CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter is always decrying "misinformation" from conservative media, but extreme climate panic is never considered inaccurate. On Sunday, he brought on two guests to describe how journalists must panic the public about the "permanent emergency" of climate change.
Introducing global warming alarmists David Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker and Emily Atkin of the newsletter "Heated," Stelter engaged in handwringing:
Meteorologists and reporters are running out of words. They are running out of words to describe the impacts of climate change. "Unprecedented" just doesn't cut it anymore. From drought and lethal heat waves out West, the related fires that have been raging in California and in Canada, recent flooding in Detroit -- these are just a few of the deeply troubling stories that have been linked in various ways to climate change.
He added: "But how often is that context being included in reports on extreme weather events? But how much do you know -- how much do you feel you know about the climate crisis? And is there enough devoted, rigorous attention from national news outlets?" He means is it panicky and one-sided enough?
Wallace-Wells -- who is also editor of The New Yorker -- advised that the media project more apocalypse, more "alarmism" in response to current events:
We can't shy away from scary projections about the future or the scary facts as we're living them today. I think we also need to start thinking a little harder, be a little clearer in our story-telling, that learning to live in this new future, which will continue to get worse -- probably considerably worse from here...
He soon added:
Estimates suggest the burning of fossil fuels kills about 10 million people every year, which is dying on the scale of the Holocaust -- in fact, larger than the Holocaust -- every single year. And yet we don't see many public health stories, we don't see many moral crises stories addressed to that issue.
Where is this hot talk coming from? A global team of scientists issued a study estimating 10.2 million deaths from fine particle pollution in 2012, and revised it downward to about 8 million in current years. Stelter didn't breathe a word about how past predictions in his old employer The New York Times projecting the end of Atlantic beaches in America by 2020 didn't turn out.
Even though journalists already repeat alarmist predictions about the future as if they were verifiable facts, Atkins advised reporters to make more dire claims about the future:
It's not an excuse that you need to talk to a climate scientist anymore to include something in your story that says this extreme heat event was made more likely by climate change, and it's a part of our climate change future. And what I would also argue is that you should probably have a sentence in there saying climate change is caused by fossil fuels...
She then claimed that weather disasters are being thrust upon the world by the energy industry:
...climate change is not something that's happening to us -- it's something that's being done to us. It's not simply a tragedy -- an act of God -- it is an injustice. And it is an injustice due to a 40-year campaign to lie and prioritize short-term profit over the health of vulnerable people. So those are just basic facts.
Stelter gave no pushback to her claims. Atkins behaved as if the media weren't already refusing to include dissenting arguments as she added: "And in the beginning, I really approached it out of a desire to be fair as this environment science story, trying to tell all these sides. And really, when you start looking at the history and everything that's going on right now, it's a corruption story."
The environmental propaganda in this episode was sponsored in part by Restasis. Their contact information is linked.
Transcript follows:
CNN
Reliable Sources
July 4, 2020
BRIAN STELTER: Meteorologists and reporters are running out of words. They are running out of words to describe the impacts of climate change. "Unprecedented" just doesn't cut it anymore. From drought and lethal heat waves out West, the related fires that have been raging in California and in Canada, recent flooding in Detroit -- these are just a few of the deeply troubling stories that have been linked in various ways to climate change. But how often is that context being included in reports on extreme weather events? But how much do you know -- how much do you feel you know about the climate crisis? And is there enough devoted, rigorous attention from national news outlets?
Let's talk about that with Emily Atkin. She's the founder of the Heated newsletter and podcast for people who are, quote, "pissed off," about the climate crisis. And David Wallace-Wells is here as well. He's editor of The New Yorker and author of the acclaimed book, The Uninhabitable Earth. David, Emily, thanks for being on. David, we heard from the governor of Washington this week talking about climate change as a permanent emergency. So my question is: How does the news outlet cover a permanent emergency?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: Well, I think being honest that we're already living in a state that would have once seemed to us to be, you know, a state of alarmism, and that our story-telling tools need to be commensurate with that fact. We can't shy away from scary projections about the future or the scary facts as we're living them today. I think we also need to start thinking a little harder, be a little clearer in our story-telling, that learning to live in this new future, which will continue to get worse -- probably considerably worse from here -- is not just going to require decarbonizing, although that's very hard. It's also going to require us to be building out more resilience -- more measures of adaptation and hopefully doing that in a way that promotes some amount of social and climate justice. So it's not just about cutting carbon, it's also about defending ourselves against the impacts of nature which we're already beginning to see growing more and more intense.
STELTER: "Defending ourselves against the impacts of nature." That's a stark way to put it. What I noticed, Emily, 10 years ago versus today, there's a lot more climate change coverage on TV. There are a lot more reporters assigned to this beat. So there's been real progress, but is it enough, in your view?
EMILY ATKIN, FOUNDER OF HEATED: You know, I think it's really great that we've had progress on this issue, but the fact is that we're just not treating it like the planetary emergency that it is. I mean, we're not learning the lessons that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us where we have a global crisis and the entire newsroom mobilizes to cover that crisis. We understand that it infiltrates every single area of our life. There's no excuse for being a reporter today who doesn't understand the basic science of COVID-19. Why is it not the same for climate change?
STELTER: Mmm. Interesting.
ATKIN: Right now, everyone should be a climate reporter, and if you're not a climate reporter right now, you will be, whether you realize it or not.
STELTER: Let's go back to both of you on this. What does it mean, David, to be a climate reporter -- that everyone has to be a climate reporter today?
WALLACE-WELLS: Well, it means that climate is threaded through every aspect of our lives at the very highest level through the geopolitics and competition of nations, not just energy resources but over land and military relationships, trade relationships, all the way down to the individual where many people's mental health is being eroded as we speak, not to mention their physical health today. Estimates suggest the burning of fossil fuels kills about 10 million people every year, which is dying on the scale of the Holocaust -- in fact, larger than the Holocaust -- every single year. And yet we don't see many public health stories, we don't see many moral crises stories addressed to that issue. We need to be threading it through talking about absolutely everything.
STELTER: And, Emily, this also means, you know, reporters can't be scientifically illiterate. We've got to have the basic knowledge to explain how these stories are linked and how they're related.
ATKIN: Yeah, it's not an excuse that you need to talk to a climate scientist anymore to include something in your story that says this extreme heat event was made more likely by climate change, and it's a part of our climate change future. And what I would also argue is that you should probably have a sentence in there saying climate change is caused by fossil fuels because climate change is not something that's happening to us -- it's something that's being done to us. It's not simply a tragedy -- an act of God -- it is an injustice. And it is an injustice due to a 40-year campaign to lie and prioritize short-term profit over the health of vulnerable people. So those are just basic facts.
STELTER: What you're saying is it's a corruption story. You're saying it's an accountability beat.
ATKIN: It's always been that way. I think for too long journalists -- and I've been guilty of this, too. I've been covering this for eight years. And in the beginning, I really approached it out of a desire to be fair as this environment science story, trying to tell all these sides. And really, when you start looking at the history and everything that's going on right now, it's a corruption story. And that makes it sexy, to be honest -- it makes it a good story to tell. It's not -- there's a myth that it's a hard story to tell. It's a very exciting story if you don't think about how awful it.
STELTER: And therein lies the challenge, yes. Emily and David, thank you both for being here and breaking it down for us.
