Mary Annaïse Heglar

[00:00:00] Hotcakes, welcome to Hot Take the podcast where we talk about how to talk about climate change. I'm Amy Westervelt.

[00:00:06] And I'm Mary Annaise Heglar. This is the first episode of our Season three, our third season of this, right?

[00:00:16] Kind of hard to believe that we we made it this far.

[00:00:19] But this episode, we're going to be looking back at the wild ride that was the year 2020. And we're going to hope that by the time we listen to this episode again, in a year that 20, 21 hasn't made, 20, 20 look adorable.

[00:00:36] Oh, Lord, yeah. Lordy, Lord. I know. Very, very possible. Very possible. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So our with someone like I saw someone who like was tweeting recently that like basically 20-20 is like won't really be over until like we until there's some sort of like accountability for the Trump administration.

[00:01:03] I mean, there is that we're going to be waiting a while. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this this episode format is a little bit different. We're going to be looking back and it's just going to be me and Amy for this episode.

[00:01:17] That's right, and we're going to look at both how climate coverage changed overall in terms of how much or how little there was of it and some of the key themes that came out in the year.

[00:01:30] Exactly. Also, another disclaimer.

[00:01:33] We are recording this on Monday. Aw, shit. What what day is today?

[00:01:38] Tuesday. We are recording we're recording this on Tuesday, January the 5th.

[00:01:43] That means that we have no idea who won in Georgia and we have no idea what happened in Congress when the Electoral College reared its like came back from the casket. Like, I don't know I don't know what's supposed to be happening in Congress. I don't understand why we couldn't just have a regular ass election where you vote and the person who gets the most votes wins except.

[00:02:04] Oh, right. Is America and of course, why we do that. So I don't know exactly or if I know they have a say and they bring back everybody who was at the framers convention and they asked them to like play tic tac toe until they figure out who the winner is. I think that's what's happening. And then Trump is trying to like, I don't know, win some of them to his side, which is pretty possible because a lot of them were slave owners and they're like, yeah, build the wall. So, yeah, we'll see what happens then and we'll see if what we record today has any relevance.

[00:02:40] And apparently Trump was saying something at his rally recently about how, like, you know, hopefully Mike Pence will come through for us because, yeah, he I think, thinks that Mike Pence has an actual role in this and not a ceremonial role of just like overseeing the whole thing.

[00:03:01] But yeah. Anyway, yeah. And last disclaimer is that we're not sober for this episode. I don't know who you thought we were. If we were going to look back on twenty twenty stone sober. We're not doing dry January over here folks. Nope. No. Can you hear the ice in my glass. I don't know if I can hear it. Yeah. Because I've got better, I've got better headphones this time but yeah. What are you drinking Amy.

[00:03:28] I have a mix of tequila, a hollow Panio simple sirup that I made. Hmm. Some grapefruit juice and some lemon. So sort of like a citrusy spicy Maag.

[00:03:45] Oh that's kind of like the hot take, but you just don't have the ginger beer. I made a I made a hot take and I add a cucumber to it. Oh yum. Yeah. Sounds good. Yeah. It's really good. It sounds really necessary. And I brought the tequila in here with me just in case I need to freshen up.

[00:04:05] So with that you're ready. Yes, I'm ready. You're supposed to say it's time to talk. Am I supposed to say yes. All right. All right. It's time to talk about Climate Guide. And are you ready? Yes, I am, Mary. I am ready.

[00:04:27] OK, so first we have to start with the climate coverage and how much it plummeted in 2020.

[00:04:36] It wasn't good and it was not good. Yeah, we ended 2019 thinking, wow, we've come so far. Close is here to stay. This is amazing.

[00:04:47] January still looking pretty good. January 2020, climate coverage had almost doubled from January 2019, the same again in February 2020. We're like, yes, this is looking good. And then Mark Korona happens March. And all the media institutions were like, no one can think about two things at one time that is literally impossible for the human brain. Only octopuses can do that. Yep. Yep, it's true. Yeah. So climate change coverage in March dropped 36 percent in April. It dropped 30 percent, 30 percent for a more. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a fifty nine percent drop from January to April in coverage and then we started to dip down below twenty nineteen numbers. Yeah. So depressing. No, no, no.

[00:05:49] We were below twenty nineteen numbers in March or so. March twenty twenty compared to March twenty nineteen was drastically lower. Oh yeah. Yeah. Totally, totally. So the thing to remember like going back to that January twenty twenty number that you had talked about, like where climate coverage had doubled from a year before Australia was on fire, a whole continent was on fire. Like I think it's important to remember that that's how we started the year and that and that that was only last January.

[00:06:25] And the other thing to keep in mind is that even though the Australia fires pretty much double climate coverage, we weren't talking about the Australia fires nearly enough, like not even close. And there are also these horrible floods happening in Indonesia the exact same time. And you weren't hearing about them at all. And the locust swarms in Africa, in East Africa, you weren't hearing about them at all. So even though there was a huge jump in climate coverage in January, twenty twenty, it wasn't nearly enough and it was basically a double of the bare minimum.

[00:07:02] Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah, so I mean, on that note, fires in California brought coverage back up a little bit in sort of late summer, early fall, but we never did really catch up to 2019 numbers. And we're still quite a bit below them. Now, however, bright, bright side, climate coverage is rising month by month now. And people did find some creative ways to tell the climate story. We definitely saw a huge boom, I think, this year in climate media in general between, oh, we did all the newsletters and the podcast and like just lots of people kind of breaking out on their own and trying new things. And like we did. Like we did.

[00:07:50] And and just to put this conversation to rest, no, we don't think the market is oversaturated. It's just that there's lots of different angles on climate and there's plenty of room for more a clarity of all kinds.

[00:08:06] Yeah, no, we talk about this a lot, you and I. We're thrilled to see so many new podcasts and newsletters coming up. Like Hatake isn't even that old. It's like a year and a couple of months old. And our newsletter is less than a year old.

[00:08:20] And there's so many old heads. All of us. All of it. Oh, yeah. With the podcast. Not quite with the newsletter yet. Yeah.

[00:08:27] But there's so many different ways to tell this story and there's no way for it to be too many people talking about it. Like you would never say that there's too many politics newsletters or too many like I don't know, feminism podcasts. Right. And like we need just as much media saturation on climate as there is on all of those other issues, because climate is just as big as all of those other issues. And I think this thing with, like people who have been in climate work for a long time, like feeling like they need to read and absorb every piece of climate media and we need to get to a place where that's physically impossible, where it's a really good point. You're not going to be able to read every newsletter. You're not going to be able to read every story. You're not going to be able to read listen to every podcast, because all of it is too much.

[00:09:19] And that's how we know if we, like, hit the hit the perfect pitch. When you can't keep up. Yep, that's exactly right. Right, and that was a big part of why we started our newsletter, was that we were starting to get to the point where you couldn't keep up with every single story. And so, you know, we have a Digest's in our newsletter to to keep it to just, like, keep track of all the climate stories. But there are definitely parts of this year where we were like, why is our Digest's so short?

[00:09:47] Because there wasn't enough people publishing on it.

[00:09:52] Yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But There, did there there were still some some really stand out stories.

[00:10:00] We put a call out on Twitter this past week for people to send us some of their favorites and people really delivered. There were a bunch of stories in there that I had not seen when they first came out that were great. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Make sure you check that out.

[00:10:14] Yeah. The other thing we saw in terms of like these broad over strokes is that a lot of a lot of these big media outlets who had made big commitments to climate really kind of dropped the ball and then renewed them later in the year when the West Coast was on fire. But then it turned out to be that, like a lot of these a lot of these magazines, especially their commitment to covering climate as the story of our time really just meant giving somebody a newsletter. And that's really what it turned into. And it was it was super disappointing. Like I felt like I stopped seeing as much climate coverage from The New Yorker in particular, and The Atlantic, too. And no shade on Bill McKibben and Rodemeyer, who both have newsletters there and our great writers, but they can't tell their whole story.

[00:11:08] Like, yeah, just giving one dude a newsletter, it does not a content strategy make oh I know. And you're the fucking Atlantic, you're the New Yorker. You going to tell me that you can't cover this like the world's on fire? You can't find the resources to fucking cover it. Like Girl Holler at me commissioned me. I'll write it. Actually, don't actually don't I have enough shit to do but I don't have time.

[00:11:29] Yeah but no it's really wild. I know it is. It's really because I don't know especially because a lot of folks made those commitments right after they had pulled their climate reporters off of climate to cover covid and um. And it's like yeah I don't know. Yeah. I just, I don't understand why, you know, it's crazy. Like I not to like, toot my own horn here, but to indulge me for like maybe like ten or so years ago I partnered with a friend of mine to start like a crowd funded climate reporting collaborative, because we were annoyed by the fact that all these large national outlets did not have like in depth climate coverage. They were not running long form climate stories. There were hardly ever climate features. There were hardly there was just like, you know, it was sort of maybe like a news feed on like the biggest climate news. But that was about it. And so, you know, we started that and we syndicated content and ended up being like six of us to The Atlantic and The Guardian and all these places. And we ended up ending it because in part, like all of these places started to actually like have much better climate reporting and to really establish climate desk and all that. And then I feel like I don't know, I just I'm like, how many times are we going to go through this cycle?

[00:13:02] Why can't we just have people in the same way that there are like there's a business desk at every newspaper? Why is why is there not just always a climate desk? And like those reporters, you know, weigh in on a whole wide variety of stories.

[00:13:19] You know, like a lot of different things can be a story that a business reporter does, for example. Exactly. I don't know how why it's taken us so long to get to that point with climate.

[00:13:31] But I mean, I think it says a lot about what we value. Right. Like, you would never write a story about pretty much anything without talking about the economic impacts of it. But we feel like it's perfectly fine to write all of these stories about anything without the climate impacts or climate intersections taking front and center stage. And that says a lot about what we think is permanent and what we think is not. Yeah, and that's like a major freaking problem. Like like I read all these stories about the refugee crisis, for example. Hardly ever does it mention climate change. But every single time it talks about how much money it takes to feed a refugee family, how much money it takes to build a refugee facility and write like how much like the economic impact of it is always included in the story, because without that, it would be considered incomplete. Well, how is it complete without talking about the climate implications of, first of all, why folks are are moving in the first place? Like what are the climate implications of taking a boat full of refugees and casting them out to sea indefinitely? Like what does that mean in a hotter summer, in a hotter sun on acidic oceans? Right. So I don't know. I could talk about this forever.

[00:14:46] Yeah. Yeah. No, I know it's really it's really frustrating. And I do hope I mean, we are hearing more of these kind of climate commitments. So hopefully, you know, we'll see more coming from them this year. And I do feel like I mean, there are some some pretty heavy hitters that have left the kind of, you know, quote unquote mainstream and started their own thing. Yeah. Too. So they have I think that's actually, you know, that's not a bad thing. I think that helps to like spur the bigger outlets to realize, like, oh, actually there's an audience for this stuff. Know that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:25] And we'll be keeping an eye on this. Yes. This is what we do here.

[00:15:31] So if they're keeping their commitments, we will be happy to congratulate. And if not, we will be happy to drag that. Right.

[00:15:38] Correct. So, yeah, I next I want to talk about the first big thing that we've already talked about that kicked climate out of the headlines, and that was the covid-19. And I was just re listening to our episode after like like the covid-19. Lockdown's became real in early March. I think we had we had David Wallace Wells on and and. Right. Yeah. And we were supposed to have a. That one in person and weren't able to, because obviously and it still felt so bizarre, like just listening to that podcast, all we were talking about was like washing your hands, washing your hands, washing your hands and like, you know nothing about mass.

[00:16:26] Well, we were like talking about like, oh, this can't last that long. Like, this will be crazy if it's still going on by summer. It would be so crazy. It is still going on by May, you know, like we said.

[00:16:43] Oh good. We just cut. Wow. It was so surreal at that point. It's like believe that this was real. And you know what's so fucked up is like I look back at that sometimes fondly, like I look back on. Yeah, I have fond memories. I have nostalgia.

[00:17:04] Yes. Early we are like remember.

[00:17:07] I just remember like how fucking weird I thought it was when I like the first few times I went to the grocery store and like everyone was bragging about how unsettling that was. And now it just it feels like it's going to be unsettling when it's not that.

[00:17:22] Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things that, like I still have the nostalgia for it, too, is like during that time we still had the primaries going on. Yeah. And like it didn't feel like Joe Biden was inevitable.

[00:17:41] Yes, that's right. In fact, it seemed very it seemed like that really kind of came out of nowhere. I was just remembering that about Whited that everybody no one expected him to do anything. He was a laughing stock. It was like, yeah, right. He was a straight up laughing stock.

[00:17:58] And then he was inevitable and was like, how did that happen? But yeah, in early quarantine, he was still going up against Bernie. And I don't know, maybe that was like what made those early days not feel as bad to me. And look, I'm very glad that Joe Biden won like I cried tears of relief.

[00:18:17] But, you know, I want to Bernie instead or I went to Elizabeth Warren instead of doing at least one of those. Yeah, he wasn't much. Yeah, he wasn't. I don't think he was very many people's top choice. Yeah. Yeah. But you.

[00:18:35] Yeah. Going back to to covid-19. So when this really took off in mid-March, a lot of climate stories got postponed and then killed all together and it became pretty much impossible to pitch them unless there was a hook between climate and and covid, because we talked about this a little bit earlier this week, like in the early days of covered. The other thing that was kind of happening was like if you were a climate person, people who didn't know anything about climate or covid were rushed to you and be like, So what is this? I don't like can you explain this to me? And blah, blah, blah. And all the climate people were like, I don't know either.

[00:19:17] I'm no public health person. I'm like, what do you think? Yeah.

[00:19:20] And what that says to me is that climate is way to tether to science. So people think that if you care about climate, you must be like a science geek. No shade on science geeks. I have lots of scientist friends. They're great people. Lots of them are very funny. And but like not everyone who's into climate is into science. Right. And that is like a perception that we need to shift. But I yeah, I remember that.

[00:19:47] And being like, I don't know, they said wash your hands, wash your hands.

[00:19:50] I don't know what to tell you. I can't even calculate time zones. You think I can figure out a virus.

[00:19:58] Yeah, yes, yes. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And then hot.

[00:20:05] You know, the other bonkers way that people try to make it a climate story was this eco fascist myth, mythmaking that drove all of us crazy that the earth is healing. Amy. Yeah, and we are at the virus like all of these pictures and meme labels are, right? Yeah, exactly. There were like whales in New Orleans and it was like, oh, this is like whales.

[00:20:31] And then like, remember that was you remember the fake dot, the fake pictures of dolphins in Venice? That's what I was alluding to. That's what I was alluding to. Yeah, yeah, yes. And then everyone was like, it's fake. And then it was like, oh well. But still the earth is healing and like, oh I don't know. Yeah I, yeah I, I was talking to someone about this the other day because they were like, but I don't understand how that ties into eco fascism. So like real quick, basically, you know, if humans are the virus, then what that quickly leads to is like which humans are the virus. Right. And like Bagli. Yeah. And also like, you know, if nature can only be healed by people dying, then like which people should be the ones that die or that like have fewer kids or, you know, any of those things, it just kind of leads to this whole, you know, we need to protect our natural resources from humans versus like, you know, humans need to learn how to live in balance with nature, which is a little less less fashi right.

[00:21:40] And also, like, think about the people who were suffering the worst from this pandemic and it was black and indigenous and those are the people who have contributed the least to climate change.

[00:21:51] So again, with this whole who's the virus thing here. Mm hmm. Right. Like we want to be real about it.

[00:21:58] Rich people are the virus. Yes. Yes. And you know what?

[00:22:02] covid in slow them down at all. No, no. It's set them up running to New Zealand.

[00:22:09] And actually, that's another way that this was actually a climate story that didn't get a lot of attention. So when Colbert really kicked off a lot of rich people headed to their bunkers, bunkers, Zelin and other places, too, but mostly New Zealand. And it was like I think a lot of people outside of climate didn't quite realize that the super rich have these bunkers and they've had them because they've been like, well, when climate gets really bad, I'll just go to New Zealand, to my bunker. That was like stocked with everything they. And they're actually quite nice and and write it out, right, and they were like, well, good thing I invested in that because now there's a pandemic and I can just write it out in my book. And so, yeah. And also New Zealand now, like, people are having parties like There,. They're doing good. So are doing great. I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that eco fascists mythmaking was pretty quickly follow with the. Oh you think covid is bad. Where do you get a load of climate change like that little false dichotomy like this drove me crazy. I saw so many political cartoons where it was like, look, you know, coronavirus is this big thing beating up this guy. And then right behind him is an even bigger, even angrier guy labeled climate change ready to, like, beat the guy up again. And then behind him, the biodiversity crisis. That's an even bigger, even angrier guy. And it was just like, dude, like, that's not they're not going to take turns first.

[00:23:51] Exactly. Yeah, they're going to come all at once. And you know that also, I just feel like in the same way that people were doing the whole leg nature is healing thing. A lot of people were really framing like this sort of self imposed, you know, quarantine stuff and whatever as like, you know, as kind of like the same as a climate solution. I was like, OK, yeah. Like, it's not either or problem. They're they're not you know, they're not totally similar problems and the solutions are not similar. Like why why can't we just talk about these things as like, you know, side by side complex issues. Why do we have to, you know, do this thing where we're like comparing and contrasting all of them? Yeah, I don't know.

[00:24:41] Yeah, it was interesting, too, because Republicans Republicans kind of latched on it to it as like this is what the Green New Deal would do, like it would deprive you of, oh, do you hate quarantine?

[00:24:52] Just wait till you see the New Deal. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. When actually the reality is more like, you know, if you hate quarantine, just wait till you get a hold of, like, not acting on climate, you know. Right.

[00:25:10] Honestly, the real thing should be, oh, if you hate it, wildfires in 2020. Where do you see them in twenty twenty five. Oh God. Yeah I know. Too soon. Too soon. It's never not going to be too soon for that Friday one in California. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Yeah I know. OK, so you know eventually there was quite a bit of very good climate writing on climate and covid. Yeah.

[00:25:37] And like in particular kind of debunking all of these myths that you just talked about.

[00:25:43] Yeah. Yeah. So what were some of your fav my favorites about this myth in particular, if we are the virus came from Cape Marvel Briancon Cape wrote a piece called I Am a Mad Scientist that you published on Drilled.

[00:26:04] And Brian wrote two articles on Earth There, about basically how. How craven the Republicans are and how like they actually want you to become accustomed to mass death, and then later on he had a follow up essay that was like, oh, they want you to become comfortable with mass death of people of color in particular. And because they are they're becoming like me, Catley. Eco fascists, like when they like, as Republicans accept climate change, they are becoming more and more eco fascists and is super fucking gross. Another one, David Wallace Wells wrote about how Korona teaches us what happens when you ignore a problem.

[00:27:01] And how like, oh, you don't want to get alarmed. You don't want to get alarmed because there was also this.

[00:27:06] Another big parallel between climate change and covid is like not wanting to be hysterical, which I think speaks to misogyny. Really like nobody wants to overreact. Right. And then turns out everybody is fucking underreacting and that that comes into play with both climate change and our reaction to Karradah. And so David was writing about like you could have been in way, better shape, like this was going to suck either way. But this aversion to overreacting is a big part of why you have a huge problem. And then you wrote a fantastic piece in Huffington Post about individual actions.

[00:27:48] Yes. Because, again, people were like, oh, see, if we each, you know, chose to do without, we could tackle climate change. And it was like, no, OK, first of all, we're not all and none of us are choosing this.

[00:28:03] No, not a choice. Yeah, it's not a choice.

[00:28:06] And also, like, actually look at what has happened with everybody choosing their own personalized covid guidelines. It has not done well. Right? It's not working. Right. And also, people have been enabled to make those choices by government policies. Right. Like it wasn't like if I if my company had not say you can work from home, I wouldn't have been able to work from home, you know, likely. Yeah. Things have enabled that. Right, exactly. Yep, yep, yep. And then you wrote, speaking of which, a great piece about Korona and climate change, making us feel a lot of the same things which I thought was so smart because it's true that. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's like this kind of like paralysis of like grief and anxiety that is very similar. Yeah, but I got to tell you, looking back at that piece for March, like, I can't help but laugh.

[00:29:06] It makes you naive. Little from right. Blumer memory.

[00:29:13] Like, I was so dramatic. Like the opening line is I've been crying a lot lately and I'm like, girl, you know what the fuck the rest of this year's Garretti Mary?

[00:29:24] It's like, oh really? You'll be crying from laughing, delirious, maniacal tears by the end of this year. You're going to be in a corner.

[00:29:34] Yeah. Yeah. Seriously, March feels like a really long time.

[00:29:41] Yeah, no, I mean, I'm glad I wrote it, but I also look back at it like, oh God, girl, you are adorable, pull yourself together.

[00:29:53] But it was very real at the time. At the time was super real. Yeah. So yeah. The other very big thing that not climbing out of the headlines this year was it feels weird to say it, but it was racism.

[00:30:10] Racism. Yeah it's not. Yeah. You know, the reason it feels weird to say that is because when do we ever not have racism around these. Exactly.

[00:30:22] But this summer there was a huge and overdue eruption around Black Lives Matter in in the immediate wake of George Foley's murder. And it was about much more than the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. It was about Brianna Taylor. It was about a Montabaur. It was about plenty of other people going back to slave ships.

[00:30:45] Right. But that was that seemed to be like a very galvanizing moment. And I just want to say, like, I knew that that moment was very different. Because in the wake of every other police murder that I can invest in my recent memory, people started to attack the place where it happened, like when Eric Garner was killed, it became all about like, fuck Staten Island. And when Trayvon Martin was killed, it was fuck Florida. And like even with Orlando, Castille was killed. It was like, fuck Minnesota. But this time nobody, like, named a locality.

[00:31:24] I was fuck the police. Right. So it was fuck America really and fuck America. Right. And it was everywhere.

[00:31:31] It was seriously everywhere. Nobody localized it at all. And I was like, oh, this is different. And the other thing is that that same week there was a black man in Central Park named Christian Cooper, who know a white lady named Brittany. I know about Amy that Amy threatened to call the police on him, which is basically threatening his life. And that happened like within days of each other. And it's hard to believe that that was the same frickin week. Yeah, I didn't even remember that those two things were side by side like that. Yes.

[00:32:05] And that's what I did feel. It felt really it felt like, well, just seeing it was it was especially because it was, you know, a couple of months into quarantine and and everything like it it was it did it felt like a kind of a heartening movement to see so many people get out and protest. Yeah. Like keep and really like keep protesting for. Yeah. Long time, you know, like it wasn't one day or even one week, so.

[00:32:34] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that that was super in encouraging. And I also felt like the reason so many people poured out into the streets in that way was because when we had been deprived of social interaction for so long, that's true. And also because it was really fucking hot this summer. Every big moment of huge like social unrest has been when it was really, really hot, like Bastille Day, the L.A. riots from the 90s, because there have been many L.A. riots, the Watts riots, rather, the Detroit riots, Newark riots, every single time that there's been a huge social upheaval, it has been when it was really fucking hot.

Transcription

In our 2020 year-in-review episode, Mary and Amy talk about how Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests impacted climate coverage, how the media dealt with record-setting fires and hurricanes, the beauty that was greentrolling taking off this year, and what where we hope to see the climate story go in 2021.

 So let’s start with, really basically, what is climate reparations — what does that mean?

So
 climate reparations is a term that was coined by Maxine Burkett, who is
 an attorney and a practitioner, and a teacher in Hawaii.

She
 coined this term by writing a law review about what government could do
 to respond to climate harm, and assess all the harm that has been 
caused by so many groups and sanctioned by the government — and taxed 
double on it as well.

So
 really wrestling with all this major pollution and the fact that it 
didn’t just rob people of their actual goods, but of the vision of a 
future where we wouldn’t be fighting climate change.

She
 did this in a really incredible article in 2009, which came on the 
heels of a really great piece of litigation. I worked at Center for 
Race, Poverty, and Environment in 2009. The case that they had just 
finished was a massive effort led by a community of Alaskans in Kivalina
 — the 

So
 this case was about a community that could prove that their island 
landmass and their permanent sea ice was melting and that it was caused 
by climate change. So they sued Exxon Mobil — and got $89 million. Did 
they get that in real life? No, because Exxon fought and fought and 
fought them and appealed until they didn’t have to do anything about 
that.

(Remember that the next time Exxon tries to pretend like they’re a climate organization on Twitter.)

It’s kind of the precursor to all the climate liability cases happening now, right?

Yeah!
 And Ruth Hopkins, amazing human being. She is the daughter of the woman
 who was involved in that litigation, along with Luke Cole and a lot of 
other really great, smart people who recognize [climate reparations] is 
real. And we had to come up with a way to talk about harm when it feels 
like it’s everywhere, but we know it’s from something specific.

In
 2017, a couple of climate groups sort of bandied about the words 
“climate reparations” because reparations themselves have come in and 
out of fashion as people get a little woke — and then get scared. And so
 as reparations have come up, progressive people have been trying to 
figure out how they fit in. Because the work of environmentalism has 
avoided talking about people, racism, and sexism, and all those -isms 
that really make that money.

Given
 that a lot of this term has come and gone in a global context, it’s 
often described as loss and damage. And people think about it in terms 
of, how do you move money to people who will be forced to be climate 
refugees, who have to get up and leave because everything’s on fire?

So
 the folks who are facing that imminently, who are terrified of the 
truth, which is that their homelands are not safe and they will be 
people without land — are thinking about whose job it is to pay for it 
when the communities that are going to suffer first and worst.

They
 didn’t make those deals [to burn fossil fuels], didn’t get any benefits
 of it, weren’t asked, and frankly, shouldn’t be made to pay to 
relocate. That loss and damage conversation has been happening in the 
UN. It’s been happening at all of the COPs [UN climate change 
conferences]. Last year the Gulf South Center for Law and Policy held a —
 well, you know, it’s the South, so they do a lot of whiskey-related 
events — a whiskey and reparations event and a bunch of people came to 
talk about it.

It
 was one of those things that that made folks say: Right. So reparations
 is coming back. In the U.S. it has gone nowhere. Loss and damage hasn’t
 gone anywhere. But nobody will get the U.S. to admit that it’s been a 
bad partner. And there are internal situations that have to be dealt 
with. So Black reparations is just looking at the fact that the 
concentration of wealth on behalf of people who’ve made money hurting 
all of us is exactly corollary to the distribution of impacts, health 
impacts, loss of much shorter life income.

All
 of that stuff is connected. So climate reparations is really just 
trying to figure out how do you connect these twin harms and how do you 
add that to the conversation around racialized harm and racialized 
capital? There is not a single thing that exists in America that isn’t 
built on Black people’s bodies or Indigenous people’s suffering and 
relocation.

Yeah, the way that I usually explain climate reparations to people is: You fuck it up, you clean it up, right?

Yes. That’s exactly what it is. Right. Exactly.

When
 you get into a car accident, if you are at fault, you have to pay for 
the other person’s repairs, and that’s kind of what climate reparations 
is, right?

That’s
 right. It’s slow. The U.S. has its problems. The U.S. has racism, has 
relocation. It has tons of money being made on the backs of human beings
 who did not ask to be put in situations where their lives will be 
shortened by everything. But the U.S. itself is not the only container 
for this. England rivals it — having had a deeper hand in this for a 
longer period of time. Think about any number of island nations, 
including the British Virgin Islands, which are suddenly being given 
back to the people that live there just in time for them to get wiped 
out.

So
 if we would like a real conversation about climate reparations, we 
would be asking, why is the Crown returning all of this stuff just in 
time for people to get wiped out instead of offering them the 
opportunity to be able to move when they’re going to have the house? 
Because one in four people will become a climate refugee in our 
lifetime.

This is a good time to remember the full names of some of these companies like Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum.

Almost
 every time oil companies talk about this stuff and also this whole 
batch of tech pros in the climate space, they talk about the “energy 
poverty problem.” [That] you can’t act on climate now because that will 
make it so hard for developing countries to get a certain quality of 
life that you need. They will make this argument that it’s basically 
racist to not let India have coal or to not let Africa have coal when 
the reality is rich countries could just pay for those countries to 
transition to a cleaner energy. There is nothing stopping them from 
doing that. And the idea that somehow, it is bad for those countries to 
try to act on climate globally is a neat little rhetorical trick that 
they play.

Right.
 It doesn’t take into consideration that almost every one of the places 
that you just mentioned is actually fighting coal. Yeah, like 
decolonize.

So
 many different parts of India and Asia and Africa are in the middle of 
the fight of their lives, because every time we’ve ever had a win in the
 U.S., we’re like, yeah, we’ve killed coal. If we close our eyes and 
pretend that industry hasn’t moved offshore to an entirely different 
place without the benefit of our information of the health impacts, our 
resources to relocate people in government that, well, seven minutes ago
 we might have said have looser enforcement capacity.

I
 think we’re in a moment where we’re not feeling so smug about what our 
government can do. But we used to think, oh, it’s a jungle out there, 
quite literally — it’s nonsense that we can say and folks don’t want to 
have their water polluted or their air polluted or to be forced into 
industries where you could lose a limb and get black lung.

We
 have lots of proof here in the U.S. that people who give you black lung
 leave you to die in a hospital and don’t pay for your repair, or your 
community, if they even cover your funeral. One of the things that 
climate reparations could and should really focus on doing is resolving 
that question around coal because we’re going to be there with oil and 
gas and all the fossil fuel until we get rid of it.

I
 think that over the past couple of years, the climate movement has 
gotten more comfortable talking about racism and the intersections with 
misogyny and white supremacy and all of these other problems. Not where 
it needs to be, but I get trolled when I talk about it a lot less, to be
 honest. So I see an improvement. It feels like it’s becoming more 
mainstream to talk about it as this intersectional, holistic issue. And 
as a result of that, I’m seeing a lot of people come around to the idea 
of climate reparations and thinking that they invented it.

Because
 in the U.S. it runs up against white supremacist culture, maintenance, 
and the structure of philanthropy. So to call for climate reparations is
 to call into question the way our government operates, whether or not 
we should have free-market capitalism that allows people to plunder you 
to death. And so the idea that we can call for climate reparations is 
really a wholesale review of what the economy is made of.

We
 have to talk about treaty rights. We have to talk about the Green New 
Deal with sincerity. One of my favorite things about this moment of 
climate reparations, the remix, is the idea that we’re bringing it back 
at a time when the Green New Deal provides a roadmap for what it could 
do. It feels like a lot to me, like the teeth that could make a Green 
New Deal work because it’s a lot of great ideas about moving capital and
 people.

But
 if we don’t stop folks from making money, seize their assets so they 
don’t leave sick and dying people that they hurt on the sidewalk to die 
in a climate-related event, then we have some capital to make the Green 
New Deal happen that doesn’t just come from taxation credits and moving 
around the banking until it looks funny and everybody forgets to count. 
So I do think that this is a moment where that framework with the 
enforcement capacity of making polluters pay, stopping them at the door,
 frisking them for their assets, and then returning them back to the 
people they harmed.

I
 think the two things need each other. And that’s some of the boldness 
in terms of coming out. Or I would say is as one of those people, part 
of the reason why it’s more comfortable is because there are Black women
 yelling it — there are Black women calling for it, and building 
programs around it, and connecting the dots on it. And whether we’re 
talking about NAACP Climate and trying to figure out how to deal with 
climate finance. So we act for environmental justice, thinking through 
how do we connect the dots not just on the harm, but to how we got here 
into a narrative Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy on this based on 
how do we move this to connect the ecofeminist in Africa that’s working 
on Lake Chad? So the African Americans living in the Global South, 
inside the U.S., inside the north, that are struggling in Louisiana and 
Texas, where we do well in Appalachia and West Virginia, we are not in a
 unique moment.

We’re
 just in a place where there’s time for real alignment. And it has been a
 real pleasure of mine over the last two years to connect all of those 
dots, connect all of those people and then say, hey, wait a minute, 
there are Indigenous communities fighting for a land back. And guess 
what falls under the category of climate reparations? Land back.

I
 actually think in this moment where people are super focused about 
getting a new administration, overcoming the revolution, pushing for a 
climate. There’s a real opportunity to reconnect what’s happening in the
 U.S. to what’s happening in the Global South and the rest of the world 
and start building some Global South leadership that depends on the U.S.
 and bidding where it’s made mistakes. Climate reparations feels like a 
great way to do that. One of the things that’s really cool about it, 
Sonia Kolinsky, who has worked a lot with Maxine Burkett that’s thought 
about different kinds of reparations, Sandy Darity and Culburra, tons of
 other people have also thought about this. But the idea is generally 
that the first thing you’ve got to do is admit you broke something. You 
have to say you’re sorry. And then a second thing is you deal with 
people about what they need to get better and then you give it to them. 
And they are a part of a conversation about being brought back to 
wholeness or being moved or given the tools to adapt and build a 
different kind of housing so you could stay in your homeland.

Like
 these are conversations we can’t get in if the U.S. is still a bastard 
that can’t get involved in any conversations about climate because we’re
 still reeling from the last four years of awful.

Right. But can you say more about the “you need to say you’re sorry first”? Like why isn’t that…

The
 U.S. has been reluctant to do that because it usually means liability. 
My grandfather’s brother was the youngest person executed by the state 
of South Carolina. And it took so many years and a lot of dead people 
for them to apologize and say, “Yeah, sorry. So your grandpa’s brother 
was a kid. He couldn’t have lifted the implement and everyone in the 
town at the time knew it wasn’t him. We just wanted to execute a Black 
boy and we just did it.” I have siblings who have the same eyes.

It
 took another generation of people and forcing the government to 
apologize 70 years later, after almost all those people were dead, they 
said, “Oh, yeah, we totally did that.”

Because
 if they did it in the lifetime of the people that they harm, they would
 have to pay for it, given that the bill came due for the harm. Right? 
As Trump was being installed, the state said we don’t have to pay that. 
You know why? Because you won’t ever get this president if we take it to
 the highest court to respond to you. So he just walked off. And so this
 has happened to my family, but it’s also happened to communities 
dealing with black lung and Appalachia who were supposed to get the 
black lung fund.

That’s
 why we need to own up to an apology because it makes liability. It 
means you have to assess the harm that you’ve done to other people and 
engage them about resolving it. So if we don’t have acknowledgment come 
first, restitution and satisfaction will never come.

 Tamara, if you could design the perfect climate reparations policy, like, what would it look like?

So
 I actually think that the best-case scenario for climate reparations 
would be that we start to recognize that communities have to be dealt 
with in terms of the Green New Deal, like they are beneficiaries, like 
they are a series of folks who have been taken for hundreds of years of a
 ride they never signed up for. And we start looking at the harm to 
communities.

We
 look really closely at all the folks who’ve gotten all this fossil fuel
 money in the last couple of bailouts. We retract all of it. So first we
 take our money back from them.

Then
 we go after them through climate liability lawsuits to the government, 
no longer giving them subsidies, and cut off the faucet so we can stop 
spending good money after bad. And after we’ve done that, we put all 
that in a fund that, unlike the blackland, actually does respond to 
people who need to be to be rehoused, need to be moved to different 
communities, need to look for higher ground because maybe not today, 
maybe not tomorrow, but in 10 years, they’re not going to have a place 
to live if they’re sunny day flooding. I really love how we put such 
friendly names on horrifying things that will destroy you.

It’s like a positive feedback loop right? Yes, that actually sounds good.

So
 if you’re looking for higher ground right now and you aren’t 
independently wealthy and you can move to higher ground, I think you 
should be really smart about setting up a fund for people to be able to 
move to a place of their choice where resources to risk their lives. 
Now, that’s just happening at the community level. The Green New Deal 
has tons of ways that shows up in affordable housing and better 
transportation and community design and retraining for people. But at 
the same time, the U.S. has been a bad actor and expelled a bunch of 
things into the rest of the atmosphere, along with other bad actors 
globally.

And
 they have to think about what the pool of funds are for exactly what 
Amy mentioned, for people who are having to who are being chastised for 
getting an air conditioner and getting a car instead of a bicycle, if 
that’s what they choose because we’re not making the technology 
available.

So
 it’d be super great if we flattened all the licenses by paying for them
 so people get what they do so that I could move into better tech 
without having to pay the price tag for it.

Yeah,
 exactly. And also some of those places you got to get an air 
conditioner because it’s gotten too hot to live. Yeah, it’s gotten too 
hot to live because of the actions of, you know, companies and 
governments in the Global North.

And
 I think globally it would look like forgiveness of debt, pick a 
country, pay global debt. Like anybody who has been through the global 
debt is probably also first and worst to suffer in terms of climate 
change. So closing that so people will have to make a choice between 
fleeing and living is really important.

I
 also think it would be really, really great to start looking at the 
maps across geographies and pulling down all the walls because people 
are going to have to relocate. And as nation-states try to figure out 
who they want to save and who they literally are going to let die, we 
shouldn’t be building infrastructure to support that even in a 
hyper-militarized moment like the one we’re in.

So
 I do think that some of this has to happen in the U.S. A bunch of it is
 going to have to happen through states and municipalities suing the 
government and these perpetrators for bringing us here. But then the 
rest of it has to happen at the government, a government level from 
tribes and Indigenous communities to U.S. and Asia, U.S. and Europe, and
 everywhere. There’s a lot of transactions to be done and undone and 
none of it happens if we keep handing off all of our money to people who
 hate us and are trying to kill us. Yet coal, oil, and gas, if you’re 
out there, I’m talking to you.

But
 also the way I understand climate reparations is like if you did 
reparations for slavery and colonialism, you might deal with this 
already. Right? It’s kind of like the Global North becomes the debtors, 
right? And they are indebted to Africa and to Asia and the places that 
they stole from. And, you know, what would that look like?

Yeah,
 part of why this means so much to me as a person who shows up in a 
Black woman’s body, is that all the wealth that there is comes from 
Africa. Like I would be in West Africa, cold chillin’ if it wasn’t for —
 so all of us who have come to here through so many transactions that we
 were neither given accountability agency or any remuneration for, like 
the wealth of this country is in our bodies.

There,
 and in and in the lost opportunity, whether it’s genetic or epigenetic,
 which means not just this generation, but this one and everyone that 
could come through your body with the trauma that you’ve experienced, 
like just and answering that debt in a form of reparations would in fact
 deal with the fact that you don’t live where you live by accident.

Your
 zip code in terms of your health by accident. The racial covenants that
 have decided whether relatives even talk to you about communities that 
you live in, all of that stuff is wrapped into it. So the idea that we 
could do reparations without climate is silly. And to do climate without
 reparations is intentional blindness.

Hopefully the media will learn a lot and learn how to actually talk about climate reparations. That’s the goal.

I’m
 just so glad that you asked these questions and you wanted to have this
 chat because I do think it’s about to blow up and go big time. It’s the
 perfect time.

The term climate reparations first came into the global climate conversation back in 2009. It disappeared for a while but has re-emerged in the past year or two. Environmental activist, organizer, lawyer, and all-around climate expert Tamara Toles O'Laughlin joins us to talk about where this idea came from, why it disappeared, and why it's back...hopefully to stay.

Hot Take S2

S2, Ep16 | No Better Time for Climate Reparations, with Tamara Toles O’Laughlin

S2, Ep15 | 2020: The Shitshow

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.

S2, Ep15 | 2020: The Shitshow

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S2, Ep16 | No Better Time for Climate Reparations, with Tamara Toles O’Laughlin