[00:00:19] Welcome to Hot Take, the podcast where we talk about storytelling and the face of the greatest story of all time climate change. I'm Mary Annaise Heglar.

[00:00:29] And I'm Amy Westervelt. Our last few episodes, in case you missed them, were yearly recaps from 2016 to 2019. And in this, our first episode of 2020, we'll be taking a critical eye to the climate story as it's unfolded over the first month of this new decade.

[00:00:47] Yeah. And I got to say, I thought this was going to be a lot lighter to go from doing one month instead of a full year. But the climate story logit has not chill, so it is almost as jampacked as the other ones.

[00:01:02] Yeah, but lucky for us, we have a special guest, Meera Subramanian, to help us sort through it all.

[00:01:07] Yes, I'm really excited to talk to her. Meera is a longtime climate journalist and she was just elected as the board president of the Society for Environmental Journalists.

[00:01:17] So she has a lot of thoughts on how climate journalism has evolved. Also in this episode, we'll be digging into listener questions that folks have been sending us.

[00:01:25] Yes! Also, note that all the articles we talk about here are linked, as always, in our Twitter at real hot take and in the show notes.

[00:01:33] Yep. And please make sure you're following us there as well.

[00:01:48] Welcome, Meera! So our first question for you is hunt us a little bit about your path to climate storytelling.

[00:01:56] Sure. I became interested in the environment very long time ago. I was 19 and traveling around the world. And for some reason, even though the world was imploding, like the Soviet Union was about to collapse and Yugoslavia was breaking out in war, Tiananmen Square had just happened. So all these like monumental political events were happening. But I just became hyper focused on the garbage that we were dumping off the back of the ship that I was traveling on. So I I became fascinated by just the impact of the environment on people's lives. And so I actually got into nonprofit environmental work form all through my 20s. And I'd lived out in Oregon. I was working at a sustainable living skills and Research Education Center. So we were to be very hands on work, you know, living on the land, living very close to the land and figuring out how things work and how people can connect to their natural world. And then I got very burnt out on nonprofit work and was increasingly writing. And so that's what shifted me to go into NYU Journalism School in my early 30s and basically writing about the same stories, but getting to let the journalism and the facts of what I was finding allow me to write much more complicated, much more messy stories. Yeah, yeah.

[00:03:11] I relate to that almost a little bit too hard about nonprofits.

[00:03:16] I love nonprofit work, but you have to say a certain thing. And I felt like the stories were way more complicated. And I and I trusted that readers would be able to decipher that for themselves.

[00:03:30] Yeah. That means I've made some, like, enemies, you know, back home. I'm not I'm not toeing the line, but I'm not here to make friends. Yeah.

[00:03:39] Yeah, I I want to ask like maybe a so obvious question, but you are you're the head of the Society of Environmental Journalists as the resident non journalists on the show. Was that everyone should know about this organization.

[00:03:52] So the Society of Environmental Journalists is an organization. It's a nonprofit. I guess I am back in the nonprofit world. It's a nonprofit that's been around for 30 years now. So, again, was sort of cutting edge like somebody just said, oh, you're you've been interested in the environment for 30 years. Like, I thought it was like a five year old thing now. Yeah, right. And so there's been a. It was started by a group of journalists from National Geographic, The Washington Post, who really just wanted to create an organization that supported the work of people who are writing about the environment. And so it's been around for 30 years. It has a flagship conference that happens every year. This year can be in Boise, Idaho. We go too far flung places that a lot of times conferences don't go to. We were in Flint, Michigan, a couple of years ago where in Fort Collins, Colorado, last year. And we do the other great thing about this conference. It's about 800, 900 working journalists for the most part that are there. You're learning things, you're networking at the conference, and then there's field trips, which are awesome. So you're getting out into the geographic region that we're in. Learning about water issues and climate issues and agriculture and nuclear energy and all these different aspects. And so it's it's a very hands on conference. So that's a big part of it. But then the whole rest of the year, there's all these resources, there's mentorship programs. We have the funding for environmental journal-isms that's actually getting money into reporters hands so they can go report on these stories. We have an award series. So for all the great climate writing that's out there, you know. Submit those for the awards and you can get recognition for for that work. So it's really just fostering. Our official statement is that we're strengthening the quality, reach and viability of all forms of media that advance public understanding of environmental issues. And our membership is at an all time high. And I feel like part of that is just that there's a real deep recognition of how much environmental stories are not separate anymore. I think for a long time they felt like they were. And I just we just had a big event in D.C. I got to introduce Ban Ki moon. It was quite amazing. And we had a great panel of journalists talking about everything that was going to come in the year ahead. And something that I said There, in my introductory statements is that we're used to seeing stories about clean water and clean air and, you know, the science section. Those are environment stories. But but now they're in every section, there, in the arts section and they're in the business section. And so I was saying that they're front page stories, you know, there, every page stories. The Everywhere's. I've read stories like that is there is no separating this anymore. Now is the story.

[00:06:26] Amy, you're part of SEJ., right?

[00:06:28] I sure am. Yes. Proud longtime member. I love as SEJ, love it. I find the conferences really helpful, too, not just for  subject matter, but just like connecting with other people that are in the same field and, you know, seeing people you haven't seen for 10 years and all that. It's good.

[00:06:49] So many freelancers, right? It's the largest contingent in our group. So, I mean, for me, like just having that camaraderie and connections and networking all happen is so is so powerful when you don't have a newsroom, you know? I mean, that's your work group.

[00:07:03] Yeah, totally. Meera, what are some of the trends that you're seeing in the climate storytelling world, things that excite you? Even, you know, different, different approaches, different types of writing. What are you seeing?

[00:07:15] Yeah, it's an exciting time and kind of a transformative time, I think. Everyone on the speed is kind of amazed at how much this is becoming relevant in a way that that it wasn't seen as relevant before. It was always relevant, but whether people perceived it that way was kind of missing. And I think in some ways, like like right. Like I'm a tough go Shaw at the great derangement that came out in 2016. And that was kind of like like where are the artists?

[00:07:41] Where's the creative response to this crisis? Like this is, you know, in so many ways, not dealing with climate change is like a failure of imagination. All right. We have to we have to imagine a very different world than the one that we inhabit now. Yeah.

[00:07:56] You did this amazing series about the perceptions of climate in conservative America and inside Climate News. And then you did this beautiful culminating essay in Orion magazine. And we're gonna put you on the spot and ask you to read a quick excerpt from it. And then we can talk about some of the more fascinating things you learned from the series. OK.

[00:08:16] So this was this was from a piece for Orion that I wrote in December.

[00:08:22] Sometimes I allow myself to wonder if the extreme weather events, the droughts, the fires, the dying cattle, withered peaches could unite us. Everybody everywhere. As we wrestle with the first truly global crisis, could the shared catastrophe be akin to gazing at that first iconic image of Earth from the Apollo 8 spacecraft in 1968? Oh, that's where we live. There,. Because no wearable would be left untouched. This isn't the Irish potato famine where you could set sail for America. This isn't the dust bowl where you could move on to California. California is on fire. America is on fire. The planet is on fire.

[00:09:02] And when did you publish this? This just came out in December. So this was no Ryan essay. That was basically I had worked for about a year and a half before that in twenty, seventeen and eighteen for a nine part series for InsideClimate News about our perceptions of climate change in conservative America. And so that took me all over the country. And so I wrote all these individual stories about individual subjects and geographies and people in places. But there was this kind of like big overarching takeaways that came from doing all that that I just I sat with it for a really long time. And then this O'Ryan essay was at least just a beginning of trying to unpack it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:09:42] I loved that series. I thought it was so great. And especially because you you told engaging stories. You know, it wasn't the sort of I think I talked about how at that time there was this sort of Trump apology tour happening in the media, you know, where everyone was like, whoops, sorry, we forgot about half the country, you know, and link up. And I thought you did such a good job of sidestepping that. But but bringing really important stories and perspectives to the conversation was great.

[00:10:13] Yeah. Yeah. You know, there are there are the journalists who fly in and they go to the diner and they. Right. Right. And so I was parachuting to some degree cause I you know, it's I'd only spend a week in a place I wasn't living there and I wasn't from there, but I did just like hang around on Main Street. And, you know, something happens in small towns. That's that's kind of amazing where people like don't want to talk to you, but then they keep talking to you and then, yeah, inviting you to the barbecue. And it's just like there is there is just an openness that I think we think isn't there, because we hear so much about about the anger. I wrote about this in the Orion piece, too, is like like one of the fly fishermen that was a very like soft spoken, very conservative, but believes climate change is happening. Please, we should take action. Wonders where all the conservatives went in his party. You know, that used to protect the land so that he could go out there and fly fish every day. And, you know, I just I wrote an Orion like you. We do not hear his voice. Like he just. Right. He's not angry. He's not mad. He's not screaming. And those voices are not heard on on the right or on the left. Right.

[00:11:23] Where do you see climate storytelling going in the next year? Well, sure.

[00:11:28] Hot take what I take like that.

[00:11:35] I think I mean, I think we're all amazed at how much climate change writing has infiltrated from all angles within the arts fiction, within longform journalism ever.

[00:11:50] Everybody is stepping into the space. Sometimes for good and for bad. But yeah, yeah, everybody is is is stepping into the space in terms of all these different views being told. The one angle that seems to still be missing to me is again, thinking about that conservative. Right. And that and the fact that, you know, the people that I was meeting like they are on the frontlines of climate change. Yeah. Right. They are farmers and they are people who live close to the land in rural America. And they are feeling impacts arguably much more than us sitting here. Yeah. In this room. So I want to hear those voices coming from them. Yeah. And that would be that would be amazing. Yeah.

[00:12:30] That kind of reminds me of season two of Drilled. Amy's other. Yeah. Podcasts. That is just backing. You should be subscribe to. I think that's where you talk to the fishermen.

[00:12:41] Yeah. It was really interesting just to really I don't know to hear them talking about it and get out on boats with them although I got really seasick. But just like see how that whole world works, you know in here, like there was a young candidate I talked to who is like, you know, grown up in a fishing family on the East Coast. And now he was on the West Coast and he was just kind of talking about how, like when his dad got started, you could make a decent living as as a deckhand and like work your way up to being a captain and all that kind of stuff. And that that's gone now. And I don't know just all these ways that the environmental stuff overlaps with the economy and and also kind of this historical and cultural stuff, too. Like there are these little fishing communities all across the country that are changing dramatically because the fish are moving.

[00:13:31] I don't think it's no longer true that conservative and climate denier synonyms.

[00:13:36] No, you're starting to see that like the sort of conservation ethic coming back into into play, I think. And there's also like a religious thing that's happening, too, or I think there are some religious groups that are coming back around to the idea of like stewardship and yet all that stuff.

[00:13:57] So big news, Hatake has its first sponsor, and I don't know that we could have asked for a better when our first sponsor is a company called Aaskov Finlayson and they make the best cote's on Earth. And I'm not just saying this because they're sponsoring us. I would say this with him, with or without. So this code is fucking amazing. Like I'm someone who does not like Wincer. I'm someone who does not like being cold. And I got this coat right before it got really cold here in New York.

[00:14:30] And it's like, you know, 20 something degrees outside when I normally would just not go outside. I'm like strolling around the city, running errands. Everybody else is like walking all fast. And I'm just like chillin in my new coat.

[00:14:44] Those nights, it's amazing. I keep, like, talking about how great it is because Amy has not gotten hers yet and I have mine. And I'm just like, first of all, let's talk about these pockets. Okay? Like there's pockets all over the place. Pockets mean a lot to me. All right. Because I wear a lot of dresses and that means I don't have pockets because the patriarchy is real and there's like six, seven pack is here. Like, I could sell knives and baked cookies.

[00:15:13] They're amazing, John. So much. And I'm going to get a new side.

[00:15:17] But anyway, they're also really super sustainable and climate conscious. And their whole mission is to keep the north cold and as much as love. Exactly. Like as much as I don't like being cold. I do think the North should stay cold. I do think that's the thing that should happen. So please go to ASCO, Findlay, CENTCOM. There's a S K O V SFI in L.A. Y A in that Tom to get a code. Now while it's still winter.

[00:15:51] OK, I'll just take us through like a few top level disasters here and keep in mind, these are just the ones we know about.

[00:15:57] There's definitely others. Of course, everyone, I hope, has heard about the massive bushfires in Australia who lost more than a billion animals. I also heard that doesn't even include livestock. So like if you had cattle or horses, that's not included in this bill again. Animals.

[00:16:14] Right. And distinct. I mean, Australia has such a distinct ecosystem that there are animals that are only our endemic to that to that continent that will be gone. Right. Exactly. That there's risk of like what this is what extinction looks like is when you have a population that just gets hit so hard that it cannot recover.

[00:16:32] Right. As far as humans. The death toll is 33 and counting the last time I checked. And that also includes three American firefighters who died in a in a plane crash trying to fight the fires. It's burned some 27 million acres of land so far because the fire is still going. The fires are still going. It's spawned fire, NATO's ash, rain, dust storms and smoke so intense that it created its own weather like lightning.

[00:17:00] I mean, they're predicting a heatwave this week in New South Wales again, which is where the bulk of the fires were.

[00:17:08] Yeah. So what's sad is like we in our climate bubble, I feel like we saw a lot about the Australia fires as well. We should. I'm not sure that most other people did who don't live in our in our bubble is definitely not been coming up in the last conversations I've had with other non climate people. But even sadder than that is that there's all these other disasters that we really didn't hear much about. And I'll start with the floods in Jakarta and in Indonesia. So this disaster unleashed right around the same time as the Australia fires. At least 67 people have died in the floods and dozens have washed away. And the resultant landslides and I'm emphasizing at least because I have been really struggling to find any articles written on this. Most of what I've seen as bomb about from the beginning of January, but it was the heaviest downpour in a 24 hour period, and that's since record keeping began. And it's really put the the countries in a quite inequality in the spotlight as the slum neighborhoods are especially vulnerable not only to the flooding, they're also often located near where wastewater is kept.

[00:18:19] And when that releases, it's in like it can release all sorts of diseases. And it's just really dangerous. Again, I can't tell what the what the state is currently in Jakarta because there's just so little coverage. Like I know the fires are still going on in Australia. I don't know if the floodwaters have receded in Jakarta.

[00:18:38] So if you know, please tweet at me. There is a pretty good article about this by Rachael Ramires in Greece. It's not just Australia. And she's sort of profiled the Indonesian disaster in it. There is also Typhoon Ursula in the Philippines that made landfall on December 24th and killed at least 47. And I don't know what the state of recovery is because, again, there's been very little updates on that. And I know that there was also a volcano that erupted in the Philippines this month. And even when I was reading about the volcano, there was very little written on it. And none of the stories I read about the volcano talked about how the the country's still reeling from this horrible typhoon. And how does that interact with the disaster of the volcano? I couldn't find anything about that. And if I'm not looking in the right places, please tweet at me. And I would love to look in the right places. There was also the earthquakes in Puerto Rico, which is not necessarily climate change, but a interplays with it since the island is still reeling from Hurricane Maria. So this was a magnitude 6.4 earthquake. It knocked out water for 300000 people and power for 93 percent of the island because the grid has not recovered from Maria. And unlike Maria alive, there was just no warning for this. I was reading about, you know, a lot of folks from Puerto Rico saying like, we definitely knew this something else was going to happen at some point, but we didn't expect it to come from the earth. We expected it to come from the sky.

[00:20:05] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Because all these natural disasters like do keep happening. And I'm I'm I'm super picky when I'm writing about, you know, attribution and attribution. Science is like getting better. But I spend so much time just making sure I get that right about the attribution. Garzino like there,. It is such tricky ground about what science from climate change. But but your point area, just about how rare all these natural disasters that have happened for ever and will happen forever. But when you're just you know, it's just talking about, you know, you break your leg and then you get the flu like you that you interact with one another. Yeah. It's a compounding effect. It's not just two different things. It's. Yeah, they they exacerbate each other.

[00:20:48] Yeah. So I did. Joy, seeing the articles about Puerto Rico and they all of them mentioned Maria, which was what, 2017, 2018, 2017. But then in the Philippines, where the typhoon hit, literally just happened a few weeks ago. We're talking about the volcano and we don't mention the typhoon. How? I don't understand. Then lastly, there is the locusts and the floods in East Africa. So there is this unusually large swarm of locusts, as expected in East Africa in the coming months. It's already active in Kenya and Somalia and Ethiopia. And pretty CH2 soon could spread to Uganda and Sudan. And this puts countries are already suffering from severe food sausages due to extreme rain events and the resultant floods at the end of 2019. This puts them at even more risk because not only is there no food to eat or to buy. There's no way to grow the food with the locusts now. So these are although they are eating them, they are eating the locusts, you know. There's a solution. Yeah. Which is actually I mean, this is a pretty climate stable diet. Yeah.

[00:21:57] Yeah. I mean, not dependable year after year but but it is a good source of protein, you know, taken locusts and making locusts meat.

[00:22:10] I just want to pause here and say that I think that we need to do as a community, we need to do a better job at telling all of these stories. Of course, we need to talk about Australia, but we need to talk about Jakarta, too. We need to talk about the Philippines. We need to talk about Kenya and Puerto Rico and all of these other places, too. And what I see when I see these stories about the typhoons in Philippines, for example, we talk about them as these meteorological wonders and not as human interest stories. So we talk about like the strength of the storm and we marvel at this event, but we don't talk about the people who are affected by it in the same way that we do the Australia fires or even in Puerto Rico. We did a better job at it. But I want to see that same empathy and that same humanity extended to Asia and Latin America and Africa know.

[00:23:10] Now we're going to transition to talking about some of the major themes and trends of the climate conversation in January.

[00:23:17] Some of these are just emerging. Others have been kind of on the rise for a while now. I'm going to start with the explosion of climate media this month, which is a little bit funny because we were part of it. Yes. So we launched Drilled News on January 21st. And it's an expansion from the podcast out into more reporting across multiple verticals, accountability, journalism, looking at corporate influence on environmental policy and the media, all sorts of of areas. And then, you know, of course, we still have the podcast and we have Hot Take podcast and we're partnering with Heated. And we're also partnering with a few larger outlets like HuffPost Grayest, New York Magazine and a couple of other folks, too. So. So that's getting going. We have some exciting co reporting projects that we'll announce, though, actually on the same day that we launched, which I didn't realize was going to happen, but was kind of awesome. Bloomberg launched its climate vertical called Bloomberg Green. And a couple of days before us, NPR announced its search for a climate editor to oversee expansion of its climate coverage. So that's awesome. I mean, it's really great to see that. The one thing that I was like kind of thinking about, though, on that front is that, you know, we had this explosion of of climate verticals and climate media, maybe like 12, 15 years ago. Right. And then they imploded and they imploded. Exactly. And so and I think that part of the problem there was that at a certain point, outlets were like, oh, climate should be part of everything. Yes, it should. But instead of keeping like their climate experts on and integrating them into the rest of their coverage, they just got rid of all the climate beat reporters. And so you had you had like general assignment people trying to, like, jump in on climate. And it just like it just. Yeah, it didn't go all. So I'm hopeful that this time around that it will be more of what, you know, it kind of should have been before, which is that, you know, yes, there's this climate team, but they aren't just, you know, siloed off in the climate realm. They are actually, you know, bringing that lens to coverage across the board.

[00:25:44] So I got a couple of questions. What is a vertical and I know what a beat reporter is, but I'm not sure everyone does.

[00:25:53] Yeah. Vertical is sort of just like a subject matter sections. So like the climate section, the gender section, the like immigration section, those are all verticals in newspaper or website or whatever. And then a beat reporter is someone who focuses on a particular area. So like a climate beat reporter is someone who has is just focused on reporting on climate. And, you know, it's really know. It's interesting because in some ways, you know, there probably are some beats where you could reasonably say, oh, this really should just be a lens we bring to everything. But with climate, I think you kind of need both because you really do need that that background and expertise to provide context to a lot of the stuff that's happening now. If you don't know that, then there's there's a lack of that context in especially for journalism. I don't think that's necessarily that important for for writing essays or or even Op-Ed sometimes. But I think for for the journalists who are trying to give people information about this stuff, it's important for them to know, you know, why a similar initiative failed 10 years ago.

[00:27:08] Hey, there's a can I give a shout out? That was a recently the Harvard Business Review at a piece by Gretchen Gavitt called What Do People Really Believe about Climate Change? And so this is basically based on Anthony Lesar, which is at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

[00:27:21] And they've been doing surveys for a decade about perceptions of climate change. And they're behind the the kind of classifying Americans under like there's six Americans when it comes to climate change from like the dismissive on one end to the alarmed on the other. And so it's kind of people just fall into into the places. And, you know, the whole InsideClimate New series was finding many people, like many people are in the middle, like those again, are the people that we're not hearing from. But they were they were trying to look at all those surveys to try to figure out like what the fuck happened, like. Right. It was go it was concern was going up 2008. You know, Barack Obama comes in. We have Congress and all this all of all of these things were in place that seemed like there should have been clear action. And this is. Just There, analysis, so I. I'm not saying that. I think that this is what happened, but this is from them looking at this, they think I'll just read a little excerpt from this, that what happened was that it wasn't as much the economy or media coverage or cold weather events that make people think nothing's getting warm. But it's what we call political elite cues, which is just a fancy way of saying that when leaders lead, followers follow. The key thing that happened in that time period was the rise of the Tea Party and the strong rightward lurch of the Republican Party. Of course, I'm going to add that there's this there was a concerted effort to further that. And then she goes on to write as a whole. They basically crawled out on the last twig on the longest branch away from climate science. It became a common Republican talking point that climate change is a hoax. That's so interesting. My point is that the encouraging thing is that recently the alarmed category, which is like the most concerned, is at 31 percent. Yeah, I mean, you had a percent. I'm over there. So even back in late 2014, it was at like 11 percent. So that the you know, the in terms of the shift of everyone, you know, the dismissive eyes are like the same there,. They're gonna stay. Then nothing's gonna happen there. But there's this huge space with everybody in the middle and the people who are going from concerned to alarm to like, let's get off of the couch and do something. So.

[00:29:29] So another theme or just like an ongoing event is the Democratic primary. It's like the funnest event of the year. Oh, my God, so much fun.

[00:29:41] So on January 14th, we had a debate. Did you get to watch it? No.

[00:29:47] If you didn't watch it, Zoya tierce Dane wrote a pretty good overview of it in Ingress that will loling too. I'm the glutton for punishment, so I did watch it and I saw it. Really interesting thing happening.

[00:29:57] Pretty much all of the candidates were trying their best to talk about climate and to weave it into their answers and the moderators were trying to steer them away from it.

[00:30:09] So like one of the like all of them brought it. Bush brought it up. Warren brought it up. Sanders brought it up. Tom Steyer with his very creepy contact, brought it up.

[00:30:19] By the time they actually got to the climate question, which was in the last, I want to say fifteen, maybe even ten minutes of the debate. It was easier to identify who had not brought it up. And it was Biden and Klobuchar. By my count. So that one of the like the most viral moments was when Bernie Sanders brought up climate as part of a trade deal conversation. And she was like, well, we're gonna get to climate.

[00:30:44] He was, I guess, the same thing for him. It totally is.

[00:30:48] And it's like it's wild that we've gotten to the place where like now the candidates are trying to the people are clamoring for climate coverage.

[00:30:58] The candidates are clamoring for climate coverage. And the news networks are just like, no, it is it seems very specific to broadcast news. Also, clubs are stressed the importance of fracked gas as a transition fuel. So you know that and go over to the base folks then like that. But she still managed to snag The New York Times endorsement along with Elizabeth Warren, because apparently you can endorse two people now. I really wish I had known that.

[00:31:26] But there's a good angle in that because even in their endorsement, The New York Times says this about Elizabeth Warren.

[00:31:36] But Miss Warren often casts the net far too wide, placing the blame for a host of maladies from climate change to gun violence at the feet of the business community. When the onus is on society as a whole.

[00:31:48] The way I think about that, this is, again, just just that whole conflation of these. This is this is an ongoing the straws in beef in what you eat. That's just this is gonna be kind of endless about until we until there's some sort of tipping point around structure and how people make decisions. Yeah. Know, it's behavioral economics. It's basic. People make decisions based on what is easy and cheap. Every human is like that. So there have to be structural structural mechanisms in place that make the right decision easy and cheap. You don't have to decide time to save for retirement. You you automatically your business place put you into retirement. And if you want to opt out, you can. Yeah, but just make it easy. Yeah. And you think about things when a complete structural level to make that happen. Yeah.

[00:32:42] Yeah I know. It's like basic sociology.

[00:32:45] I just I don't know if the New York Times is still the paper of record. I think they're the paper of the status quo and they've been that way. No shame to anybody who works there. I know there's there's great people who work there on on all site.

[00:32:58] Yeah. And they're doing. They are doing. They are doing great. Create climate coverage. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

[00:33:02] Okay. So we talked about the Australian fires a little bit before coverage of those fires provided some really interesting conversations around misinformation and climate, which is still a thing that's happening. You know, Australia. Rupert Murdoch, he owns like three papers.

[00:33:23] And he's still really pushing the climate denial thing.

[00:33:25] So there was this really high profile situation where a reporter at one of his papers quit News Corp over misinformation and her email went salmiya viral.

[00:33:37] She wrote, I have been severely impacted by the coverage of News Corp publications in relation to the fires, in particular the misinformation campaign that has tried to divert attention away from the real issue, which is climate change, to rather focus on arson, including misrepresenting facts. I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies. The reporting I've witnessed in the Australian, The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and start doing something about it.

[00:34:17] So boom. Nice one, Emily. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not just the hardcore Murdoch funded deniers that need to be held accountable. There's this whole spectrum of this stuff and media in general has been a little bit slow to kind of wrap it, wrap our collective heads around dealing with disinformation and squaring that with, you know, bringing sort of, you know. Seeing objectivity in air quotes. But that's like, you know, the the goal. So there was this good. There was a good piece in. Also in Australia.

[00:34:54] John Birmingham wrote this piece that he called, We the media must take some of the blame.

[00:35:00] As Australia burns, can we ask mirit or eat that one? We in the news media or what's left of it cannot simply treat climate change denial as we would disagreements over tax or health policy. But there is nothing legitimate about climate change denial. It has the backing of a trillion dollar industry sector, but no actual credibility. There are no experts to hear from. No counterpoints to be made. It is all lies in the service of profit and power. One day it will probably be a crime. Until then, however, those of us who work in the media need to take a hard look at our practices and ask ourselves whether we are really serving our audience.

[00:35:41] As like long term environmental journalists. I mean, this is this is a really challenging thing. And, you know, I mean, there's there's that trying to clarify the distinction between journalists who cover the environment and environmentalists has been a long time, difficult territory. I mean, ECJ has dealt with this where people from the outside say, oh, you're you're all environmentalists, so therefore you can't take us. You know, if you you're too opinionated, too opinionated.

[00:36:08] Yeah, you're bias. Right. But it having a living planet like. Right. But doing much better.

[00:36:14] But journalists have been like, you know, within the organisation have been very adamant that we you know, we're journalists first. We're covering the environment. Yeah. And so but this is tricky. I mean, I see this and know many, many journalists would have their hackles raised. You know, mine are raised a little bit of like just the you know, the again, the language like that. When the language is it's it's very tricky ground to language is such that it be it it antagonizes and raises the blood pressures on both sides. And then I feel like sometimes that makes the scism even worse as opposed to going for the tempered. But then sometimes you need you need anger and you need outright. Rebellion to make things happen. Yeah, so. But it is very tricky that so many journalists who are journalists first and foremost, but are writing about the environment. And perhaps lo and behold, my care about the environment at the same time, because they laguer people who are sports journalists really like sports, probably I would venture to guess.

[00:37:22] You know, the first you know, I mean, like this.

[00:37:28] So there is an interest rate there. That's why you choose to spend your life getting paid.

[00:37:33] Almost no money to pursue pretty difficult stories again. But but it is it is really tricky ground to tread. To have people not accuse journalists who cover the environment for just being flat out environmentalists. There are two different things.

[00:37:50] Yeah, I. My kind of line on this, because I get like I have people often be like, oh, you know, you're biased because you're pointing out that fossil fuel companies are not behaving responsibly. But but my take on that is like if you have the receipts, then you know.

[00:38:13] Right. Because we do do that as journalists. We go out and we get a lot of information and we distill it so that it is within the realm of comprehension for someone who doesn't have the time to do all the legwork that journalists are doing. So it is that there is a responsibility there to bring that information forward. And so, yeah. If you have a conclusion to say, then seems like it needs to be part of the story. I mean, I am fortunate of being being able to do long-form writing and being able to do first person writing. You know, I am a journalist who covers that territory as well. So there's it's more challenging, I think, for, you know, newspaper reporters and. Yeah.

[00:38:57] See, this is why I'm a creative writer and I failed at being a journalist because I just want to say what my opinion is all the time. So, you know, things like I struggle to like ask these questions that I felt were really invasive of other people.

[00:39:12] And then like, oh, yeah, my opinion at the door is like, no, I think things go further.

Transcription

The first month of 2020 proves that the climate story has no chill at all. From the Australian bushfires to big important stories on everything from climate vision to radiioactive fracking, the story just keeps getting bigger and crazier. Special guest co-host Meera Subramanian joins Mary and Amy to break it all down.About Meera: Meera Subramanian is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has been published around the world, and her first book is A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka, published in 2015 by PublicAffairs. She is currently serving as the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

S1, Ep6 | Feb 2020: More Fucking Greenwashing! With Maddie Stone

S1, Ep5 | Jan 2020: No Chill, with Meera Subramanian

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, Ep5 | Jan 2020: No Chill, with Meera Subramanian

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S1, Ep6 | Feb 2020: More Fucking Greenwashing! With Maddie Stone