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Guest column by David Schechter of WFAA-TV
When you’re a local journalist, like me, you become a collector of useful tidbits. A keeper of facts about your community. After a while, you end up knowing a little about a lot. Because of that, when big news happens, local reporters can quickly make sense of what’s happening.
But unlike the coverage of breaking news—which we do with ease—providing context for the big, ongoing stories of our time can give us heartburn. That’s particularly true with climate change.
That’s why I’m collaborating with Covering Climate Now, a consortium of more than 460 news outlets committed to better coverage of the climate story. Covering Climate Now promotes best practices and organizes workshops where reporters can learn to fold climate change into their daily beats. With a little training, I’ve found, it’s possible to see how climate change intersects with important local issues like commercial development, public health, and transportation.
New From CCNow
Talking Shop, February 25. Want to boost your news team’s climate chops but unsure where to start? Our next Talking Shop webinar is designed to get journalists on every beat up to speed. We’ll offer basics on the science, politics, and economics of climate change, as well as ideas for how to tell human-centered stories that will engage audiences. We’ll flag common mistakes to avoid and best practices to emulate. And we’ll highlight lessons from media coverage of another all-encompassing emergency, the Covid-19 pandemic. The webinar is set for February 25 at 12pm Eastern time. Check out the panelists and RSVP here…
April Joint Coverage Week. Per our announcement last week, CCNow’s next joint coverage week is set for April 12-22, in the lead up to Earth Day and President Biden’s scheduled international climate summit. The theme is “Living Through The Climate Emergency.” In addition to reporting the science that calls today’s circumstances a climate emergency, we encourage partners to run human-centered climate stories drawn from every beat in the newsroom. To help newsrooms and reporters prepare, we’ve created a new reporting guide, which unpacks what we mean when we say that climate is a story for every beat. Stay tuned for more details!
Some of the Week’s Essential Climate Coverage
- A record cold snap this weekend covered much of the United States in snow and ice. In Texas, especially, plunging temperatures and storms left more than 4 million homes without power and many without cell coverage. The PBS NewsHour spoke with Dev Niyogi, a geosciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who said the “extent and severity” of the storms were a harbinger for climate change. Niyogi rejected simple arguments that dismissed the climate connection on grounds that “global warming” is making winters more mild. In fact, he explained, climate change is expected to bring “wide swings” in temperatures and weather patterns — the very swings that would result in unprecedented weather like this.
- Proponents of the fossil fuel industry seized on the outages in Texas to denigrate renewable energy, but the facts say differently. “The less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them,” one Wall Street Journal editorial read, claiming that the presence of solar and wind power in Texas’s grid made it unreliable. But in fact power plants relying on coal and natural gas also struggled in Texas, partly because, as Earther describes, the state’s grid was designed to withstand heat, not unprecedented cold. To make matters worse, CNN explains, Texas has chosen to isolate its grid from the rest of the country, meaning it couldn’t import electricity from other locations, like every other state would do in this situation. The scapegoating of wind is “a red Herring,” one expert told CNN.
- Bill Gates is making headlines with his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast a segment with the Microsoft founder, who stressed technological innovation and global cooperation as the keys to solving what he calls “the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced.” Yet there are problems with Gates’s book, according to Bill McKibben writing in The New York Times. For one, Gates’s understanding of green energy and other climate solutions is “surprisingly behind the curve.” Gates moreover is weak on the political dimensions of the climate challenge – and ignores his fraught influence as a billionaire who both calls for government action and writes campaign checks to avowed climate deniers. “The exhaust plume from his airplane won’t make or break the planet’s temperature,” McKibben writes, “but given his resources and political reach, the quality of his analysis just might.”
- CCNow partnerTeen Vogue has released in book form some of its best climate coverage of recent years. No Planet B: A Teen Vogue Guide to the Climate Crisis compiles 28 pieces on a range of climate-related topics, especially activism, intersectionality, and climate justice.
- “The roots of systemic racism run so stubbornly deep in the US … that global heating harms Black and Latino children before they are even born,” Oliver Milman writes for The Guardian. According to new research from the University of Texas, climate effects, especially heat, result disproportionately in adverse pregnancy outcomes for women of color — and then afflict children throughout their development.“This heat disparity between poor, Black neighborhoods and rich, white ones is no accident,” Milman writes, but the result of decades of racist housing and environmental policies.
Republication Recommendations
The following stories deserve special attention and consideration for republication and/or rebroadcast by CCNow partners:
- Coal’s Cautionary Tale for New Mexico’s Economy | Capital & Main
- How a public uprising caused a province built on fossil fuels to reverse course on coal mining | The Narwhal (Canada)
For partners, to submit stories for sharing, please use this Google Form. As always, instructions for republishing and the full list of stories available for republication can be found in our Sharing Library.