change and climate solutions. They’ve got really good insights as well, I feel on where the American public are on climate change. And in terms of the science, Climate Central does a good job, I think, too, of connecting people in a quite clear and down to earth way of what climate science is saying. And again, they get quite localized with that. So I’d give a shout-out to them too.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:38:33): Oliver Milman of the Guardian just mentioned the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications. And let me just expand on that a moment. If you are a journalist who is perhaps having trouble selling your editors on a given story, Yale has gold dust that you can use. They literally have a county by county description of how people in counties in everywhere from Arkansas to Alaska and Florida to Maine, how the people in that community think and feel about climate change. And the headline is that basically, 70% of the public nationally wants to know more about climate change. There’s differences in the various counties, but that is a strong majority. So if you’re having trouble winning that argument in the 10:00 AM story meetings, go to Yale Climate Communications, you can look up, here are the counties that are in my news outlets reporting area, market area. And you will find very conclusive authoritative data that you can take into your editors and say, “Hey, you know what? Can you give this a second thought?”

(00:39:46): So with that, I’m going to start taking questions from the Q&A and people are welcome to keep them coming. I’m going to start with a couple from overseas, starting with one from a colleague of ours at the German public radio network, NDR. This is from Yasmin Appelhans, and she asks, “How would a Trump victory immediately influence the international climate politics at COP29 and COP29, the UN climate science negotiations, they begin, I think it’s November 11th, but very soon after the election. So Oliver, let’s start with you on that one.

Oliver Milman (00:40:33): Yeah, it will be the talk of COP, for sure. I think the US election, whichever way it goes, is going to be the talk of COP. I mean, it’s not going to be, I don’t think it’s going to be the most well-attended COP of all time this year. I think there’s a lot of distractions going on in the world elsewhere. If you think about Israel, Ukraine and the US election looms over COP this year, even though it’s quite an important one in terms of the global stock take. So yeah, I think it will be the talk of COP. What the US does, as I mentioned before, is often very much top of mind to people, international negotiators, just regular activists who go to these international climate meetings. So I think it will have a profound effect.

(00:41:21): If it is Trump, there will be immediate concerns. The US will not only pull out the Paris climate deal, which I’m pretty certain they would, given Trump did that before, but also remove itself entirely from the UN climate framework. I’ve had it put to me by a Trump ally that he could put this to the Senate as a treaty and it will get shot down in most likelihood, therefore making it more difficult to rejoin. So yeah, there’ll be concern about that, about US backtracking not only with its emissions because the emissions would likely go up if Trump’s policies are implemented, but also around issues around climate finance, where wealthy nations are so far behind in terms of their promises in giving aid to countries that are struggling with adaptation and costs from climate change in a developing world. So I think you’d see a huge wave of concern that that money is not going to be forthcoming at all. You’ll have concern that US leadership, there’s a US leadership vacuum as there was before under Trump.

(00:42:40): And I think there would be immediately eyes on countries like China, how will they respond? Will they see this as an opportunity to further entrench their leadership in the renewable space or will they see it as a way to kind of back off their own climate commitments? Because if the US is not bothering them, why should we? So yeah, I think it’s going to have a really, really meaningful impact upon COP and the overall international process.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:43:09): And just quickly, how big of a team is the Guardian sending to Baku for COP29?

Oliver Milman (00:43:15): A handful of people, team from the UK and then we’ll be sending someone from here too. And I think my colleague from Australia will be going as he has the last couple of COPs. So yeah, we are still there, even if others might be skipping it.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:43:32): And Maxine Joselow of the Washington Post, do you have anything to add there? And how big of a team is the Washington Post going to have at Baku?

Maxine Joselow (00:43:41): Well, I’ll take your questions in reverse order and just note I will be there in Baku. I’ve heard Azerbaijani food is quite good, so it’s always something to look forward to, a little different than ritzy Dubai, but we’ll see. And then we’re also sending colleagues from Rome and China. So there’ll be at least three of us, which candidly is smaller than the number of people we sent to COP26 in Glasgow when there was a huge post presence for what everyone thought was going to be a much bigger COP. And then I thought Oliver did a fantastic job answering the question about what the US election could mean for COP29. I would just want to add one thing, which is that I think it’s underappreciated maybe that we might not actually know the outcome of the US election by the time COP starts.

(00:44:40): Obviously, the election is on November 5th, COP starts on November 11th, there could be a delay in tallying up and certifying votes and electoral college counting, and we could have a situation where everyone shows up in Baku and there’s the World Leader Summit at the beginning, and there’s a lot of uncertainty over who’s going to be the next president of the biggest economy and biggest emitter after China. So that could be an interesting situation to watch unfold in Baku.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:45:18): That’s a really important point everybody to bear in mind as you talk with your colleagues about how you cover COP29, which by the way, you can do remotely. Covering Climate Now is preparing a reporting guide as we have for all the previous last five COPs about how to report on COP29 remotely, meaning you don’t have to be in Baku, obviously that’s best, but there’s a lot you can do to just keep bringing it up into your audience’s mind that this is happening. Likewise, with during this election. Even if you just do a story between now and election day that talks about, as Maxine was saying a moment ago, just look and see, “Well, here’s where candidate X stands, here’s where candidate Y stands. Do they accept climate science? What do they want to do about the climate crisis?” And of course, this is not just about the presidential candidates, crucially who is elected to the Senate and the House of Representatives and governorships and so forth is really going to matter for climate policy going forward.

(00:46:19): So don’t think that just because you’re working in a local outlet in say, North Carolina or Arizona or even a non-swing state, that these things don’t matter. Climate change is still a story. This is a climate election. People are voting on the climate future whether they know it or not. And it’s our job as journalists to help them know that. It’s not our job to tell them who to vote for, but it is certainly our job to say, “Look, you are making the decision about the future of the climate on this planet, the future that your kids are going to live with for the rest of their lives.”

(00:46:54): So with that, on the question too, Craig Miller, who’s a freelancer, and he’s talking about how the climate message will finally get through, and he’s suggesting that the insurance companies may be the way that the message is finally going to get through. I saw a thing on Twitter the other day that said, “You may not believe in climate change, but your insurance company does.” So question from Craig Miller, “Is either candidate, Harris or Trump, paying attention to the insurance role?” Now I’m going to start with you Maxine, because of that great story that the Post had the other day. I don’t recall hearing any kind of reference in that story to the candidates, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Maxine Joselow (00:47:38): No, it wasn’t my story, just to clarify, it was my colleague Mike Coren, who writes a great climate advice column called The Climate Coach, which everyone should sign up for, and he had a piece out yesterday, I think it’s part of a new series he’s doing on how climate change is affecting the experience of buying and owning a home. And the piece was really data intensive and looked at how climate change and its impacts like flooding and sea level rise are actually repricing and oftentimes lowering the price of your home depending on the level of risk to inland flooding or coastal flooding or other climate disasters that your county faces. I don’t think his piece mentioned what Harris and Trump are saying or not saying on this issue. I think it’s fair to say from my perspective that neither of the candidates is talking a lot about climate change or insurance as it relates specifically to climate change.

(00:48:45): I did have a story probably a month or so ago about why Harris and other top Democrats have been quiet about climate change recently, and I can drop a link to that in the chat. But to answer the question, I don’t think really either candidate is highlighting this, although the Harris campaign is trying to make housing and the country’s housing crisis a big issue, and it’s one that we know resonates with voters and of course, is bound up in questions about climate risk.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:49:21): Oliver, anything to add there?

Oliver Milman (00:49:24): Yeah, we published this story today looking at what the potential political ramifications of the hurricanes could be around climate change and the election. And there was some focus in there from the people we spoke to around insurance and how Harris did mention insurance in the TV debate she had with Trump. She mentioned we have these climate impacts, it’s going to affect your assurance. A lot of her allies are happy she drew that link because it’s relatable, it’s something that people, it’s very tangible to people. They can see that happening and they can see insurers leave the market. I think there’s a certain disappointment that she hasn’t really built upon that since that time. She hasn’t really mentioned climate change at all, and she just hasn’t really drawn that link between insurance rates, cost of living, that kind of thing, which is obviously a primary focus of hers is the economy as well as reproductive rights.

(00:50:24): But linking these things to the climate, making them tangible to people, she’s almost vacated that field in the sense that she feels she has that vote sewn up. And the difference with Trump is so obvious that why would you talk about that? I think there are those around her and some senior Democrats we’ve spoke to who would like her to make more of a case, a more kind of down-to-earth tangible kitchen table case of why climate change is costing you and why an action on it will cost you far more. So I think there’s frustration on that amongst some people, but certainly it’s going to only become more and more of a problem to people as they face these huge storms.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:51:11): That makes a nice segue to the next question we have here, because it is quite clear that the Harris campaign is not going as hard on the climate issue as they could. For whatever reasons, that’s pretty evident that they’ve made that decision internally. So here’s a question from a colleague of ours in Russia, from the journal, Expert. I gather, it’s a media journal. And he asks, “Does climate change really matter to Americans? Can the climate agenda actually influence voters’ choices in the United States?” Judging from the Harris campaign’s relative silence on this, one would guess that their analysis is no, it cannot. But Oliver, you mentioned Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication a minute ago. What’s your take? And then to you Maxine, how much does voting, how much rather does climate change matter to American voters?

Oliver Milman (00:52:02): The answer is yes and no. I mean, I spoke to various pollsters and features in polling. And you see this growing… On one hand, you see this growing alarm amongst voters around climate change. They’re seeing more and more impacts, they feel it’s going to become a big problem for them and their children and grandchildren. There’s a shrinking hardcore number of people who deny anything’s going on. They’re not as relevant as they were. The US still differs from a lot of other countries around the world, but still there’s this growing sense of alarm run, climate change. 60% of people, that was a poll done in spring showing 60% of Americans said that climate change is causing harms right now. So there is this concern, but at the same time, when you ask people what are your priorities for the election? What are the issues that really motivate you? Climate change is pretty much always near the bottom.

(00:53:01): I mean, if you have a list of different issues, climate change is down at the bottom. So it’s an issue, but not one that’s really driving people. The caveat and the twist to that is that we are obviously facing quite a close election if all the polls are to be believed. And there is some evidence, I spoke to research who studied this, the 2020 election, that climate did give Joe Biden a small bump in terms of the rising levels of concern between 2016 and 2020 meant that Biden gathered a few more voters than he would’ve done otherwise.

(00:53:38): And in a close election that was important. And this election, if the same thing happens, that could be important again in that, even if it’s not the top ranked issue, if you see one candidate who’s wildly opposed to your own views on climate, you might vote accordingly or might be a reason you would vote accordingly alongside other reasons. So I think it’s going to have a difference of the margins, maybe a mess, but the margins are all that might decide this election. So perhaps

Mark Hertsgaard (00:54:14): Maxine.

Maxine Joselow (00:54:16): I think Oliver covered it really well. I would echo a lot of what he said. I saw the same survey that I think he was citing and that I cited in my piece about why Democrats have been quiet on climate change. And that was done by Yale and George Mason universities. And they looked at 28 issues including abortion, the economy, border security, inflation. And they found that of those 28 issues, climate change ranked 19th in importance to the registered voters that they surveyed. But then when they also asked voters if they wanted to vote for a candidate who supported climate action, the number of people who said yes was quite significant. 97% of liberal Democrats, 62% of independents, 47% of liberal to moderate Republicans, and 17% of conservative Republicans.

(00:55:16): So I think those numbers tell a really interesting story, and just by looking at one set, the first set of numbers, you might come away with a more pessimistic take on whether people support climate action. But then when you really look at the full picture and drill down to the numbers more, you realize that more people support it than you might think, and as Oliver was saying, this election is one that could be decided at the margins and so shouldn’t count climate voters out.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:55:46): Yeah. One more point on that. Anthony Leiserowitz, who’s our close colleague at Covering Climate Now, he runs the Yale Program on Climate Communications. He also commented on those findings that if you look again at liberal Democrats, which is the base of the Republican Party, climate change is a very important issue for them. And you might think, “Oh, well, they’re going to vote for Harris anyway.” Right? But what Leiserowitz said was that they matter more than just voting for Harris because it’s about can you drive turnout? Meaning, will those people really vote and will they make that their neighbor down the street and their cousin across town also vote? Because that’s an election that’s close, turnout, turnout, turnout is what really matters. Unfortunately, so much of our profession here focuses our polling and all of our analysis on this, so-called undecided voters, which is a very small portion of the population, and they ignore this role of turnout.

(00:56:49): So that again, is for fellow journalists. If you’re thinking about doing stories on this, that’s a really valuable story. In the next three weeks, go out and talk to people who are, say young climate activists. Are they going to vote? Some of them are not happy with Biden and Harris, frankly, we have the US is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. So that’s a really good story that you can do on the ground in the next couple of weeks. We’re going to sneak in one last question for the top of the hour here. Then it’s on those same lines from a freelancer, Michael Bradbury, who says, “Gen Z and younger readers and watchers are getting a lot of their climate information on TikTok. Are there any climate TikTokers to watch or who provide good ongoing climate information for younger generations?” Maxine, I’ll start with you.

Maxine Joselow (00:57:41): Can I get back to you on that? I’ll drop a link in the chat. I need to go to my TikTok and find who I’m following because I definitely do follow some climate accounts, but they’re not [inaudible].

Mark Hertsgaard (00:57:54): Well, I’ll give a couple of moments. Oliver.

Oliver Milman (00:57:57): My goodness, you dropped me in at Maxine. I really hope you would answer this one, because I’ve given you are younger than me and on TikTok. I am not on TikTok. We’ve started to do a bit more on TikTok. My colleague Dharna Noor has been doing some really good explainers on TikTok around the hurricanes and the climate change influence upon them. So the Guardian is, we are dipping our toe into that in terms of explainers. But in terms of actual TikTok influences on climate change, yeah, sorry, pass, I’m drawing a blank here.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:58:35): All right. Maxine, did you come up with anything?

Maxine Joselow (00:58:38): Yeah, there’s a guy I follow named Michael Mezz, who does these explainer videos about sort of climate economics. And I can drop the link in the chat, and then have to give a plug for the Washington Post and my colleague Dave Jorgenson, who is on TikTok and on Twitter, his handle is That Washington Post TikTok Guy (please note: Jorgenson’s handle is actually [at]davejorgenson). And sometimes he will make a funny video based on one of our climate stories.

Mark Hertsgaard (00:59:13): Okay, we’re going to have to leave it there for today. This has been a fabulous conversation. I think you’ll all agree. I want to express my deep thanks and appreciation and admiration for our two panelists today. Maxine Joselow at the Washington Post, Oliver Milman at the Guardian. And of course, we at Covering Climate Now are at your disposal in these three weeks ahead. It’s really important that we get across to our audiences, this is a climate election. You are voting about climate change in this election, whether you know it or not. It’s our job to let them know that they are to focus on as the media critic, Jay Rosen likes to say, “Let’s focus on the stakes of this election, not the odds.” Let’s leave the polling aside and talk about what this election will mean for humanity’s climate future.

(00:59:59): As we said earlier in the hour, who Americans choose as their president and their congressional representatives next month is going to have unmatched influence over whether we as a civilization do turn around the climate emergency while we still can. So our job as journalists is to raise that awareness and we have three weeks to do so. So we’re here at Covering Climate Now at your disposal to help. And one more thank you to both Maxine and to Oliver. And with that, on behalf of Covering Climate Now, this is Mark Hertsgaard. Wishing you all a very pleasant day.