Mary Annaïse Heglar

[00:00:13] Welcome to Hot Take, where we talk about talking about climate is very matter. You're gonna love it. I'm Mary Annaise Heglar.

[00:00:21] And I'm Amy Westervelt. In this podcast. We're going to take an intersectional crack at media criticism for the climate era because it is the story of our time.

[00:00:30] Right. But we felt first there's a lot of base setting to do because we don't really give ourselves enough time to think about it. But climate storytelling has changed dramatically in the past few years.

[00:00:42] It really has, especially in the Trump era. So our next couple of episodes are going to take a look back at 2016 to 2019 in review. I've been going back and reading some of those articles and it's fascinating how much has changed in just a couple of years. So I can't wait to talk about it.

[00:00:58] Well, I can wait because I have a lot of reading to catch up on. But I'm excited, too.

[00:01:04] On this episode, though, we wanted to take a minute to talk through our own work. So Amy and I are friends now, but we met a few months ago as fans of each other, actually.

[00:01:13] That's right. So we thought we'd just do an episode where we fangirl out on each other and, you know, get that out of the way. Yeah. And we kind of I would be a good way for ya'll to get to know us to.

[00:01:33] Amy, how about we start with you, since you've been doing this for quite a while. I saw you recently say on Twitter that, you know, you've been hearing a lot of people say like, wow. Amy, you're suddenly everywhere in in the climate space and you just got started writing recently. And how much that bugs you because you've really been doing this for like, OK, more than a decade.

[00:01:57] Yeah, yeah, I know. It's funny. I think, you know, if you're a freelancer, you sort of end up writing about everything. But the thing that I've written about the longest and most consistently is actually climate. And I've been writing about it for maybe 16, 17 years now. Well, yeah. But then I had sort of like a little break in the middle, which is that was sort of what I got into that thread. Was that like, you know, I didn't actually come from nowhere. I, you know, started a long time ago, but then had various sort of career diversions foisted upon me by the caregiving roles that are often assigned to women in our society. And so I ended up taking, you know, three or four years out, which is like an eternity in media years. It's like if you come back after four years, it's like you basically are just starting over. So there's this weird thing that happens there.

[00:02:57] And that's another thing that you write about as well. That's another theme of your writing.

[00:03:04] That's true. Yeah. I do write about American ideas about motherhood and how those ideas impact women, whether they have kids or not. So how those ideas kind of shape everything from societal expectations of women to workplace policies, health insurance policies. There's a bunch of ways that, like our weird ideas about family and motherhood in particular, sort of infiltrate everyone's life, whether they choose to have kids. Right.

[00:03:35] So that reminds me of a piece that you wrote, I believe it was in The Guardian. Of course, U.S. birth rates are falling from May of 2018.

[00:03:48] I have a passage and I'd love it if you could read it.

[00:03:51] Yeah, totally. My big claim to fame here is that Bernie Sanders shared this story across all of his social media.

[00:04:05] Feeling the Bern. OK, so the story was called, Of course, U.S. birth rates are falling. This is a harsh place to have a family.

[00:04:13] And this story makes that very clear!

[00:04:20] In the midst of the harsh economic reality, facing parents and would be parents in America is a looming physical threat, climate change. As the president and his EPA head parrot talking points from the fossil fuel industry, pointing to volcanoes and natural temperature cycles as the culprits for warming temperatures. The global scientific community tells us that we have essentially run out of time to do anything about it, that any children we have will be at a higher risk of dying in a superstorm or a massive fire. That because a small handful of men decided that their own profits and comfort were more important than the rest of the world's safety. Any new humans that join the world will face greater challenges than the generations that came before. A few months ago, Paul Ryan asked Americans to have more children and said he had, quote, done his part by fathering three. I would argue that his part is creating an America that's truly family friendly and he hasn't done it at all.

[00:05:17] Very true. Suck it, Paul Ryan!

[00:05:20] (laughing) No, but it's also just so well-written.

[00:05:25] Like, I just I mean, for the bigger piece. Write us about all of these reasons. U.S. birth rates are probably like housing crises, unemployment or underemployment, the gig economy. But you ended it with the problem of all problems being climate change. And yeah, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how this piece came to be.

[00:05:49] It kind of came out of the research that I did for my book, which came out last year, which was about all of this motherhood stuff. And I you know, I I really what happened was I was seeing all of these pundits on social media kind of wringing their hands about the falling birth rate. And then I had also gone back and forth on Twitter with this guy who claimed to be just like an objective, you know, sociology researcher just looking at the data. And he had somehow. Yeah, he had like somehow gotten a piece in The New York Times, not in their op ed section, but in There, like regular newspaper section where he claimed that the following. He basically claimed that the falling birth rate was due to like women being selfish and like modern women were suing like careers and family and like shirking their reproductive duties like it was insane.

[00:06:43] And I was like, how did this get printed in the newspaper?

[00:06:47] And so I kind of went back and forth with him for a while to see what what exactly was the data that he had gathered and whether he had looked at like, you know, wealth inequality or stagnant wages or the impacts of climate change on all of these things. And of course, the answer was no. So that was kind of like the genesis of this piece. I was just like, I'm mad, you know? Yeah, like most of my pieces.

[00:07:16] Yeah. I think some of the best pieces come out of angry writing.

[00:07:27] Like, if I'm honest, the vast majority of my pieces that like are the most lovey dovey-- I think I talked about this a little bit on Drilled-- like the ones that are the most like woo woo and hippy start out angry.

[00:07:39] You did! You totally talked about that. Actually I thought that was so interesting that you said that like you will sort of start out with the angry version and then be like OK, is this might not be productive. Maybe I should soften this approach a little bit.

[00:07:59] Okay. Actually, that makes me want to have you read from one of your pieces that came out in the last couple years.

[00:08:07] And this is let's see if you pick one of the ones that actually started angry.

[00:08:12] Well, I think you talk about anger in this and how and how sort of like productive it can be. So this one is called the big lie, we're told about climate change is that it's our own fault. And it appeared on VOX. And I have a little excerpt from here for you to read. You're talking a little bit about when you first started to read a lot of studies about climate change and got really involved in the movement and kind of experienced your first brush with climate grief.

[00:08:46] And actually, this is one of the ones that started very angry.

[00:08:56] Yes! You talked about this on Drilled where you said that it started out you started out being like mad that people kind of read the recent CCC report and that they just realized that this was a serious problem. And then you realize that like getting mad at people for being slow to realize was probably not great, or telling them to like grow up.

[00:09:17] Right. Yeah. That was originally the title in my head set.

[00:09:27] I came to the organization as an editor, not as an environmentalist. I cared about the Earth. Of course, I knew climate change was real. I knew it was dire. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I did know just how bad it was. I didn't know how many innocent, and I mean, innocent people were already suffering hideously. I didn't know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties simply because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances. Right. At that very moment, I knew I would see bad things in my lifetime, but I didn't know I would see them before 50. Nor did I realize how many of them I'd actually already seen. I was in both Sandy and Katrina. After all, I didn't know it then, but I went into mourning. I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears, and I refused to admit to myself that I knew exactly why I was crying. Where other people saw bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. Even as I walked on dry land, I saw floods. I imagined wild animals, especially snakes getting out of the zoos in the aftermath of natural disasters. I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. I still doubt that, actually. I kept editing, but I tried to dissociated as ridiculous as it sounds. It didn't work either. The craft of editing demands empathy. You have to be present. Then I went into depression. My social life turned into fits and spurts of intense engagement, followed by equally intense withdrawal. I was deeply afraid of telling even the people closest to me what I knew and why I was so scared. I couldn't sleep. The crying fits continued. They didn't become more predictable.

[00:11:23] I have to say, when I was reading this, it just felt so familiar and so like. That's how I felt.

[00:11:30] And like I said, I feel like I still cycle through that sometimes because it's...

[00:11:36] You go on in this essay to talk about how Wen Stevenson's book, What We're Fighting For Now Is Each Other, helped to pull you out of that depression. Can you talk about that book a bit and and how it got you from like, you know, kind of despair and shock to righteous anger?

[00:11:55] Mm hmm. [00:11:56]So there is a quote from James Baldwin that I love where he says, you think you're alone until you read and then you find out just how big the world is. And I think reading that book, which I highly recommend, is it sort of showed me that I wasn't crazy. [21.7s] So like the opening the introduction to it is really beautifully written. I'm gonna start reading now:.

[00:12:24] The question now is not whether we're going to stop global warming or solve the climate crisis. It is whether humanity will act quickly and decisively enough to salvage civilization itself in any form worth salvaging. Whether any kind of stable, humane and just future, any kind of just society is still possible. We know that if the governments of the world actually want it to address the situation in a serious way, they could finally acting as though we accept what the science is telling us. And as though we actually care for our fellow human beings. But isn't that a bit extreme? Really extreme business as usual is extreme. Just ask climate scientists. The building is burning the innocence. The poor or the oppressed? The children, your own children are inside. And the American petro state, which under the all of the above energy policies has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil and gas on the planet. It is spraying fuel, not water, on the flames. That's more than extreme. It's homicidal, is psychopathic, is fucking insane.

[00:13:32] That's great. Yeah, it IS psychopathic.

[00:13:37] Yeah. Yes. So during my experience, like first coming to terms with this, you kind of feel like you're crazy because everybody around you is just acting like this is normal.

[00:13:55] You know, and I I came to the Green Movement and in earnest in 2014 and 2015 was the Paris agreement. My first year it was like sort of like that year shock. And 2015 was my year of like, oh, coming back to life around it all. And that is right during Paris, while everybody was, you know, over there. That's when I was reading this book. And I remember like watching. All the preparations for the Paris Accord being like, wait a minute, but we're already too late, like that was when I found out that we had already warmed. That wasn't clear to me before.

[00:14:36] Well, yeah, because I mean, I feel like honestly, before that most recent IPCC report. And like and David Wallace Wells story in New York magazine, scientists just were they had a it was kind of a weird, like closed ranks thing where it was like, we know this, but let's not tell anyone...

[00:14:58] Exactly. Exactly. It was such a weird experience.

[00:15:03] And when I would like finally. So after I read that book, that was when I started to be like, oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not right. I'm not crazy. When I should talk to someone about this run and reached out to a couple of other people that, you know, we're doing similar work and it was like, no, I'm scared to death, too. And that sort of gave me a sense of security. It leaves her like a some sort of reassurance. Yeah. It didn't fix the problem, but it was like, at least now I have someone I can talk to and I know that I'm not alone.

[00:15:39] Yeah. And that really helped me. And that was what I was trying to do with this piece.

[00:15:45] And I was like I was saying before, like we were saying a minute ago that I didn't write this in the wake of the IPCC report of 2008 18, the one that I had way more alarmist language than I believe any other IPCC report. Right. Yeah.

[00:16:04] Which is probably evidenced by the fact it's the first one I had ever heard of.

[00:16:09] And I think most people. And it's I just sort of felt like everybody was collectively in mourning and I felt like, you know, my first reaction was really frustrated. And I wanted to be like grow the fuck up. We've been trying to tell you this for ever. Like, yeah. Blah. And then I thought about my own coming to terms with it and I remembered the book that helped me come out of it. And this book did not approach me in that way. Like Wen's approach wasn't Grow the fuck up, you big baby. It was more like, no, you're right. The way you feel is right. And you probably haven't acted on it because everybody else is acting like, you know, let's just go along to get along.

[00:16:54] And so. I decided that the best way to actually get someone to grow up, which is my goal, right. I do think we have to grow up as a society to deal with this problem. Yeah. The best way to do that is to give them a road map. And the best road map I can give anyone is my own experience.

[00:17:16] I mean, that's a good point to cause Wen, you know, has been writing about and knowing about climate for like, yeah, I mean 20 plus years, so he definitely could have been like, yeah, guys we tried to tell you, but he didn't take it at all. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk to you. I think we should talk a little bit about anger because I know you and I both like to write a little hot

[00:17:46] I mean, you wrote the anger essay of two thousand and nineteen and I had to stop myself from asking you to read the entire thing and like videotape yourself acting it out.

[00:18:02] But I do have a generous excerpt. I'd love for you to read.

[00:18:11] Okay. So this was called the case for Climate Rage.

[00:18:17] And I feel like I had started working on this, like I had started working on it like months before it came out, because I just kept I kept having these experiences over and over again with specifically men in the climate movement where they would sort of like dismiss how I was feeling, especially if I was angry, like they. There was a really like consistent response of like, you know, like calm down, be practical. Yeah. You know, like this isn't going to help us. Why are you trying to point the finger at people that's unproductive? All of that. Like, I was like hearing these messages over and over again. And it kind of just reminded me of like experiences that I've had in the climate movement all along with like male editors and like, you know, like people that I'm on list serves with and all of that kind of stuff. And so I wanted to kind of combine it all together and also a little bit make the point that like, you know, people with different experiences than white men have different emotional reactions to climate change, and that is equally valid.

[00:19:34] Oh, yeah, yeah. So they were against pointing the finger. Meanwhile, you know, we see this in so much climate writing. It's all about we.

[00:19:45] You know, like we did this. And it's very much an all that is pointing a giant finger.

[00:19:51] Exactly. Well, and it's it's in this way that it's like, oh, if we if we can if we can make it a collective responsibility, then we don't have to look at the fact that the people, the very specific people who had a much bigger hand in this look just like us.

[00:20:07] Yeah. You get into that in the in that excerpt. Yeah.

[00:20:12] Yeah. Okay. So here I'll read from this case for Climate Rage. I think there have always been a lot of women covering environmental stories, but the breakout stars, the loudest voices have tended to be those of white men. More recently, there, specifically literary white men for whom climate change is the ultimate epic saga in which all of humanity is both villain and hero. We had a chance to act on climate. Decades ago and blew it. The story goes. And now we must rise to the challenge and save humanity. If we don't. And we're unlikely to. We only have ourselves to blame. These dominant voices are agreed that climate change stories can be serious. Sad, occasionally. Funny or hopeful? Always smart and knowledgeable. More recently, a bit alarmist, but never too emotional and especially not angry. For about two decades now, white male environmentalists and journalists have been telling me and other environmentalists and reporters who look like me, and especially those who are browner than me, that we doesn't quite include us or our anger. It is unseemly and certainly on intellectual to react this way. So is imagining a vastly different future that goes beyond technological solutions or new energy sources and fingerpointing, quote, playing the blame game. That is certainly not on the appropriate response is bemused detachment and plenty of charts followed by a book tour. But when women like my colleague's point the finger, it is not at one company or even one industry. The oil, coal and automotive industries all play a role. The utilities to the PR flacks and lobbyists who carry out their vision, the politicians who cave. It's a lot of people, but it's not all people. It's not humanity. The story of, quote, us consuming our way to oblivion with the oil companies innocently fulfilling our insatiable greed for fuel is just a lie. What does it matter who's at fault? We all need to come together to solve it. Shout men who look just like the men who are most to blame. Men who will suffer. Last and least it matters because the same patriarchal elites have remained comfortably in power for so long that their imaginations are unequal to the task we face. Arguments for civility, for forgiveness, for we're all in this together for a preservation of the status quo with just a few tweaks won't keep us all from going over the cliff.

[00:22:44] Mm hmm. I love that, so. I remember after you posted this, it was just like all over the Twitter machine. Can you talk a little bit about what the reception was like for you?

[00:22:59] Yeah, actually, I was kind of expecting to get a lot of angry emails from people.

[00:23:06] You know, I was like I was like sort of, you know, preparing myself for, you know, like trolls and anger.

[00:23:12] But actually, a lot of people were really supportive. And a lot of women in particular were like, yes, absolutely. And actually, quite a few white dudes were like, yeah, I've noticed this. And then, you know, the people the emails that I did get were mostly from men who who were really genuinely asking, like, how can I be a better ally, which I was like, really appreciative of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really I.

[00:23:41] Those are my favorite climate guys.

[00:23:43] Yeah. But I do think that there's this thing that happens where a lot of us, like white men that I've talked to in the movement will sort of initially take this tack of. So what do you think? I should just not write about this? And it's weird to me that the choices are like I either have to dominate or not be involved at all. You know, like there's a huge middle there. And there's like many ways that you can both continue to say your piece and support other people, you know, expressing themselves, too.

[00:24:16] Yeah, [00:24:17]right! The climate movement It does not do good with nuance. It's funny. It's just so much black and white thinking. Right. It's either individual or collective action is either hope or complete and total despair. It's just we can never the pendulum just keeps going all over the place. [20.4s]

[00:24:38] Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a great segue into the next one I want you to read from, which I just loved this essay and especially this part of it where you talk about how like the "we must have hope" and "everything is doomed" things are basically like two sides of the same coin. So this one is called. Home Is Always Worth It. And this one also started out angry. It was like sort of an angry response to the Jonathan Franzen essay.

[00:25:09] It's a little bit that, you know, I think I kind of let the Twitter machine get me a little more worked up over that piece than I wanted it to be. And so, yeah, when I sat down to write it, I sort of like I reread his teeth and was like, actually, I see, you know, I kind of see where he's coming from. And I kind of see what what could send someone like this over domination of the whole narrative, how that can send someone all the way to the other side, because the hope narrative is just like so incredibly out of touch at this point that I do see how someone can go all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Yeah. And I did think that a lot of the stuff he was saying were like he describes like, you know, climate action can be like voting rights action. Right. And I totally and completely agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. And he was talking about how it's too late to stop climate change. And he's right. And I also started to see a lot of blowback for this is why fiction writer shouldn't write about climate. Like, OK, hold on there. Put that pony back in the barn, you can't both say that we need everybody in the climate movement--why aren't more people engaged on this?-- and be upset about that, and then when new people come and decide that they want to have not just a role but a speaking role and not just be an extra and take orders, right. Then, you know, tell them to get back in their lane like that's not cool. And I just thought that rage is not a good way to engage with those ideas, because I think people who have gone to this other side of the spectrum are in a lot of pain. Yeah, that is why I decided to take a more compassionate approach. So, OK, this is the part you want me to read.

[00:26:57] What we used to know as potential impacts of global warming now have proper names. Dorian You two add a campfire. Maria In our context now, Rosie, hopefulness feels downright sociopathic as these tragedies fade and blend into a continuum. The climate community's insistence on hope everlasting begins to sound anything but realistic. It becomes emotionally immature, a hurdle unto itself. Not to mention that in order to have this type of pope, you have to be able to explain the solutions that would justify it. And that favors a certain type of expertise and rages raises the price of admission to the climate conversation to an astonishing astronomical rate. We can't afford to keep all these gates and all these gatekeepers again. We don't have time. Granted, this reflexive ness is a byproduct of decades of relentless bad faith attacks from both industry and government. But the result is the same. It's exhausting, it's ineffective and it's alienating. Honestly, it's not terribly unlike the doom or narrative. Both are mansplaining paradises, both smack of the privilege, right from the deluded belief that this world has ever been perfect and that therefore an imperfect version of it is not worth saving or fighting for. Both represent two sides of an overprivileged pendulum swung too far, and the swing is so unnecessary. Given the abundant room in the middle room for all of us. In fact, the community that prides itself on scientific nuance can learn to embrace emotional nuance. It is absolutely possible to prepare for the disasters already terrifyingly upon us, while also doing our damnedest to quit baking more than we can acknowledge. The storm of emotions that comes with watching our world unravel. Process those emotions pick ourselves up to protect what we can. Because it's worth it. Because we're worth it. We don't have to be Pollyannish or fatalistic. We can just be human.

[00:29:03] I love it so much. It's so good. I love that when I read something that I feel like expresses what I've been thinking but unable to articulate. Yes. Yeah.

[00:29:16] Yeah. That's kind of like, you know, always the goal. Because I think we've never really talked about the emotions of climate change. At least not at a large scale. I think we just like there's so many things swirling around it that we don't know how to talk about. And it just feels like you're trying to grasp at the air. Yeah. It doesn't have a form. You can't fully see it because you can't describe it. But the interesting experience of writing this essay was, as I wrote the hope section I was like, why does this feel redundant?

[00:29:56] Like I got to, you know, like the editor in me sort of like, kicked in and I was like, you wrote this part already? Yeah. Why are you repeating yourself? And I scrolled up and was like, no, I didn't write this part.

[00:30:06] And then I reread what I wrote about the doom narrative and how that made me feel. And I looked at what I wrote for the hope one and was like, oh, they both make me feel the same thing. They're the same thing. They're two sides of the same coin. And that was when I completely changed the entire frame of the piece.

[00:30:21] The way you put it here is perfect, that it's the exact same kind of approach of like like sort of mansplaining. It's coming from this place of thinking that like things were perfect and that anything imperfect is like not worth fighting for.

[00:30:36] That's real good. Yeah. Okay. I feel like I want to have you read from the first essay of yours that I read, which was this Vox one that really just kind of debunks this whole, you know, individual responsibility narrative that we hear all the time and we see all these yelling fossil fuel ads like, you know, you need to get a handle on your carbon footprint or like you need to fly less or you need to go vegan.

[00:31:05] And I especially loved how you were very careful to make the point. And of course, this did not stop people who didn't actually read the essay from arguing with you. But I loved that you were careful to make the point that, you know, you're not saying that those actions are unnecessary or stupid or a waste of time or that people shouldn't do them or any of those things that just like they need to be combined with systemic action.

[00:31:37] Okay I have this excerpt for you to read.

[00:31:43] Once upon a time perhaps. We need a strong grasp of science to understand climate change.

[00:31:49] But now all we have to do is look at the date daily headlines or out of our windows from the campfire. A devastating California wildfire that was exacerbated by dry, hot weather to Hurricane Michael. A storm that rapidly intensified due to increased sea temperatures. Climate change is here.

[00:32:07] I don't blame anyone for wanting absolution. I can even understand abdication, which is its own form of absolution. But underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It's the narrative that is both driven and obstructed. The climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us. Climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout use, fewer plastic bags turned off some more lights, planted a few trees or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can't do the trick. What's the point? The belief that this enormous existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous. It's dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin, defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who can't or don't uphold this ethics. When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from just a handful of corporations aided and abetted by the world's most powerful governments, including the U.S., is victim blaming, plain and simple. When people come to me to confess their green sins as if I were some sort of eco nun, I want to tell them that they're carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry's crimes, that the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder, and that that blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom. But that doesn't mean we do nothing. Climate change is a vast and complicated problem. And that means that the answer is complicated, too. We need to let go of the idea that it's all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become Mini Davis against one big bad Goliath.

[00:34:00] Yes. Also, I love that you're. I love that you're like an eco nun that people confess their sins to (laughing)

Transcription

In this intro episode, Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt share their own approaches to climate storytelling and what they love most about each other's work.

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about talking about climate. We take a crack at intersectional justice oriented media criticism for climate coverage. I'm Amy Westervelt.

[00:00:21] Right. And I'm Mary Heglar. As we mentioned in our last episode, we're gearing up to going biweekly in 2020, but we're going to spend the rest of 2019 taking a look back at the past few years and how much climate storytelling has changed recently, because it really has. Right?

[00:00:38] Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember when you could barely even say climate change in a story.

[00:00:42] It's really true! And it's really changed a lot. Specifically in the Frump era. And we wanted to do a recap of the whole Frump era. But we'd be here forever. So we're gonna break it up a little.

[00:00:53] Yeah. We really would. In this episode, we're going to focus on 2016 and 2017 and next time we'll look across 2018 and review it and then we'll do an episode on 2019.

[00:01:04] Then it'll be 2020 and we'll be every two weeks! Try to think of these recap episodes as sort of snippets. We're humble enough to know that there's no way that we got our hands on all the great climate writing that's out there.

[00:01:16] Exactly. And if there's something we missed in 2016 and 2017 that you thought should have been discussed, please tweet at us, we're at realhottake and we're bound to miss some great stuff.

[00:01:27] That's right. Okay. Should we get started?

[00:01:56] I felt like a yearlong hangover.

[00:02:02] Yeah, actually, I in 2016, I found myself waking up with more existential dread than I do now.

[00:02:10] Yeah. Actually, climate is a big part of what has been very, very wrong with this presidency. But it like it. It was like barely even discussed in any of the debates. Not in the primary at all, like..

[00:02:27] Do you remember that debate? That was all about that one guy in that red sweater that was like undecided between Hillary and Donald Trump.

[00:02:36] And this is like a real late in the election. And everybody became obsessed with him. And it was like not one word about climate in these debates that I can recall. I do remember being like, really happy when Bernie Sanders brought it up. And one of the debates, it was like his opening statement. I was like, beautiful.

[00:02:55] I know. And even I feel like even the environmental reporters were not talking that much about what he would do to roll back any kind of regulations on the oil industry. You know, he he talked about withdrawing from Paris is like part of his one of his campaign promise.

[00:03:22] So, you know, really, I guess what's disturbing is that I see those exact same people now who are so dismissive and so smug in 2016 being just as dismissive and just as smug today. And so I'm like do you not learn?!

[00:03:39] I think the rule should be if you laughed more than you cried in 2016, you need to listen more than you talk in 2020, that is the fucking rule.

[00:03:50] That is a great rule! You know, kind of in keeping with our subject here, which is climate coverage, there was a huge shift in climate coverage from 2016 and 2017. And I think, yeah, you know, the election definitely played into it. And some of the pieces that we're going to talk about today certainly did too.

[00:04:12] Yeah. So when I was doing the research for this episode, I was struck by a lot of stuff. First of all, one of the things that really stuck out to me is that I was still seeing a lot of articles that were relying really heavily on the individual action frame, which now I don't feel like I see that as much anymore. It's far more widely accepted that we need collective action, that we need political action, that this is the fault of industries and corporations. But when I was looking for articles from 2016, that wasn't all them. What I was finding, I was finding a lot of like you should recycle and you should compost and you should like cut your carbon foot right in these different ways. And even the ways I was seeing for people to cut their carbon footprints were really like not even the biggest things you could do as individuals. I wasn't seeing as much about like stopping flying. It was more about like what you do as a consumer on the day to day level, which I found that really interesting.

[00:05:16] Yeah, yeah. It was still really like around just like buying different stuff, that's the key.

[00:05:24] Yeah, exactly. Because you're a consumer, not a citizen. But we know that that's wrong.

[00:05:29] I feel like some of the pieces in 2016 were like the ones that did talk about climate straight on and talked about, you know, and we're kind of some of amongst some of the earlier ones talking about the path that we are on and what that might look like. And all of those ones were like eerily prescient. I just.

[00:05:52] Yeah, yeah.  For example, ProPublica did this story on Houston's perfect storm and it pretty much predicts Hurricane Harvey

[00:06:02] Yeah, it's crazy. The little map that they have where they're like and then there's these chemical plants and if they get hit ...I was like oh my god, all of that happened, and not that long after that story came out!

[00:06:12] Exactly. They came out and were like, look at science, predicting the future in a very eerie way.

[00:06:21] I know another one that had that effect for me. I want to read a little bit from this by Jeff Goodell.

[00:06:28] And the title is Can New York be Saved in the era of global warming, which I highly recommend everybody going back to read.

[00:06:37] Oh, this gives me a chance to debut our new Sound Effect for reading excerpts. Here it is. [wind chime]

[00:06:48] If it is going to survive fortifying New York will require more than just walls. It will require a radical rethinking of the relationship between the city and the people who live in it. If the central role of government is to keep people safe, what happens when people realize they are not? What is the government's role in keeping people out of harm's way? How does the government compensate people whose properties are underwater? The Dutch architect who led the team that designed the Blue Dunes and who has done as much thinking about how to live with water as anyone compare sea level rise to other transformative catastrophes such as the dustbowl, a partly manmade natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role that government plays in ensuring the long term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. We're going to need a new deal, he says. It's going to require a rethinking of the social construct contract in America.

[00:07:47] Does that remind you of anything happening right now? Anything at all?

[00:07:53] Yeah. So I thought that that piece super interesting.

[00:07:57] Another thing I was seeing when I was looking back was that we were just starting to put the pieces together around climate refugees. As it relates to, you know, these waves of migrants coming from Latin America and really all over the world. That was like I don't remember. I started seeing climate refugees as a term in 2017. I didn't see it so much in 2016 and in a lot of journalism. And again, might have missed some stuff.

[00:08:25] Well, it's interesting because climate refugees was a big thing in 2009 and then it totally disappeared. You know, there was this. There were all these stories about it in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit.

[00:08:41] There were all of these stories about the Maldives and about Tuvalu. And there were activists that were there, you know, like holding signs up about like art, like we're going to be underwater soon, you know.

[00:08:54] And then in the U.S., there was the indigenous village of Kivalina in Alaska. That actually was one of the first big lawsuits against fossil fuel companies because their village was disappearing because of glacier melt and sea level rise. And that was in 2009, 2010 ish. So there was like a bunch of stories around it. And that was also the first time you started hearing about climate reparations like that actually started to come up around Copenhagen. And then it just like totally disappeared within a year.

[00:09:28] The whole like, well, I ... think It was mostly because of the climate gate scandal. So I don't know if you remember.

[00:09:34] I don't remember. It's like one of those things that I keep seeing people mention and I don't know...

[00:09:43] OK. So this is it was it was wild because it was basically like a "hack" of a bunch of high level IPCC climate scientists. So climate scientists who were working on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its annual reports and like all of that stuff around 2008, 2009 and in in like the months leading up to the Copenhagen climate summit, which was in 2009, there were all these leaks of emails and they were totally like it was all like this completely manufactured scandal where it was like, you know, gotcha scientists like, you know, turns out They're still really uncertain about climate change and they're colluding to try to make it seem like they're more sure than they are.

[00:10:37] And, you know, kind of took like bits and pieces of people's emails and and cobbled them together to to create this non scandal. But it was enough. I mean, at that time, the we had Obama in office and Congress was in control of Democrats. And so it was the the first time in recent history, kind of since Kyoto, that there was a real chance that we might have like a binding global climate treaty. And so the fossil fuel guys were going frickin nuts, like the spending on ads and lobbying and all that stuff is just off the charts in the lead up to Copenhagen. And then here comes climate gate.

[00:11:21] And like honestly, it's totally one of those things where you're like, how did this work? Because it was so obviously bogus and it was clownish. But it worked. And it was it was like the thing that was it was actually like a really key kind of modern turning point on climate action where like it really seemed like something was going to happen. And there again, it's like there were a ton of youth activists. You know, this is why sometimes, too, now when people are like, oh, if we just get Democrats in charge, it'll be fine. I'm like, well, history says no.

[00:11:53] Yeah. I think it's also like why we see people on the .... Well I wouldn't call it the far left like people who want to preserve the plant aren't far anything. BUT  you see a lot of folks in the environmental space, in the climate space, looking at candidates for office really hard. And I think there's a lot of for lack of a better term trauma or I like broken promises. Some people who have really like that, they were gonna get somewhere at some point and then finding out that they're absolutely not getting somewhere. And it's just really hard to believe in political power.

[00:12:36] Yeah. There's some baggage there.

[00:12:37] In case you hear some hissing in the background, I have a very old apartment with a very old heater, which means I'm very lucky to have heat, but I can't control this thing.

[00:12:55] (laughing) But yeah, another one of the trends that I saw in the research for this show that actually kind of cracked me up in a very sad way was all of these people still thinking that Donald Trump might become presidential?

[00:13:11] Oh right, like he was going to rise to the occasion.

[00:13:14] Remember Van Jones, and that whole like the night he became president.

[00:13:18] Oh, I still have. Oh, my God. I have not gotten over that yet. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:22] But I think this put a lot in the in the articles about the cop that here the COP of 2016, which was held in Morocco.

[00:13:32] [record scratch noise] COP is short for conference of parties. It is the decision making body responsible for monitoring and reviewing the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But when people say things like, you know, the COP in Morocco or the COP in Copenhagen, they mostly refer to these global climate conventions where representatives from various countries are trying to come up with a global treaty. The COP has met annually since 1995. So that's how long people have been trying to get some sort of global agreement on climate policy. The Kyoto Protocol was the first agreement to come out of a COP that seemed like it could actually move the needle globally on climate change. It was torpedoed by the efforts of industry and various Republican groups. And George W. Bush pulled out of it officially in 2001. And the only one that has been drafted and actually stuck is the one that was written in Paris. And then, of course, the United States pulled out of it. [record scratch noise]

[00:14:43] I saw a lot of article saying like, oh, he might rise to the occasion.

[00:14:46] And then I was also seeing these articles that were saying that the U.S. was going to become a pariah state and that Donald Trump attitude toward the climate might turn out to be a good thing by motivating everyone else to take action. And we know how that turned out.

[00:15:04] But it just it almost seemed like people weren't even believing it when they were saying it. They just sort of had to find some silver lining, some way to find something. Yeah.

[00:15:15] Yes. Speaking of outrage, remember Scott Pruitt?

[00:15:18] Who? God Scot Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, Rick fucking Tillerson, Rex Tillerson. My what I will never, ever, ever forgive him for is making Rex Tillerson not that bad of a guy like I remembered there was one point where, like, he seemed like the adult in the room, like Rex Tillerson is going to save us. And I was like, what kind of gaslit-ass shit is this?

[00:15:49] Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Rex Tillerson, who's who's like most recent public appearance, was testifying in the Exxon fraud trial jury about the time that, you know, he was CEO of Exxon as they were like lying about climate change impacts. Yeah, I mean that guy. But then Scott Pruitt and his and his his secret phone booth. Oh my. Remember. Yeah. I don't remember if that came out Probably hadn't come out yet in 2016.

[00:16:23] No, it came out in 2017. Scott Pruitt was out of office the summer of 2017. He did not last long. All of this shit happened really, really fast and that's why we all have whiplash now. [**Correction: Pruitt resigned in 2018].

[00:16:40] I got to say that we started to see some real strides in climate storytelling from 2016 2017 and starting with the summer of 2016. There was this flurry of major climate coverage. It thought it seemed like what Donald Trump was elected. There was a rush to cover the subject and take a lot more seriously like I was seeing article after article after article and really big news organization. It was also a really big year for climate action. That's the year Amy Brady's first climate fiction column came out in the Chicago Review book. So I think that was a pretty big milestone.

[00:17:23] Yeah. Totally. That was huge because before that I feel like, you know, CliFi, climate fiction existed, but it was sort of like it was just it was kind of like a niche thing and honestly. OK. So there was one guy that pitched me on CliFi like years ago, like starting 10, 15 years ago. And he always just seemed like a little bit nutty. So I feel like 2017 was sort of the year that climate fiction became a real thing.

[00:17:54] With like real plots, just like a variety of types of story. Yeah.

[00:18:01] And I think that also was the year that The Great Derangement came out, which is Amitav Ghosh's really great essay collection about why is climate not in all of our stories. It was published in 2016. So you're kind of in the same same time frame.

[00:18:23] 2017 was also the year that we started to see more people talking about how we talk about climate change, especially on the emotional and psychological front. Doctor Renee Lertzman has been talking about that for a long time and she wrote a piece in Sierra magazine called How Can We Talk About Global Warming?

[00:18:46] Yeah You know, she wrote a book a little while back called Environmental Melancholia. That was sort of talking about tackling climate grief and then and then has kind of focused on this space of of the psychology of environmental news for a while. Anyway, I feel I feel like 2017 we start to actually see more of these kinds of conversations start to emerge in the coverage on climate, which we hadn't been necessarily seeing much.

[00:19:21] Yeah. And the the range of emotions, which means the range of language got much, much, much bigger. And yeah, it was a groundbreaking year for climate coverage. a lot of people did some really amazing work.

[00:19:40] Before we get into that, I think we also got to recap some of the issues that caused a lot of that shift to happen. With so much happening, so much shit like Donald Trump and his fucking goons like come into office and with a straight god damn face and were like, you know what, fuck y'all, y'all clean water and clean air, you're fucked again.

[00:20:05] We're going to get rid of the EPA.

[00:20:08] We're going to poison ourselves to own the fucking libs. Hard to get this shit like they pulled out of Paris. They straight up tried to eliminate the EPA.

[00:20:18] They deregulated every fucking thing totally. I know the guy that was in charge of the EPA transition team for Trump is this guy named Steve Milloy, who has been basically trying to kill the EPA since it was born.

[00:20:36] The moment that haunts my dreams the most is when he pulled out of Paris and he had like that big reception on the Rose Garden and it was crazy fucking hot. And there was a band that played the whole time. Yeah. And it just felt so much like the Titanic.

[00:20:51] Another big political event going on in 2016 and 2017 was Standing Rock.

[00:20:59] And I've got two pieces that I want to talk about from that phrase. I want to acknowledge that there are some really great coverage on Standing Rock from Unicorn Riot and Mother Jones. I think they might have teamed up, actually. Yeah. And Unicorn Riot covered every second of it. It was really fantastic and really brave because it got extraordinarily violent on the part of the state. Yeah. Against protestors, you know.

[00:21:30] And the piece I want to read from is the eviction letter to the Army Corps of Engineers by Harriet Frazer of of the Sioux Nation.

[00:21:43] [wind chime] I take your letter as issuing a direct and irresponsible threat to the water protector. It appears to further empower the militarized police force that has been brutalizing and terrorizing our water protectors while imposing the blame and the risk on unarmed, peaceful people. We have pleaded for the protection of the United States. Your letter makes a grave and dangerous mistake. Federal efforts to de-escalate the violence should be aimed at the wrongdoers, not at our peaceful peace people.

[00:22:16] And. I just wanted to read that piece. And in the words of someone actually on the ground there of.

[00:22:26] The disproportionate violence and the disproportionate blame for that violence, because they would straight, do stuff that was caught on camera, and then claim they didn't do it.

[00:22:35] And then the footage came out and it was like, oh, you just straight up lied.

[00:22:41] And it was just totally far cry from what you see at most by climate marches or invite Earth Day. You know, demonstrations and what happens basically when it's mostly white people.

[00:22:55] And actually, this Standing Rock, I mean, I think it's really important for people to kind of like look back at these stories and we'll post links to these in the show notes, because this is the origin of what we're seeing now, where you have pipeline companies working with groups like ALEC, which like writes, you know, legislation that they then just give to politicians and actually passing laws that criminalize protests. This was the thing that made them kind of start thinking this way, that we really have to crack down on these protests because guess what? If oil companies don't have access to as much cheap indigenous land as they want, which is pretty much like what they've done for decades, they keep this whole thing of running pipelines this way, in that way all over the country, in between Canada and the U.S. and wherever doesn't work anymore.

[00:23:48] Right. And where these pipelines go missing, indigenous women tends to happen.

[00:23:55] Yeah, right. Yes. Yes. You end up with these things that they call "man camps," which are like these giant camps of, you know, workers. And there's a huge incidence of women being assaulted, battered, raped, gone, missing, murdered. All of that.  Sometimes it happens as a result of protests. Sometimes it happens just as a result of there being like large groups of men isolated in an area where there aren't that many women. And they kind of take women, you know.

[00:24:28] Right. And it's not just like they take women. They take very vulnerable, unprotected women, women who are marginalized, who they know the police don't care about. Basically.

[00:24:39] Right. Right. That they won't be tracked and they won't be prosecuted.

[00:24:44] Yeah. Yeah. The other piece I wanted to read from is by Julian Brave Noyce Cat in The Guardian.

[00:24:56] It's called I Was Arrested for Protesting and a reason I wanted to read from that. So Julian is an indigenous man from, I believe, Canada by way of California.

What happened in climate coverage in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election, how natural disasters rocked our world and our stories in 2017, Standing Rock, pieces that changed the narrative forever, and more.Stories discussed in this ep:ProPublica, "Houston's Perfect Storm" 

https://projects.propublica.org/houston/Rolling

 Stone, “Can New York Be Saved in the Era of Global Warming?” 

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/can-new-york-be-saved-in-the-era-of-global-warming-240454/Sierra

 Magazine, “How Can We Talk about Global Warming” 

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-can-we-talk-about-global-warming

https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/04/13/11-climate-fiction-authors-favorite-books/Standing

 Rock; Eviction Letter to the Army Corps of Engineers by Harold Frazier of the Sioux 

http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-tribe-reacts-u-s-army-corps-engineers-eviction-notice-letter-makes-grave-dangerous-mistake/The

 Guardian, "I Was Arrested for Protesting," 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/03/i-was-arrested-for-protesting-my-idealism-did-not-prepare-me-for-that-experience

 Mother Jones, "“This is How Puerto Ricans are Talking about Climate Change” 

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/09/heres-how-puerto-ricans-are-talking-about-climate-change/New

 York Magazine, "The Uninhabitable Earth," 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.htmlThe

 Atlantic, "Democrats are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change" 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/there-is-no-democratic-plan-to-fight-climate-change/543981/Inside

 Climate News, "Finding Middle Ground" series 

https://insideclimatenews.org/content/middle-groundThe

 Nearly Now, "The Smokestacks Come Tumbling Down" 

https://thenearlynow.com/the-smokestacks-come-tumbling-down-c03ba1294522Bitch

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/least-convenient-truth/climate-change-and-white-supremacyIsland

https://www.taswriters.org/wildcare-winner-harriet-rileys-essay-endlings

Hot Take S1

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Hot Take is a holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it. Hosted by real-life friends Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt—an essayist and a journalist— Hot Take offers a unique perspective on the issue of climate change. With a breath of fresh humanity and humor, conversation moves swiftly from cackling about the bad week an oil company had, to speaking seriously and passionately about the unequal distribution of climate impacts and our own experiences of climate grief. And then washing it down with a round of dad jokes! Every week, we’ll connect you with the latest climate news and with the journalists and storytellers trying to make sense of this complex issue to help you see the world through climate-colored glasses. We ended production on Hot Take at the end of 2022, but you can still access episodes here, or 

A holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it.

S1, Ep1 | Fangirl v Fangirl

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