Talking Shop: How to Cover Climate Activism

Transcript

Kyle Pope: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Talking Shop with Covering Climate Now. We’re thrilled to see you. I’m Kyle Pope. I’m one of the co-founders of Covering Climate Now, along with Mark Hertsgaard. For those of you who don’t know, we are a global collaboration of hundreds of news outlets from around the world, and we have a very straightforward, sort of simple organizing principle, which is that we’re trying to help each other do more and better coverage of what we see as the defining story of our time. So go to our website coveringclimatenow.org, where you can see a list of our partners. You can sign up for our newsletters, you can check out our resources, and we really encourage you to join us. So let’s get to today’s discussion.

This conversation actually sprang from some work that Covering Climate Now has been doing around the country. We’ve been sitting down with newsrooms, local newsrooms, local TV newsrooms, just to talk to them about how they can better cover the climate crisis. How can they make connections to their audience, and how can they just raise the level of coverage, both in the US and around the world? And I’ve been doing a lot of these trainings with my colleagues, and we started to hear over and over again, when we talk in these sessions about how important it is for journalists to cover activism around climate, to listen to what people are saying, to not focus just on the tactics, but focus on the messages that people are bringing to these conversations. And we kept hearing over and over again a concern among journalists that covering activism too aggressively or too often would make them, they were concerned about feeling like activists themselves, and they were concerned that their audience would have that sense, and even they were concerned that their bosses, their producers, their editors would have that sense.

It sort of took us aback, but when we kept hearing it over and over again, we realized this is a thing that we really need to think about. We really need to understand where this is coming from. And because our view is that if you’re going to tell the whole story of what’s going on in the climate world, you have to listen to activists who are critically informed and who have a critical voice, and that’s part of the story. So how can we do this in a way that both sides feel comfortable with? And we’re going to talk today about why this concern exists. We’re going to talk about the concerns that the climate movement may have towards news media, and then we’re going to get into some current events about what’s happening in the world as it relates to climate and politics in the US and around the world.

So, super happy to be here. This is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I think this is a great time to be jumping into this conversation and we couldn’t have two better people to help guide us. Keerti Gopal covers activism, grassroots mobilization and repression of activism in the climate movement for the nonprofit news outlet Inside Climate News. Previously, she researched youth climate activism in the US and completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan, where she studied climate action there. She’s a graduate of Northwestern University. It should be noted that she is the first activism beat reporter Inside Climate News, which is a big deal. I think most of Bill McKibben, author, educator and environmentalist who wrote the first mass market book on climate change, The End of Nature in 1989. He’s contributed to the New Yorker, the Nation, and many other publications, is a founder of 350.org and recently co-founded Third Act, a climate activist group for people over the age of 60. Thanks to my birthday two weeks ago, I am now part of this cohort. Thrilled to be there.

So, we are going to talk for the next 25 minutes or so. Really, we’re going to hear from our colleagues here. And then, in about half an hour, we’ll turn it over to your questions, which you’ll see you can access through the Q and A function. Please go there. Please have a conversation with us. We will get to as many questions as we can, but we really want to hear from you, because I think this is a super important part of why we’re here. So again, thank you. I really look forward to this. Let’s get going. So, Keerti, I’ve told you before about this thing that I kept hearing, and I’m just curious whether you have the same impression, whether it surprised you, how you play out why this fear that journalists may have that covering activism makes them seem like activists, why that may exist?

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I’ve definitely heard that before and it does always kind of surprise me a little bit, because I don’t really think that we approach other beats or other topics like that. If you’re covering public officials, of course you’re going to hear what they’re saying, hear their opinions, their views, but we’re not just doing their PR for them. So we’re going to interrogate that and fact check, see what evidence they have. And I don’t think people talk about when you’re covering a public official, being afraid that they might be just seen as a spokesperson for that public official. And I think when we’re covering activism, we’re not doing PR for these groups, we’re not doing their comms for them, because they’re doing their own comms and they’re good at that, but these movements are happening, and they’re really essential and critical to the landscape of the climate conversation.

So why wouldn’t we be covering them with the same kind of, taking them seriously and really covering them in the way that we cover any other part of the climate ecosystem? I think just looking at the way that social change has happened throughout history, people’s movements, social movements are at the helm of that and they’re often ahead of the curve of everyone else. So I think as journalists, it’s our responsibility to be going there and looking at what are people saying on the ground, what’s mobilizing people, what’s motivating people to take these kinds of actions? And then, covering that like we’d cover anything else. I think it’s a really rich place for journalism, but that definitely is a concern I’ve heard, and it’s tricky.

Kyle Pope: Bill, she sort of teed up this question, why is this happening here on this beat and not other beats? Business reporters who cover finance don’t worry about seeming like Wall Street people necessarily. Why do you think it is here and maybe even different? I mean, I think maybe it’s worth pondering, because these same issues came up in covering protest against the Vietnam War, journalists were hesitant. Covering the civil rights movement, journalists were hesitant and here we are again. But what do you think the answer is to why there is this reluctance?

Bill McKibben: Well, I mean, I’ve spent much of my life as a journalist of one kind or another, including the most basic ways, covering city politics, covering on and on. Journalists are kind of used to who the powerful players are usually in a scenario. It’s government officials, it’s economic leaders or corporate leaders, things like that. And they’re kind of used to the way that information flows from those places. They come with a series of regular meetings, they come with a series of quarterly reports, so on and so forth. And almost by its nature, activism is a little scruffier than that. It’s on the outside of the normal way of doing things. And so, it’s always viewed a little suspiciously. And if you think about it for a little while, there’s something odd about that, because truthfully, it makes a lot more sense to be cynical about what you’re being told by a corporate spokesman or a political spokesperson.

They have a very definite personal stake in whatever it is they’re talking about. Most of us who are activists like me are volunteers in this work, and our stake to the point that we have one is, I don’t know, emotional, it’s because we view these things as really important, but that I think for journalists can be a little suspect, and a little harder to deal with than the ways that we’re kind of used to getting information. I know that this is true, because watched in newsrooms over the years, the difficulty and the willingness to kind of shunt protest and activism aside, but the irony of all of that is, especially on this issue of climate, what do you know? It really turns out that it’s been activists who’ve been correct about what’s going on for the last 35 years, and it’s for the most part, business and government that have gotten it wrong, that have been slow to react, that have been underplaying, the danger that we’re in, so on and so forth.

So I think it’s understandable why journalists react that way, but the interesting question is how to help people rethink through how to make activists into another important part of this story. Not to suspend one’s skepticism in the company of activists, that would be a bad idea, just as it’s a bad idea to suspend one skepticism in the face of power, but to understand what a valuable part that it can be. And just to go to back to something that Keerti was saying, look at over the long sweep of history, this really is how change gets made. Our other institutions, politics, business things are basically forces for maintaining the status quo.

And that’s a useful thing. I mean, the world needs state world can’t be in a constant state of chaos and uproar at all times and so on. So it’s good that we have stabilizing forces around us, but we need a way to bring change into that picture. And for the last a hundred and some years, really I think since Gandhi and the suffragists and things invented the idea of mass social movements, this kind of activism is probably the most important way for bringing those notions about how we need to change into the story. And so, they should be treated with respect too.

Kyle Pope: It has to be frustrating though that, I mean, everything… I think most of what you said, Bill, about the role of activists in promoting social change over the decades is known by most journalists. I mean, they know this as a matter of history, but they don’t translate it to the climate story as they’re living it right now. Keerti, we’ve talked a lot about how journalists view activists. You spend your day, all day, every day talking to activists as part of your beat. And it sort of gets to the question of what are their suspicions of journalists? What are they, and not necessarily about you specifically, because you’re unique and that this is your sole beat, but what is your understanding about where do they think that journalists misunderstand them, or what agendas do they think that reporters bring to the story that isn’t helpful to them? Could you just talk a little bit about the other side of it?

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it’s definitely not uniform across the board. People have different hangups about the media or not. I think there’s a lot of activists that I’ve spoken to that are really excited to talk to press, and they really want to get their message out there and they’re excited that press is even paying attention to them. And then, there’s definitely also situations where people will be pretty skeptical of news, and I think some of it comes from bad coverage in the past, or just seeing the way that media has covered climate activism and sensationalized actions, or just covered the spectacle of the action and not really covered the substance of the action. So I think there can be some skepticism there. And I think once you start asking questions, and actually asking media questions about the motivations behind an action, and not just why are you getting arrested or something like that, then there can start to be a much richer conversation, more interesting story.

And then, I think the other piece of nervousness that maybe isn’t even really skepticism, but an actual fear is just around repression or legal issues. If you’re dealing with people who are engaged in civil disobedience, then there are all sorts of potential legal questions that people might be dealing with. And then, I think here in the US, but also especially if you’re working with people internationally, there’s a lot of really real fears of the type of repression or violence that people could face for engaging in activism. I mean, the repression of people engaged in climate activism around the world is really on the rise and is really frightening. I think there was a study from Global Witness that was saying it was like two or four environmental defenders being killed in a week on average, so really, really frightening rates. Yeah, Bill?

Bill McKibben: That’s super important point. I got to sort of lead the memorial service a couple of years ago when we were all in Glasgow for the climate talks, that year’s memorial service that global witness organized for environmental activists who’d been killed that year, and there were 237 or something. Almost all in the global south and almost all who got in the way of somebody’s next oil well, or whatever it was. And that’s a really good point. In truth, the number of places around the world where we can do activism has shrunk dramatically in recent years. At 350.org, when we launched in 2009 with what was kind of the coming out party for the global climate movement, this day of action that had 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries on the same day, I go back and look at those pictures and there’s a long list of places where we responsibly couldn’t any longer encourage people to organize in these ways.

We had 200 demonstrations in China, in geez, China that would, you’d be in jail overnight. Russia’s not open to this anymore. Brazil under Bolsonaro wasn’t, it’s back in action for the moment. We’ll see for how long. The US under Trump one was harder to do this kind of stuff, but still possible. Under Trump two, they seem to be enunciating a kind of set of standards around protest and things that’ll make it very, very hard. So the list is long and it includes countries that, I mean, India is a place where it’s extremely difficult to do this work. Now, the Indian equivalent of Greta Thunberg, she was put in jail, prevented from going to the various climate talks. You have to be very brave to even try.

And so, that’s very worth everybody remembering all the time. It’s one of the reasons why there’s less activism of that kind in many parts of the world than there used to be. And it’s one of the reasons why it’s so important for, in the West, people who still have these freedoms to figure out how to help in those fights too. I’ve been very grateful to see Western activists, for instance in the last few days doing a lot of work in New York around the East African crude oil pipeline, because you can do it in New York. I mean, I went to jail in New York last week and I didn’t enjoy it, but I was under no illusions that I was going to spend the rest of my life there, or get beaten up while I was there, or whatever. So it really is worth remembering what a different scene this is in different places.

Kyle Pope: Let me just spend one more second on this, how two sides view each other. Bill, you’re in such an interesting spot in this conversation, because of your accomplishments both as an activist and as a journalist. And I don’t want to steal from the Q and A, which we’re going to get to later, but somebody does have a point, which is saying that in activist circles that the mass media, I assume the commercial media are seen as complicit with fossil capital, and that sort of colors how people view the press. Just wondering, Bill, what you see, how widespread you see that, and what that means for the relationship between the two sides?

Bill McKibben: Two things. One, I think journalism around climate has gotten way, way, way better than it used to be. I mean, literally, I can remember long periods when, A, there wasn’t any. There was a decade long period when if there was a long story in the English language media about climate change, there was a 70% chance that I had written it, which was not good in any way. Now we have truly talented staffs at one place after another who’ve been doing really good work. And I think that some of those issues around bias and the kind of he said, she said coverage are less acute than they were. And I think that at least at the best top tier papers and broadcast outlets and stuff, people have come to understand, journalists have increasingly come to understand that social movements are a source of stories, that they’re something to be covered and so on.

The hard part is that activists know that the part of the story that isn’t getting through is the deep, deep, deep sense of urgency and how little time there is to deal with these challenges. And that’s why I think we sometimes end up flailing a little bit in an effort to get this sense of deep urgency across. And it’s why sometimes I think the activism itself can go wrong.

I was the first can of soup on the first old master, okay, let’s see how this works. By the fifth or sixth can of soup, I think it was pretty clear that that had, whatever that was accomplished was going to be accomplished, had been accomplished and now we weren’t accomplishing much. And so, it’s important for activists to understand how journalists work and think. And because much of our activism has to be accomplished through the medium of journalism, has to be communicated that way. So you’ve got to make it possible to design the way that you build actions in ways that are articulate and intelligible to the journalists who have to cover them and the people who have to read it. And that’s a really important part of the work of being an activist.

Kyle Pope: Yeah. This urgency question that you raised, Bill, I’ve heard you refer to it in the past as the time test that we’re living in. That is a source of frustration I think for the activist community, who doesn’t sense that sense of urgency from journalists. And journalists are like, “There’s a million things going on now. Why are you pressing me on this?”
Bill, you said something important that is sort of the foundation of this whole conversation, which was you said whatever 10 minutes ago. We need to think of how we can help journalists when they’re covering activists. So, what are some ideas, how can we help them better cover these movements and how can we help them better focus on the messages, and the facts that are being laid out? For either of you. Keerti, do you want to go?

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a tough question. And the urgency question is definitely something that I feel like we feel really acutely in the climate journalism space, because we do have such a sense of the urgency of the crisis, because we’re mired in that all the time. And so, we’re also feeling that same frustration a lot of the time. And I think something that I think gets to this question, Bill was bringing up about activists needing to also understand how media works, is something I struggle with sometimes is if I’m writing about a bunch of actions that are about the same thing, how do I make that continue to interest readers, and feel different and feel new? Because the truth is we do kind of just start to tune things out. And so, I think for activists, that’s a question of how do you make these actions seem different?

And then, for journalists, I think we can also think about how do we write a deeper story or write a new story that is going to give something new to our readers. And so, I think one thing that can help reporters who are looking at covering activism is, if you’re seeing, okay, I’m seeing soup thrown on a painting again, and I don’t know if I should cover it again, or maybe that’s not the best example, but you see, I’ve been covering a lot of these actions in New York around Citibank. So this is this extended campaign, the summer of heat bill’s been part of it, and there’s a lot of protests at Citibank all the time.

And so, I’ve been thinking, “Okay, well how do I cover this in a way that will then bring something new to the readers?” And so, I think part of that is getting beyond the actual just tactic or the spectacle of activists blocked Citibank again, and actually talking to this group and trying to figure out, okay, what’s different about this action? Maybe there’s different groups that are leading this action. There’s a different narrative that’s coming forth. This weekend, they did something a little different and went to the CEO’s house. So there’s different ways you can try to dig a little deeper beyond just the surface action. And then, you can also ask the question of what is the effectiveness of doing a sustained action, and doing things again and again and again. And I think that’s also an interesting question to tease out with our work.

Bill McKibben: I think those are very smart reflections. I think that activists help themselves when they pick legible targets, where you’re able to explain easily why you’re at a particular place, or doing a particular thing, or taking on a particular adversary. And part of our job is to help refine people’s understanding. So it’s taken, I wrote one of the first pieces, a long piece for the New Yorker about why insurance banking and stock funds were a crucial part of the climate equation, and it’s taken three or four years of steady activism to really drive that notion fully home, so that it’s become one of the things that people who write about and cover climate, and think about climate understand is important. It takes a while to do this and a certain amount of repetition, but Keerti is right. You have to figure out how to do things in ways that aren’t so repetitive that people start to tune them out.

And your first audience for this is reporters. How to do things in a way that reporters don’t tune out. So that calls for lots of creativity, which is good, getting messages across as part of it. It calls for some understanding on the part of journalists too. One of the things that’s annoying, I think for activists is when too many journalists will cover a protest and not understand that it has several dimensions. So for instance, we spent years doing the fight over the Keystone Pipeline, which became the big defining environmental fight for some years in the last decade. And at first it was impossible to get anybody to write about it whatsoever. That’s why we had to send 1200 and some people to jail. And eventually it sort of broke through some level and people began covering it. Then the coverage, sometimes there was a kind of Washington beltway pundit kind of coverage, that this isn’t that important, there’s more important issues, whatever. Which obviously all of those who were doing it understood that stopping the Keystone pipeline was not in and of itself sufficient to end global warming.

We weren’t idiots, but we understood it as a key role in helping shift the zeitgeist around climate change, and as it proved to be, same thing with the divestment campaigns and on and on and on. So helping people understand that there’s a large scale game plan, as well as a kind of moment by moment, move by move, fight by fight part of this is really important. It’s easier to see historically, nobody goes back and complains that Gandhi shouldn’t have been thinking about salt, because salt was not the most important thing in the entire British Empire and why wasn’t he taking on colonialism or something? They understand that he used the salt march as a brilliant part of the strategy to help people understand what was happening in the world around them. So trying to put on those glasses in the here and now is one of the important tasks that journalists play. Journalists have a deep interpretive role here and they don’t use it as often or as wisely as they could, I think.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I think also-

Bill McKibben: No, I’m sorry, go ahead, Keerti.

Keerti Gopal: I was going to say that’s a really great point, and I think that also is an opening for journalists to get beyond just covering a protest. I think that sometimes we can just fall into that trap and we’ll also get these press releases of, “There’s going to be a demonstration outside this place or something,” and then you just cover the demonstration.
And the much more interesting story is the months, years of organizing that are building up to these campaigns that are strategizing around doing these demonstrations that are all part of a bigger ecosystem, and also looking at the differences between different climate groups or different activists. I think so often we can get into a trap of the media of being like, “Climate activists rallied at this place,” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s just so much more interesting stuff to go into that is before that.

Bill McKibben: Amen. Absolutely right. And the stories are fascinating and great. So to go back to the Keystone example, because it’s far enough in the past now, I think. There were these public things that were happening, people getting arrested, demonstrations outside every time Obama went to give us talk someplace, whatever, that people noticed and wrote about. But at least half the story, probably much more, was the fact that these things had galvanized action within the environmental community. And so, you had all of a sudden NRDC and Sierra Club, and people like that devoting huge amounts of staff time and resources to building out the argument here, and issuing the reports. And you had League of Conservation voters starting to seriously lobby, and people missed that by and large, to the point where the New York Times, and this was a while ago, but the New York Times was taken aback when Obama made the decision he finally did to stop the Keystone Pipeline, because they hadn’t been paying attention to what was actually happening within that ecosystem.

We had somewhat a reprise of this last year, when people were sort of taken aback when the movement to get Joe Biden to pause permitting for LNG export facilities, a huge deal, was completely under the radar. The Times didn’t write a single story about it until two days before the thing finally happened, because they weren’t taking seriously the ability of movements to build coalitions, to make things happen. Good movements, and the climate movement and the environmental movement is pretty good, solid movement, are serious players in these games. They are as serious as the business interests on the other side, and they deserve to be covered with the same kind of respect. I don’t mean respect like you’re doing everything right, I mean respect like you are a player in this.

Kyle Pope: Yeah, I mean to me that’s the whole point. They’re serious players in this story and if you’re covering the story, you have to cover all these serious players. Let’s switch to the here and now. We have a ton of questions that I want to get to, but I mean a lot of what we’ve been talking about are, I’m going to shift the lens a little bit, because we’ve been talking some about people who devote a lot of, reporters, journalists who devote a lot of attention to covering climate. We’re now at a moment, especially as it relates to politics, where you have a lot of political reporters, a lot of campaign reporters coming into the story for the first time. They’re seeing climate now as part of the conversation.

They haven’t really been following it that closely, but they are going to be really shaping the conversation in their own newsrooms about what’s going to get attention and what’s not. What advice, and just to be clear, we’re assuming goodwill on the part of everybody, that they’re going to do their homework the best they can, but they’re fairly new to a lot of the dynamics here, but they want to understand how they should cover climate as it relates to this election, especially now, this election today with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the US. Let’s talk about the US just for a second and then we’ll expand it out. But what advice do you all have to them about how do we get into this? And again, it’s frustrating for folks, it’s frustrating for the activist community. They’re going to say, “Where have you been?” But this is the way it’s happening today.

Bill McKibben: Well, I’ll jump in here. I think it’s a fascinating moment. I think it’s ironically a kind of hard one for journalists to cover, because it’s so unbelievably one-sided. Trump alone among world leaders, he’s the last, he and Vance are the last people left standing saying, “Climate change isn’t real. We don’t have to worry about it.” They’re the last leaders anywhere in the world saying, “We don’t want anything to do with renewable energy.” So the kind of level of insanity and buffoonishness that represents, ironically makes it more difficult to cover, because you end up feeling like you’re being one-sided here. But it is really important to cover, because the polling data shows that there’s no issue on which the gap between, if you ask people on all the issues, who do you feel more comfortable with, Trump or Harris on immigration, on the economy or whatever?

The biggest advantage for Harris is on climate and the environment. Everybody in the country who’s sentient has picked up on the fact that this is an area of huge divergence that should be covered. And as I say, covering it without mockery is a little hard, because one of these guys is like, “Windmills cause cancer. I’m going to stop wind on day one.” And he has said, “If the oil industry gives me,” in his Austin Powers moment, “a billion dollars, then they can have anything they want.”

So exactly how you cover that without sounding like you’re in the tank is, that gets a little hard, but that’s not a reason not to cover it. This is going to be the single defining issue for the next four years, whoever’s President’s going to have to deal with this more than any other thing, because it’s now happening in real time. And what happens in the next four years, this may be, the science would give us to believe the last Presidential term that’s going to have a real hope of affecting how high the temperature gets. So there couldn’t be anything more important, it seems to me.

Kyle Pope: Did either of you see, because we’ve been in this extraordinary year where there’s so many elections all around the world, where such a large percentage of the world’s population is eligible to vote. Did you see places where you were impressed by the level of climate conversation in the election conversation? Anything stick out?

Bill McKibben: I was impressed that the environmental movement in France figured out how quickly to jump in and sort of as a part of a broad coalition. And there were some really interesting players there, Laurence Tubiana, people like that. And so far we’re seeing the same thing happen here. We had a big call last week of climate leaders. There’s a letter out today from 350 climate leaders around the country backing Harris. And so, I think if nothing else, it’s going to be important for journalists to get across the idea that anyone who cares anything about the climate future has, as far as this is not like the olden days, when there used to be Republicans who had a different set of ideas about how we might solve the… In the MAGA world, there’s none of that. Climate change isn’t real, it doesn’t exist. Renewable energy is a scam designed to, I don’t know what, take away your new pickup truck. And so, on more than almost any single issue except perhaps election denial, this is a sharp, sharp, sharp divergence.

Kyle Pope: Let me get to some of these questions, because we have a ton. Also, you all should look in the chat. Everybody, we’re putting links to some of the stuff that’s coming up, so it’s all there for you. So this is a good question. It’s based on this idea that is prevalent, that the problem with climate news that it’s too depressing and people are looking for kind of good news, or positive news, or solutions. So the question is, are good news stories shared more widely in social media? And so, is there a good news angle to covering activism?

Keerti Gopal: I mean, I think this is such, we were talking about this, Kyle, we were talking about this kind of idea that we need to be covering positive stories or good news, and it’s obviously really tough in climate to feel like there is good news sometimes, but I actually think that activism is the good news story. I think that that is more inspiring to see mass mobilization, or to see these kind of movement spaces and bringing out hope within themselves. And I think I feel more hopeful when I’m spending time in those spaces.

And so, I think that kind of is the positive stories. Look at how this activism is growing and inspiring people. And yeah, I was writing, I wrote a story yesterday about the Sunrise movement. They did two actions yesterday, so they went to JD Vance’s office in the morning in DC and were trying to spotlight his ties to the oil industry through donors, and then they went to the DNC in the afternoon or in the late morning to make a plea with Harris to put climate as a priority on the agenda. And there was a lot of excitement and hope in that action. There was a lot of enthusiasm from people who I’ve been speaking to for months, who have not felt enthusiastic about this election at all. And so, I think there is maybe some kind of angle there of you’re seeing some kind of engagement and enthusiasm that is coming from these movement spaces.

Bill McKibben: Amen. The two things that have gotten people in my experience really happy and excited in recent years are, A, the rise of the youth climate movement, which made everybody very happy or lots of people very happy. Greta didn’t become one of the most recognizable people on earth for no reason. It was because captured people’s imagination. And I got to say in a lower key way, watching the rise of this elder climate movement in the last couple of years has made people really happy too. We shut down a bunch of banks across the country a year ago with hundreds and hundreds of old people in rocking chairs. We found every rocking chair we could and we went and sat in them, and there were stories all over the next day about the rocking chair rebellion that was underway and things, and people love it and continue to love it.

I also think, and this is a place where I think activists have not done as good a job. We’re on the cusp of the most interesting thing that ever happened, which is the rapid, rapid replacement of combustion on planet earth, with power from the sun and wind. And this is the great economic story of our time and the outcome of it, how fast it happens will determine how high the temperature on this earth gets. And I don’t think activists probably have done its good a job of celebrating the milestones along that way as we could have, and I hope we can do more, because I think that’s a tremendous story.

I mean, I wrote a piece a few weeks ago for the New Yorker about the fact that California, this spring and summer has for the first time ever been producing more than a hundred percent of its electricity from renewable resources for many hours each day. And at night it now has enough batteries on the grid that becomes the biggest source of supply. That’s the fifth-largest economy in the world and arguably the most modern. And that’s a story that’s largely gone unreported and unnoticed, and partly that’s just on reporters who aren’t doing a good job of noticing. And partly it’s on activists who aren’t doing a good enough job of saying, “This is a remarkable thing and it’s the thing that we have to share far and wide just as fast as we can.”

Kyle Pope: Both the piece mentioned by Keerti on the protest at JD Vance’s house and the thing that Bill just mentioned, they’re both in the chat links to that. So if you want to take a look. Another good question here. The person notes that while it’s great that Keerti and Bill are devoted to this beat, there’s a very small number of people, there’s a very small number of dedicated climate reporters in newsrooms around the world. Is that the editors are just failing to understand the issue and elevate it, or is there a problem communicating what the audience is, or how do you diagnose the fact that we are where we are with this existential crisis, and journalism still hasn’t really upped its game substantially? I mean, by the way, taking Bill’s point that there’s a lot of great journalism going on around climate, but if you look at resources that newsrooms are devoting to this story, it’s still not there. Either of you.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear what Bill thinks about this too, but I think resources is the main problem. And I was at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference this year. I’m sure a lot of people on this call were as well. And so many people there were just talking about how they are the one environment reporter at their whole newsroom, and so they have to cover everything to do with the environment. And so, activism is just one piece of that, and they have a hard time maybe covering that with everything else. And we’re really, really lucky at ICN, that we’re all climate reporters and we all have a beat within climate, and it still feels like there’s a million things I can’t cover for every one story that I do. So I think it is a resources problem. There’s a resource problem in journalism in general.

And then, I think there is a lack of allocation of resources to climate and environment, and I think practically for reporters who are maybe at a newsroom where you don’t have the resources to devote yourself to a climate beat or to an activism beat, just honestly, activists are great sources for all your climate environment stories. So, they know what’s going on, they know the nuts and bolts of what’s going on on the ground. The LNG example that Bill brought up is a great example, where these are the people who knew this was going on for a long time before other sources may be caught up. So I think if you can’t devote as much time to covering movements on their own, trying to just embed that in the rest of your coverage can also be really helpful.

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. There’s a deep problem of course around journalism and its collapse in general. And there’s also a structural problem for journalism in covering climate, which is that it moves 10% too slowly for the ways that we cover news. In geological terms, we’re moving at absolutely lightning speed. The earth has never changed faster than it’s changing now, and it’s now reaching the point where it’s more or less happening in real time that we can cover. I mean, last week we had the hottest day ever recorded on planet Earth, and then the next day we had that record broken, and people were able to write those stories and get them out there. Truthfully, I have no idea why they weren’t the biggest story in the paper, or right next to Kamala Harris, which actually is a pretty big and unexpected news story too. So granted, but Keerti’s right, given the resource constraints under which people operate, understand that activists are really useful sources of information. The kind of corporate and government sources of information that we tend to rely on as journalists are unlikely to bring you really important new angles on things.

Their job really is to damp down, tamp down the pressure for change, to slow down and moderate those pressures, to pretend that things are more or less okay, and so on and so forth. The interesting voices are often the ones that you’re hearing from the outside, from movements. So cultivate some reliable sources. Yes, look, one of the things that makes it difficult for journalists is that some percentage of people who end up engaging in activism are nutty, and that’s just has always been, will always be, and easy to caricature, and so on and so forth. But that’s a lazy way of approaching this. Most of them are not only in it for the right reasons, they tend to be really valuable sources of information about things you don’t know about yet, and likely to be on the cutting edge.

Kyle Pope: A good question here that has to do with the sort of clash between activism and jobs. This is from a journalist from Karachi, who notes that in Pakistan, that government keeps promoting the use of coal with advertisements highlighting the developmental aspects of expanding coal in the country’s most underdeveloped regions. As a journalist, the way local activists have protested against such developmental projects by the government and big corporations is fascinating me, but I find it challenging to report as someone who’s based in Karachi. If you have a thought on that.

Bill McKibben: Well, look, I mean it’s a completely fascinating story. It’s very clear that in most of the world, in all of the world, renewable energy is a better source of jobs than fossil energy. And that’s simple to understand. It’s labor-intensive. Fossil energy is capital intensive and takes, but it doesn’t really require many people to get it up and going. If I were in Pakistan, of course the other part of this story, if I was seriously, if government officials were seriously asserting that this was a developmental boost to the country. I mean, Pakistan has suffered more and more severe climate damage than probably any country on earth over the last decade. Its development has been held back overwhelmingly by the cost of having to deal with floods on a scale that we have not seen since Noah. Nobody has suffered flooding like Pakistan has suffered. And so, I think it’s important to challenge officials in Karachi about what the hell they mean by development at this point, and how they think climate change fits in with that.

Keerti Gopal: Yeah, I would love to hear more if possible. What are the challenges? I mean, I can imagine so many challenges with reporting the story, and I think it’s a great story as Bill said, whether it’s challenges with getting to the physical location, or challenges with information, or if activists are facing repression. I can imagine there’s a lot of challenges, but it definitely seems like it’s worthwhile to get into if you’re able to.

Kyle Pope: So I’ll put my email in the chat and if the questioner wants, and I can direct further questions to the panelists afterwards. Interesting question here. We’ve only got a little bit more time. Let me get it, one more second. It says, “Does the panel here agree that since Greta has started to speak out more on climate justice issues, that she’s received less press attention, and why might that be?”

Keerti Gopal: It’s true. Yeah. I think that’s been an interesting, I think even specifically as she’s been speaking up more about Palestine, that’s had an impact on her popularity within the climate movement in Europe and also in her media attention. And I think that that gets to something that we see here as well, where there’s this kind of misunderstanding that the climate movement would be its own thing and that climate activists are purely environmental activists, purely climate activists and not involved in other causes, or not involved in other movements. And I think that that increasingly has not been true, as we’ve seen climate justice take more of a central focus in the climate movement. There was a great story actually about Greta, I think it was in Politico a few years ago, that was kind of talking about her evolution with her own view of climate justice and how she kind of shifted her focus there.

So there has been some coverage of that. But I do think that kind of noticing that she did start to exit the media a little bit or wasn’t as prominent in the media is a good flag to see maybe the media bias around what constitutes a climate activist. And I’ve definitely seen that here too, with coverage of climate groups here, Sunrise is one example, that shifted focus or included Palestine as part of their focus, and then got some pushback for that, or were seen as exiting the climate movement. I think that’s somewhat of a misunderstanding of where the movement is coming from, because I think a lot of these activists are engaged in kind of an intersectional approach to organizing or to these movements.

Bill McKibben: I think that’s right. I think the other thing to be said about Greta Thunberg, because she’s such a singular character, is that she made a very deep and powerful choice to try and take the spotlight off herself to a large degree, and point it at others. And I think that that’s a rare thing to have happened. It’s a wonderful example to everyone else, and we were extremely lucky that the one rock star that the climate movement has ever really produced turned out not to be a rockstar in quite the sort of normal way.

It wasn’t about her, and I am confident that partly because of that, she’ll have a long and useful life doing important work, but I think it shouldn’t be, we just shouldn’t pass over the fact that she did a very honorable thing in making a very conscious attempt to spin the spotlight around and put it on a lot of other people too. We’re very lucky in the fact that she emerged and the fact that she is who she is. I got to say, my happiest thing I got to do last year was write her a long letter congratulating her on her graduation from high school. I mean, think about that for a minute, and then…

Keerti Gopal: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And I think also that is also a media instinct to try to find a specific person, or a hero, or just one. And that’s obviously helpful in storytelling to have a character that your audience can be reading about, but that isn’t really how these movements necessarily work organically.

Bill McKibben: And it was one of the most important moments in all of that, was when the AP cropped Vanessa Nakate out of that picture of Greta and her at Davos, and that was enough to sort of begin to make people understand that there were some limitations, just as Keerti is describing. There’s no getting around the conundrum that you need to be able to have leaders that people can recognize, respond to, trust. That’s an important part of any movement, but those leaders have to be able to understand that it’s not about them, and that their role is to help put the spotlight on as many parts and people as it’s possible to do.

Kyle Pope: We have almost reached our hour here. This has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate both of you. As I said at the beginning, I think it’s incredibly critical that we really try to get all these sides talking to one another, especially as we enter this part of a Presidential campaign in the United States. I want to make two plugs before we go, Covering Climate Now related. One is, I mentioned at the beginning of these conversations that we’ve been having with local TV stations around the country, training programs. It’s called The Climate Station, and it is available to any local TV station that wants it.

We’ve worked with hundreds of journalists in every region of the country. We would love to work with you. You can get more information on our website. We’ll put some in the chat. Also, directly as it relates to politics and climate, Covering Climate Now will be doing a virtual summit in September, September 17, 18, 19. Really, it’s aimed at campaign and politics reporters, and to help them understand the climate issues that will be at play in this election. So, keep a lookout for that. Again, it’s on Zoom. Everybody’s welcome. Everything we do is free. We really appreciate your involvement and your support. Thanks again to our two amazing colleagues for their insights, and we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you so much.

Keerti Gopal: Thank you.