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

Mary Heglar [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.

Amy Westervelt [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.

Mary Heglar [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.

Amy Westervelt [00:01:01] I know.

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

Amy Westervelt [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.

Mary Heglar [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.

Amy Westervelt [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.

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

Amy Westervelt [00:01:37] Okay. Ready to get started?

Mary Heglar [00:01:39] Yep. Let's do it.

Amy Westervelt [00:01:46] Meera, thanks for being here.

Meera Subramanian [00:01:47] Great to be here.

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

Meera Subramanian [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.

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

Meera Subramanian [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.

Mary Heglar [00:03:28] Hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah.

Meera Subramanian [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.

Mary Heglar [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.

Meera Subramanian [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.

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

Amy Westervelt [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.

Meera Subramanian [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.

Amy Westervelt [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?

Meera Subramanian [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.

[00:16:59] Yeah, yeah.

[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.

[00:29:46] 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.

[00:35:39] How do you feel about that?

[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.

[00:39:22] There was even more disinformation. Right.

[00:39:25] Yeah. I mean, there was let's see, an independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires. That is unconscionable. At the same time that an article in the Australian making similar assertions became the most popular on the site, which, you know, can be rigged, too. It says many of those bots and trolls previously expressed support for Trump. Theft is not great. That's not great.

[00:39:54] And then we have a nominee already for a headline of the year. Definitely headline of the month from Brian Kahn in Arthur. It's not arson, you absolute fucking morons.

[00:40:10] It's a work of art. And, you know, it gets straight to the art. The heart of the issue. So good job, Bryan. Good job.

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[00:41:50] I notice a big conversation happening around reproduction and climate, this mother. I mean, I start with that conversation as it relates to Australia. I saw a lot of articles about what it was like to be pregnant in Australia and there are a lot of pregnant women calling our hospitals and asking for special certificates to give to the airlines so they could fly. They were asking to be induced and asking, is my babies safer inside of me or outside of me? Because while everybody else is running around with mask breathing mass, there are precious few such massive you can give to an infant that like logit hasn't learned really how to breathe or what breathing is at the moment as the lungs are the last thing to develop in a baby, right? Yeah. The most vulnerable part of our new child. Yeah. And sending them out into like just straight up unbreathable air feels kind of unconscionable. And another thing I know, so a lot of these articles was that there was a spike in vasectomies in Australia. And I found that really interesting because often when we talk about birth control, period, but in particular birth control as it relates to climate, it's always about women. So as it were, about really regulating women's reproductive choices. And it was interesting to see men starting to take some agency with this. And then we started to see all of these other two in particular, very strong articles from men about the importance of having children during the climate crisis or what it means to be a father and to raise children during the climate crisis. The first one is from Jedidiah Pretty Britan Purdie, and it's hard. The concessions to climate change that I will not make. And it appeared in the Atlantic.

[00:43:32] I'm just going to read a quick section from it.

[00:43:36] On one level, my answer to how can you have a child now is simple.

[00:43:41] I have never been tempted to think we should all stop having children and disappear. Part of the reason climate change is so terrible is that the threat it poses to human life and culture and I want to help them go on. So the question I asked myself every day is how to explain the suffering world to a newcomer. This is what I find myself saying to this little person who can't quite understand me yet. The world is good for all the bad in it. A good place. And you are good. Full of joy, born innocence. But you are not good for the world when you do all the things you will do work, play, love. You will be breaking down as systems, making it unlivable. And there is very little that you personally can do about it. What kind of welcome is that?

[00:44:26] It's a truthful one at least, but it raises more questions. So, yeah.

[00:44:34] I mean, he goes on in the piece to talk about, you know, he's not sorry for having a child. He's, you know, talks about how he's not a young father. You know, he'd made this decision very carefully and very strategically. But it is complicated. He's worried about what he's. What is he going to say to his child? And the next piece was from James Murray in business screen, who's, you know, his kids are a little bit older and he talks about, you know, what he is doing actively as a father to two young boys.

[00:45:05] And Meera, would you mind reading this? Sure.

[00:45:10] It is the smallest of samples. But when I look at the initial stages of my son's education, something remarkable appears to be happening. The desire for a mix of sensitivity and resilience appears to be everywhere. Empathy, curiosity and self-awareness appears to be at the heart of everything they do. These small people greet each other with hugs and smiles each morning without the slightest judgment or self-consciousness. They're better at interrogating both their emotions and the world around them than most adults.

[00:45:38] Nothing is being beaten out of anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Where do we start?

[00:45:45] Where do we start and what do we become and where do you get power from? Learning how to that you. Yeah. There's so many things that are gonna be out of your control. Every single one of us. But how do you learn now that you have some agency? That's what we want to teach. Every every little. Being right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:05] I you know, I just think this is an interesting trend to see men talk about the act of fathering more because I think it kind of speaks more to the collective responsibility to children. Right. Like I.

[00:46:19] I don't know. Do you have. No, I don't. I decided not to have children a long, long time ago. And I ended up marrying someone who has children. So I've got two awesome stepdaughters, but I. Oh, do not have children. My own.

[00:46:31] Yeah, I I don't have children. I talk all the time about like that doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to children because I don't think you have to have children to have children. You know what Emily. And so and I love being in a..

[00:46:44] The world needs more of it really. I'm really good at it.

[00:46:48] And I think that's a really beautiful thing to bring into the climate conversation. I think it really is what resilience is is all about. And so like it's expanding our networks and our communities and welcoming one another. I think that's just really necessary right now.

[00:47:06] Yeah. And so that's what can be. You know, when we're thinking about kids, I mean, it's just such a such an absolutely personal thing. It's something that it's something that you should want, ideally, and have the choices to be able to make that choice. Yeah. And then if you want it, then you then you have the opportunity to to give these kids. Yeah. Teach them and make them into. And hopefully people that can handle what's ahead because what's ahead is is really gonna be tough in real respects. And so but I get why people I mean I I didn't want to have children because I just felt like there was other work to do and other places I wanted to put my energy. But I think you're absolutely right that there's so many other ways that you can have impact.

[00:47:50] So another trend I noticed is even beyond reproduction and fatherhood, I saw a couple of men really grappling with the hope trope as sure. You know what I mean when I say hope trope. I am very much on record as finding this very obnoxious is the thing that happens where anytime a climate person is on a panel or speaking somewhere, someone always asks this question, what gives you hope?

[00:48:17] And I just I find hope to not be the necessary emotion right now.

[00:48:22] And I don't know how you feel about that. Yeah, no, I have dealt with that question all my life. I think I was cynical from a very young age for some reason I don't fully understand. But. And I wrote about this in my book.

[00:48:34] My I mean, my book was focusing on environmental stories from India and how they were facing multiple environmental major, major issues around food and water and reproductive rights.

[00:48:45] And I grappled with that and I found myself asking that question over and over. I would ask I would ask my sources, I've done this. I've completely been guilty of like that question, like, do you have hope in it? And there was this moment that I read about in the conclusion of my book where I was in Roger Stone and I was with a man who had helped basically revive his entire village, which is small scale water restoration efforts. And they'd basically brought this like desiccated landscape back to life. And I ask him this question and I was just like this like light bulb went off of like, just keep. This is like the wrong question. Like, yeah, it was I was present. I kept in my mind, I was thinking of it as a as a noun. Look like there's a yes or a no. Yeah. Either have or you know. Yeah. As a book I'm like, wait a. This is like this is it's a verb, it's an action.

[00:49:36] It's a thing that you just do and just you just keep doing it. And there's no there's some victories maybe, but nothing is ever permanent.

[00:49:48] Even, you know, recognizing this and Rebecca Solnit has written about this and there's a lot of other I mean, I've keep I keep now. You know, if I thought was it was my own. I did have a top of the hill, but there,. I just keep seeing this idea.

[00:50:00] And I think that is the message to drive home is that you really you just engage because what is the option? What is the other option that you don't engage? Yeah. Like you can live with that. And to that. Lucky you. Cause I can't.

[00:50:13] Yeah. I think a lot of the time though, when I see people redefining hope, they redefine it to mean something that there's already a word for in his courage.

[00:50:24] I like hope is the thing that like you know makes me get up in the morning like girl that's courage and say yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:34] So so there are two pieces I think really did a great job at dealing with this. The first one is from David Roberts in VOCs called The Sad Truth about our boldest climate target. I know David from writing very detailed reports.

[00:50:52] Well, there are articles, but they feel like reports about climate policy.

[00:50:55] So this felt like a step out of his usual zone.

[00:50:58] But he did a really good job with it and would just go read a quick excerpt from it to really grapple with climate change.

[00:51:05] We have to understand it. And more than that. Take it onboard emotionally. That can be uncomfortable, even brutal process, because the truth is that we have screwed around and are screwing around.

[00:51:17] And with each passing day, we lock in more irreversible changes and more suffering. The consequences are difficult to reckon with and the moral responsibility is terrible to bear. But we will never work through all those emotions and reactions if we can't talk about it, if we're only allowed chipper talk about what's still possible in climate models.

[00:51:37] Yeah. Emotional resilience is resilience. So I had another tricky word. Yeah, exact resilience. Exactly.

[00:51:46] I thought he did a really good job here in the beginning, though.

[00:51:50] I do think he still used the word we way too liberally in this piece about like we just really dropped the ball. We we fucked up and I I see where, you know, it's hard not to use that word. I find myself using it in places where I look back and say, I probably should have used that right. Like it's too much of a blanket statement because it a racist folks in the global south who really had very little to no agency in this it it racist frontline communities and the United States like us. The truth is, is a handful of very powerful people who got us in this place and kind of lulled the rest of us into complicity. And so, yeah, I think we all need to start being more conscious of when we're using and abusing that word. And another great piece was from Diego, our Great Artes in BBC Future. Is it wrong to be hopeful about climate change and take us away?

[00:52:49] But after reading and talking about hope for months, I have a different view. Hope hurts and feels at times pointless. Yeah, we have to keep doing it. It's the only way no individual will will bend the emissions curve alone. No writer modeling team, no forest fighter firefighter. No environmental lawyer will carry the day. But if you're looking for hope, there might be a space in constructing something together in in response of hope. No single coral restoration program will heal the wounds inflicted on reefs around the world, but perhaps networks offer a way forward that collective goal and the space of uncertainty. And that perhaps is our hope.

[00:53:26] Yeah, and that is I mean, going back to, you know, the aunties and the gadgety part of it that is working towards something forms a community in the process of doing that. Yeah. So that that has other again. Rebecca Solnit writes about this extensively, just about those communities being the thing that that that happens like whereas the success is the success and if if the old growth forest was saved or if this policy was implemented. Yes and no. It's also that a group of people came together and something else might have happened from that.

[00:54:03] Yeah, I'm really excited to see more emotional growth from men's voices in the climate movement because and what's really cool in all of these pieces is that they're citing a lot of women who have already talked about this, like I saw citing Kate Marvel and Katharine Hayhoe and Gretta Thumper. And so they what that shows me is that men have been listening, which is great. You know, like that's a great source of behavioral change. I'll take it that and being influenced. By women leading the way in this and are no longer sitting on the sidelines and letting women do all of the emotional labor of the environmental movement.

[00:54:42] And so I find that really encouraging. Guys, keep it up.

[00:54:47] I'm really I see the growth. I like it. Let's keep going.

[00:54:55] OK, so for I think for a really long time, people have kind of given the tech industry a little bit of a pass.

[00:55:04] And my theory on that has been that most of the media is concentrated in New York and like they just don't spend a lot of time with the tech guys, you know, because every time I feel like four years, like as as a West Coast journalist, I would see these stories come out in like The New Yorker, New York magazine or whatever that was like to, you know, tech guys or mostly libertarian. And I'm like, yeah, I fucking knew. Yes, I did. Yes, we all had new hires. Someone in California.

[00:55:33] Please get out of New York.

[00:55:37] Yes. Just I was like.

[00:55:40] But, yeah, the the whole tech industry has been very good at sort of proclaiming we are saving the world. And for a long time, people just sort of believed it. And there was a big access journalism problem in tech, too, where, you know, they would refuse to talk to you if you ever wrote anything remotely negative about them. So a lot of a lot of journalists kind of played by that game for a while. And just in the last, I would say five years, you're starting to really see that go away. There's been some really good critical reporting on Tesla, for example, which was not happening in the first 10 years of that company. But I think also you're seeing on the climate front, you're seeing employees actually out these companies for their relationship with the oil and gas industry. So you had in just the last couple of months, you had Amazon, Google and Microsoft all had kind of big employee uprisings around this stuff. And then, you know, Microsoft, of course, like put out its net zero by 2030 thing. But then when asked if they were going to stop funding oil conferences, said now there's probably still some more work to be done there. But I think it. I don't know. It just seems to me like I'm starting to all of a sudden see this explosion in like tech and climate stories that we hadn't really seen that much. Where do you think that's coming from? I think that like as climate becomes a bigger issue in general, that all these people working at these companies like a lot of I don't know like if you've spent much time in Silicon Valley, but like I reported there for a while and like the employees really kind of drink the Kool-Aid when they start working at these places. Like you work at Google and you believe that Google is like the best friggin place on Earth and that they build and that they're a force of good. Same with, you know, Apple. I don't know about Microsoft. They're a little bit different. But, you know, like a lot of people who work in tech are somewhat idealistic and kind of buy into the idea of technology and innovation, changing the world, solving the world's problems. All of that kind of stuff. And when they find out that, in fact, it's being used to perpetuate the same old, same old. They get mad. And, you know, I think honestly, I think that a lot of tech workers tend to have more agency. They tend to be better off financially, better educated. And, you know, feel empowered to stand up to their employers in a way that workers and a lot of other industries might not. So I think it's. Yeah. So I think as you see climate becoming a thing that, you know, probably a good portion of those folks are passionate about and interested in then. You know, it's it's like. Oh, yeah, of course they're going to start, you know, pushing their employers to do something on it, which is interesting.

[00:58:47] I'm curious about this because I actually have not heard that much about these stories.

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[01:00:27] Now let's dig in to our listener questions. We've gotten a couple of good ones over the past month, so we're going to pick two for the day and keep the feature going. So please send us your climate storytelling questions to Hot Takes Plur. at Critical Frequency dot org. And here's the first question. So this one came in just a couple of weeks ago. So he says in the context of the overwhelming over-represented white guy writing about the world's problems from a position of racial, economic, college educated privilege, how would you suggest one approaches independent writing on climate without being another white climate dude in the crowd, though, this guy wants to be aware of his privilege and wants to be part of the conversation, but doesn't want to be in the way.

[01:01:12] What do we think we need everybody? Yes, exactly.

[01:01:18] I think all voices are welcome, and I think that there just needs to be. I mean, he's acknowledging that. He recognizes that he's this is a complicated issue, but he needs to write his list, whatever he's finding as his story. This is not an acknowledgement, I think is the part that has been missing a lot. Yeah, I always write other people's stories as a journalist. When I'm when I'm writing my own story, it's an essay and it's a personal story. So people need to write their own stories. But I do hope that we can still make space for people who are curious and care about someone who is different from them that that's allowed. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think that there,. It feels like sometimes that space is really hard. And then people don't want to write about anything but their own story. And then that can be a little bit more narcissistic. It gets smaller. And so, you know, I rally for a larger voice, but also going back to like almost that we were talking about earlier about the infrastructure we need to make, the infrastructure where all the voices that traditionally have not been being heard can be heard. Yeah. And that that happens much quicker and easier. And that's an infrastructural problem that we have within media, within many groups that are talking about the environment and fighting for the environment.

[01:02:37] And so I would say, you know, weaponise your privilege. So as as a white guy with, you know, whatever, like, he goes into a lot about where he is situated in the world because of his privilege. So weaponize it. Right. Like there are people who are going to listen to you who would never listen to me. And by the same token, I just frankly don't want to talk to. So you can go into those rooms. I am not welcome in. And that I saw. I don't want to go in and talk to those people. And you can bring a certain perspective to it and remind yourself at all times that you're you're never speaking for me. You're speaking to your own to this group of people and reminding them of the sins that have brought us here. Right. So like you have a window into going on, like I'm just gonna pick on Joe Rogan. Right. Like you can go on the Joe Rogan show and remind him that colonialism bought the continent crisis in a way that I can write. So you can use that. You can also pass the mike in times where it just doesn't feel appropriate for you to tell, you know, the story of an indigenous community like you can pass that story on. But it is if we find ourselves in a position where it's only women caring about women, whereas only people of color who care about people of color, we never get anywhere. Right. You can sort of use your privilege and blaze a new path for white men.

[01:04:01] And of course, the most important thing is to listen to listen to people other than you.

[01:04:07] So yeah, I love that. Weaponise Googie goby. Jane Fonda.

[01:04:11] Yes, father. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[01:04:14] Well, that's something like I just want to add a tiny thing. That is that I I continue to see a kind of an issue here where where a lot of white men are taking the like, hey, don't take over so much thing as hey, don't get involved at all. And I think there's a large spectrum of possibilities between being in charge and not being involved at all. And like, I would encourage white men to seek those opportunities.

[01:04:42] You see, people like you can you can be part of the collective man, like you don't have to be the standout star or the person in charge or the narrator of the story to be involved and to do stuff.

[01:04:54] Okay. And we have one more question that Mary's going to read.

[01:04:57] What can an artist do to help the climate movement? Have you seen examples of an image or a piece of visual storytelling that really took off? If so, how is it distributed? This is great. I mean, going back to that earlier point of that. Climate change has just entered so much of the creative, artistic world in a way that I feel like really wasn't there just even three to five years ago. One piece that struck out for me that has. With me for a long time was actually back from 2007 and this was Eve Merger's high water line installation in New York.

[01:05:31] So she went around with one of those chalk lines that they use on baseball fields. And she used and part of me, I admit this is like the journalist and the science geek, but she was using like old topographic map maps.

[01:05:47] She was using satellite imagery. She was using data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University to figure out basically what is the the 100 year flood mark.

[01:05:59] And she just walked around the city with putting down this blue chalk line, showing it. So it was just weaving, you know, over curbs and through roofs, these places. I loved that because it brought together the science. And it was like so interactive. She said people were stopping and asking her what she's doing. And. So there's this like it's much more than just like looking at an image which can be very powerful. But it was there was like a gang going back to that community and conversations and actual human face to face engagement. And then the really fascinating part was that when 2012, when Sandy hit, it basically followed that line, you know, and she's like, you know, she she was quoted as saying, like, I didn't want I didn't want to be right about this, like these pieces of art that drama science.

[01:06:48] But create something bigger and encourage conversations, I think are the ones that are our most powerful. Yeah.

[01:06:55] And when I first heard this question, I immediately thought of the black power movement of the 1960s and 70s and how the Black Panther movement art was a huge part of it. And like sort of like all of these visual artists like using their talents to sort of bring people to the movement. And it reminded me of this quote, very left from Toni Cape Bambara, where she says The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. And I think that that is the role. Right. So like, I think art can be used to spark inspiration to sort of spark momentum. I remember the installation that was done at Storm King Sculpture Park in upstate New York. That all all of it tackle climate change because art has a way of putting climate in your face in a way that is both approachable and undeniable. Virginia and music is a really great photographer and she does these beautiful photographs of Louisiana. And I'm I'm originally from Mississippi, nearby Louisiana.

[01:07:58] And she showed me one of them on her phone that just haunted me ever since. And like I just recently bought it. And what she does and it's in her artwork is show how perilous and vulnerable these places are. You can pass by them a million times and not quite get it. But in the photograph, it really struck me how vulnerable Louisiana was.

[01:08:19] So I think there's a lot more work and a lot more ground to be covered in the art space.

[01:08:26] Yeah. A varsity pre-crash. I just listen to her talking with Ezra Klein on his podcast and he she talks about the role of singing of song within the Sunrise movement as another way, again, harkening back to civil rights, civil rights movement and the strength that can come from that and the unification and a place where you can express both grounding and anger. Yeah, it can go both ways. Absolutely.

[01:08:56] Now it's time for a section we're calling our groundbreakers.

[01:08:59] These are pieces that we feel charted new territory in a bold new way. They either approach the story in a creative way or they broke a really important story. So, Mary, do you want to read from this. Eric Holthouse piece in the correspondent?

[01:09:14] Yeah. So this piece is really great. It's called In 2030 We Ended the Climate Emergency. And here's how I love this, because a interweaves policy actions, activism and collective emotional growth all into one narrative. And he does it step by step in this way that I've just really never seen before. He's kind of. This is what we did in 2020. This is what we did in 2021 and so on and so forth. And so we get to 2030 and we ended it. Right. And so I just want to. My favorite year in it was 2023. And this is what he wrote for that year.

[01:09:49] We will criminalize and de-legitimize the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuel executives will be tried for crimes against humanity. Equal side tribunals will hold those to account for making parts of earth uninhabitable. We will march through the streets of our coastal cities and along the shores of the future seas in solidarity and celebration as our pressors are held to justice. We will realize we have lost so much, but there is still so much more worth fighting for. We will prioritize our own psychological and emotional resilience. We'll take walks by the river. We'll visit our friends.

[01:10:26] Yeah. I love how he weaves all of those levers together and makes it feel doable by breaking it out by the year's last episode. Well, we did the 2019 wrap up and we talked about the essay by Hayes Brown. The End Times are here and I'm at Target. And what he talks about There, is what's the point of an apocalypse without a rapture, right? Like nothing better is coming. What's the point of getting worked up about this? And Eric really tries to answer that question of how do we build a world that's not only just like livable, but better? In this piece. So I thought that was kind of a groundbreaking and I want to see more of this, more of imagining what the future can be, because I think that's what writers do really well, is what artists do really well.

[01:11:09] So, yeah. And so far, we've only really seen that play out in the apocalyptic scenarios.

[01:11:15] You know, since Meera knows the year in climate conversations, people will have her read that. Yeah. Oh, I just love this.

[01:11:23] I mean, I was following Emily Rabbitohs Twitter feed where she was basically just documenting throughout the entire year. She was documenting how people were seeing climate change effects in their own lives. So this gets to this really fundamental question about that. There's been a long perception that climate change is something that will happen down the road. And that and we are right now in the moment when the realization is coming to everybody that, no, it is here and it is now and it is us. And so this was really just like wonderful snippets. And she she framed the whole thing around food, which I just absolutely loved. She published a piece. So I'm just going to read a little bit here.

[01:12:07] Sunday, March 17th on St. Patrick's Day, Kathy, who'd prepared the traditional corned beef and cabbage, conversed about the guest from the botanical garden in her master gardening class who lectured on shifting, growing zones, altering what could be planted in central New Jersey. And when? Tuesday, March 19th. Sheila, who brought weed cookie to to the tipsy Tea Party, said that when people ask her, what are you, Hondurans, and why are you at the border? She says Americans are just future Hondurans. Monday, March 25th, Matt recalled vultures in the trees of Sugar Land, Texas, hunting dead animals that had drowned in Hurricane Harvey, during which he'd had difficulty affording flooded streets to reach his mother's nursing home.

[01:12:51] So there his beautiful little vignettes that just capture so much.

[01:12:55] And there's always a sort of like a bomb that detonates at the end of each side where you don't know where you're going.

[01:13:01] And that takes you somewhere amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:13:05] So there's another piece I I want to talk about it because I think it brought something different to the intergenerational conversation around climate is from Laura McGann inbox. And it's called baby boomers.

[01:13:19] You can still be heroes in the story of climate change.

[01:13:23] It's never easy for governments to prioritize the future over the present, which has been the trouble with climate change. It requires a political nonstarter to prioritize future generations over the energy needs of the present. The best chance we have to break this political rule is your enormous sway. Other generations are leading the way, proposing solutions and working together. They need your generation to use your power to change our politics and help save us all.

[01:13:52] So obviously here this is a letter to the baby boomer generation to join the political fight. And I thought was interesting because it kind of comes on the heels of the David Roberts piece where he talks about the one we write from earlier, where he also talks about the need for political will and how political will is not a nice to have for it for the climate conversation.

[01:14:12] And we know the baby boomer generation has a lot of it. So I thought it was cool to see like a welcome gesture to the baby boomer generation because I feel like they're often demonized and marginalized in the climate conversation. But where I started to find this piece to be kind of problematic was the way she used a lot of blanket language to talk about the safe and comfortable life that the baby boomer generation has had, because that is not true for black baby boomers. That is not true for lots of baby boomers of color. Like when I think of the baby boomer generation, I think of the generation that as children integrated the schools, the generation that like grew up hearing stories about Emmett Till being gruesomely murdered. I think of, you know, the generation that as teenagers marched on March on Washington and did Freedom Rides and like legit, risked their lives and wrote the playbook for everything that we need to do for the climate movement. So I take issue with them being demonized in this way of like you've had everything handed to you like I call bullshit.

[01:15:23] OK. That was not my family's story.

[01:15:27] If she had just written white baby boomers, the story would have made total sense to me anyway. I do think it brings still bring something important to the conversation to extend a welcoming hand to the baby boomer generation. But when we talk about any generation, I think we need to understand the intersectionality of it. And not everyone had access to the same opportunities and that whole generation. So yeah.

[01:15:51] Yeah, totally, totally.

[01:15:53] There's my soapbox.

[01:15:59] This Valentine's Day, give her what she really wants, a livable future. And by her, I mean Mother Earth. Join a climate strike. Donate to sunrise there, zero hour. Cut your own carbon footprint. Troll a fossil fuel company on social media. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your mom. Talk to your dad. I don't really give a shit. Just do that because nothing sexier. The climate action. Nothing.

[01:16:33] And now it's time for my favorite part of the show. It is time for our stand out pieces of the month.

[01:16:38] Each episode we each choose a climate story that was just our favorite for wherever completely subjective reason. There's no criteria. There's no rubric. It's just something that we love. And I will let our guests go first.

[01:16:52] Fabulous. I'm I'm cribbing a little bit because I'm taking a December story.

[01:16:56] But if you allow it, it was Genevieve Gunther's piece, what climate change tells us about being human and it was in Scientific American. It wasn't all that long. But I just loved how she got into the the really the fundamental concept about life. We have the big picture part of thinking around climate change. If the pre-modern West cast European men as the masters of nature dominating putatively lowly or creatures by virtue of their uniquely transcendent intellect, the technical revolution of the industrial and post-industrial eras seems only to confirm this view. We grow abundant food. We perform complex and delicate surgeries with hyper dexterous robots. Our tiny handheld computers enable us to interact instantly with people on the other side of the planet or access nearly the full archive of the world's information. We fly like gods across oceans and even ascend toward the stars landing on the moon and sending home images of Pluto. We have even cheated death, extending average global lifespan by decades. Looking back on what humans beings have achieved, you can easily imagine a future of ever more prosperity and freedom. Climate change exposes this imagined future to be a profound illusion. It shows that in geological time and space, we have not transcended our materiality at all. We are fully embedded in and intertwined with Earth's planetary systems as a species.

[01:18:23] The heart of it is that we have to do this very tricky dance between recognizing our human limitations in the face of the natural world that we inhabit, the actual planet that we have highly limited in this regard. And at the same time believe that we have the power to transform. So she's exploring this idea that we have to like do these two very competing ideas. We have to like think about the fact that we are limited and we are at the whim, not the whim. We're at the mercy of the natural world. Yeah, that but it is finite and you have asked too much of it and we have to recognize that. And at the same time, we have to take the one kind of amazing thing about a human, which is that we have the ability to tell ourselves stories that she refers to. You've all Harare's sapiens book, which is all about, you know, like we create fictions all the time. Yeah. Money, yessiree. All these all these things are just stories that we all decide to buy into or not. And so we have to both accept our limitations on the planetary level and also believe that we have the power to write a new story. Yeah, so I thought that was just in terms of big ideas, I was really taken with that.

[01:19:42] Yeah, I think that's a great, you know, meditation and intention for for 2020. So my favorite of the month comes from Amy Brady and she started this new series of essays that she's going to be doing at Catapult magazine.

[01:19:57] And this was the first one is called Here Comes the Sun was an anthem of Hope. Now it's a reminder of climate change. Well, what I didn't understand then and what not realized until almost 20 years later when I read the first part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is fifth assessment report, was the extent of the damage since reading that report, nothing about my life, not my work, my relationships, the ways I eat or sleep or consume. Pop culture house felt the same. One of the more unexpected changes has to do with my relationship with the past every day. As news reports about climate change become more threatening. I grow more nostalgic for the places and objects of my childhood that feel increasingly imperiled. The Florida beaches I fakie shined on as a kid. The fall leaves that will become less fibrin as the ancient cycle of the seasons grows haywire. Most startling, though, is how the songs and movies and TV shows I love. Back then, things we might expect to be safe from climate devastation. Read differently today. Take those corny 1960s beach party movies I used to watch with my mother, the ones where Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello so twisted and shouted on pristine sandy shores. They were pure sugary escapism, no real plot, just pretty faces in poppy dance tunes. Even before reading the IPCC report, these movies felt like relics from another era. Now they feel like fossils from another epoch.

[01:21:25] So I love this because I've been sort of struggling with this, too.

[01:21:30] I'll hear songs I used to love as a kid and you know, my mom is a baby boomer, so I grew up listening to Stevie Wonder and the Temptations and all that sort of music and there,. There's so many songs in there this hour to take nature for granted or, you know, at the stability of nature for granted. Right. Like I think of songs like I think is Carol Carpenter The End of the World? Like, why did the birds go on singing? They know it's the end of the world. You don't love me anymore.

[01:22:01] And like, I think about that now and like a lot of those birds are dead, girl.

[01:22:07] And it really is the end of the world. But then I just heard Mercy Mercy Me.

[01:22:11] Marvin Gaye's song was like, it's still spot on.

[01:22:16] It is. Yeah. A lot of like the protest songs like they still are. So.

[01:22:21] So she's talking about Here Comes the Sun is like, no, it sort of becomes menacing even in the face of the climate crisis. So and just looking back at these just ordinary things that you can't even escape into anymore because there is no escaping this crisis, it seeps into everything. It's all at once. You have climate vision and you see the world through through a lens colored with the climate crisis, you can't unsee it and it just gets into everything.

[01:22:50] OK? Well, I picked this Rolling Stone piece on the radioactive. Well, how radioactive? The sort of briny waste from fracking is. And I picked it because it just it was he did such a good job reporting this out. And it's something that's like I've seen little bits and bobs on over the years, but have known that it's a big problem and have been kind of waiting to see the big story on it. And I feel like this this guy, Justin Noble, did that. And I also thought that he did a great job of of kind of instantly humanizing the subject so that it wasn't like about, oh, there's radioactive waste in all this stuff. It was like, oh, God, this guy Pete, who's been driving this truck for decades now is like probably riddled with cancer. His like, his body is eating itself, you know, and his bosses lied to him about the exposure that he was facing. And, you know, so it made it really. I don't know. I think it made it. It made it really human and real for people versus kind of just talking about it as you know, just the facts, ma'am. So I'll read a little bit from it here.

[01:24:15] In a squat rig fitted with a 5000 gallon tank, Peter Criss crosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio, West Virginia Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one third of America's natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called brine, a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America's oil and gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost Qinghai every single day. At most wells, far more brine is produced than oil or gas, as much as 10 times more it collects in tanks and like an oil and gas garbage man. Peter picks it up and hauls it off to treatment plants or injection wells where it's disposed of by being shot back into the earth one day in 2017. Peter pulled up to an injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his truck with a handheld radiation detector, he says, and told him he was carrying one of the, quote, hottest loads he'd ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any mention of the Bryan being radioactive.

[01:25:24] So the story goes on to like, you know, this guy ends up collecting samples of this, Brian, because he wants to test it.

[01:25:31] And he he says he's like this very pragmatic guy.

[01:25:35] He's like, well, I want to cover myself because, like, if I get sick in 10 years, I want like proof that it was because of this so that they pay my medical bills. I'm like, oh, God, America. Yeah. Anyway, it's really it's a rules scorcher of a piece. Highly recommend. Very good. Well, thanks, Meera. I know we we always try to take less time and it never works.

[01:25:59] Appreciate you taking the time.

[01:26:01] It never works. Never work. And no, it's been a pleasure talking with you both.

[01:26:15] So that was January, just January. I know. See what I mean?

[01:26:22] No, chill. The climate story has no chill whatsoever. I know it's a good thing we're going bi-weekly in February. Hope we can get on top of it. Speaking of which, our next episode is actually going to be a live show. It's going to be at Amherst College, which is where I almost went to college. Believe it or not. And I'll be joined by when Stevenson, who is a climate storytelling hero of mine. So really looking forward to that.

[01:26:48] I'm so excited about that. Although I am really sad that they won't be able to make it to join you guys.

[01:26:54] Yeah, I know you're too busy running a media empire.

[01:26:59] It's true. It's true. But I'm excited to be in New York next week. And yet your panel I'm going to go to your panel at Columbia.

[01:27:05] So that'll be awesome. Yeah. I'm separate 11th. I'll be doing a panel at Columbia University where I am now, a writer in residence at the Earth Institute. And on the panel, I'll be with Katherine Wilkinson and Kendra up here. Louis and Kate Marvel. And it is free and open to the public. And Amy will be there in the flesh. So you shouldn't come and gawk at her. Please don't gawk at me.

[01:27:29] I'll be heckling the panel so that they do come to the V.A. and say hello.

[01:27:38] And also, a quick reminder that Drilled is back in season three. We're looking at the hundred plus year history of Big Oil's big propaganda machine. And this specific we're calling it our Madmen season because we're really looking at some of the specific people who kind of built this apparatus. And we also just launched Drilled News dot com, which is a climate accountability reporting site. We're partnering with a bunch of folks, including HuffPost Grist, Earther and hopefully more soon.

[01:28:10] That's awesome. And Season 3 of Drilled is really, really good. Like I wake up early every time. Truck. So excited. Oh, that's so funny. In the meantime, make sure that you're following us on Twitter. You can find us at at Rayle hot take. And you can find me at at Marrie Hechler. And you can find Amy at at Amy WESTERVELT.

[01:28:32] And a big thank you to Meera for joining us on this episode. She's the greatest. Really great. You can follow her on Twitter, too, at Meera tweets. That's m e e r a tweet.

[01:28:43] And thank you to our first and thechurch sponsor. Aaskov can listen. Can't wait for you to get your coat so you can join me as ballah here in New York.

[01:28:53] I know we're gonna have twin kopeks in New York. Oh guys, it's going to be amazing.

[01:28:59] As a reminder, all the articles we discussed are up on our Twitter feed and in our show notes. And please send your climate story-telling questions to hot takes.

[01:29:08] That's plural hot takes at Critical Frequency dot org.

[01:29:12] Last reminder, if you like the show, please leave us a writing or a review in i-Tunes. It really does help us find new listeners.

[01:29:19] Good reviews, only people. Okay. The climate trolls have found us. You don't help if you must. You can send us an email if you must. Just no bad reading. You know what?

[01:29:30] Just write that shit down. Put it in a bottle and leave the bottle on your dresser or some shit.

[01:29:37] Drop it into a rising ocean. No, don't do that. OK, there's enough shit in the ocean. All right. That's good enough for now. We'll talk to all the cowboys by.