[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.

Transcription

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

S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call

S1, Ep2 | 2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

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, Ep2 | 2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

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S1, Ep3 | 2018: The Wake-Up Call