Introduction by Croakey: Record breaking Hurricane Helene has left at least 166 people dead in the United States, in a toll that is expected to climb, with hundreds unaccounted for, and widespread destruction that has left what has been described as a “post apocalyptic” landscape in North Carolina.
Time magazine this week declared that the next US president “will play a critical role in addressing the world’s most pressing challenges: climate change, global health, and international cooperation”.
It said the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump could not be clearer. “Their opposing views on climate action, pandemic preparedness, and infectious disease prevention, among other challenges, will significantly influence not just the daily lives of Americans but the trajectory of millions of lives around the world.”
Yet still the climate crisis is not high on the agenda of the 4 November US presidential election — nor has it been in other crucial elections held this year: India, Mexico and the United Kingdom, to name three.
How to amplify climate issues and deal with disinformation and scaremongering were key questions explored by journalists and media outlets at a recent global summit looking at climate coverage in elections.
As Marie McInerney reports below, the event hosted by Covering Climate Now has delivered timely insights for Australia’s media and also for health and other organisations wanting to put strong climate health action on the agenda as Australia heads towards another federal election in 2025.
Readers on Twitter/X may also want to check out: #NYClimateWeek
Marie McInerney writes:
Determined to put the climate and nature crisis on the agenda at the recent United Kingdom election, The Guardian’s environment team sent one of its correspondents, Sandra Laville, to travel along the River Thames, one of the biggest rivers in England, to investigate sewage pollution.
“She spent a couple of months doing that, and she wrote thousands of words. We really tried to tell a longer, bigger, wider, political, impactful story through this one river,” said senior journalist Natalie Hanman, the news outlet’s head of environment, at a recent global media webinar.
One of the Thames stories closed with a quote from a passionate, local activist, saying:
The Thames is the most incredible river, the whole history of Britain is wrapped up in the history of these waters. But strangely for such a significant river, it does not have a voice. I wanted to help to give it that.”
In its climate focus in the lead up to the July election, which brought in the Starmer Labour Government, The Guardian’s environment team also investigated ‘just transition’ approaches, speaking to oil and gas workers about their fears and possibilities amid Labour’s pledge to end new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
The team was mindful of closure of coal mines during the Thatcher years in the 1980s, which left many workers and communities abandoned, and of current day lessons on “the rise of the far right and how they are capitalising on people’s fears about green issues”.
“The climate crisis isn’t a fringe issue that only a few voters care about,” Hanman said. “It’s completely central to all of the decisions that politicians are making right now, and it will affect everyone around the world, it will affect every sector of how we live.”
Hanman was a panellist at the recent online three-day Climate on the Ballot Summit where leading climate and political journalists shared tips on how to elevate the climate stakes of elections at a time, the organisers said, when “so much coverage tends to focus on horse-race polling and campaign gossip”.
She had been inspired, she said, by the 2023 call on media by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen to focus in the US election on “stakes not odds”.
Climate lens
The summit heard repeatedly that climate should and could be a lens on every issue – cost of living, housing, racism, justice, migration, health and beyond.
“Every story can be a climate story,” agreed journalist Adam Mahoney, from Capital B, a local-national non-profit US news organisation that centres Black voices, audience needs and experiences, and partners with the communities it serves, although with a caveat. Black, rural or more marginalised communities that are already feeling the brunt of climate change “might not be articulating it in the exact same way”, he said.
Hanman said The Guardian’s environment news team has its own dedicated newsroom ‘desk’, with the same editorial status as its more traditional national, foreign and business news teams.
As such, she is included in the key editorial planning meetings each day where she aims to be a mix of “very diplomatic and probably a little bit annoying” in pushing to make sure that climate isn’t forgotten or relegated down the news list. That includes having it included as an issue in the key takeaways from every major politicians’ speech, even or especially if they didn’t mention it.
Through the campaign ahead of the 4 July election, she said The Guardian sent reporters across the UK to delve into different constituencies and paint a picture of what voters’ climate concerns were. Their editors lobbied for prominent placement and strong design and visuals on the outlet’s website and newspapers.
They opted for quality over quantity, and not being restricted to what politicians said, “because then the terms of the debate are set in often a very narrow frame”.
By comparison, there wasn’t much climate coverage in the rest of the UK mainstream media, she said. However, Hanman was heartened that efforts by right wing media to frame climate as a culture war issue, where net-zero policies were “only going to make people colder and poorer”, did not gain significant traction.
Polling showed that voters were interested in climate action, as long as it was implemented fairly, and climate coverage picked up after the Greens won four seats and other independents on pro climate tickets did well, she said.
Echoing the experience of Australia’s 2022 election, she said that, post-election, “there was maybe recognition that there are voters out there who really care about this and it can be an electoral win for a campaign to focus on it”.
Core questions
The online summit was hosted by Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 600 news outlets to support journalists to “do a better job of covering what we consider the defining story of our time”.
The group has also launched the “Climate Changes Everything” blueprint for media transformation, which documents priorities, successes and advice for journalists on dealing with a range of climate issues including climate justice, myths and disinformation, mental health and the power of local journalism.
Held in a year in which more than four billion people across the world — half the global population — have been eligible to vote in national elections, the Climate on the Ballot summit asked questions like:
- How can we tell climate change stories that capture audiences’ attention and drive public discussion in a news cycle that is moving so fast?
- How can we be accurate and honest about climate change, while guarding against allegations of partisanship?
- How can we demonstrate to audiences the connection between elections and the climate action, or inaction, they’re seeing in their backyards?
Panelists highlighted many challenges, including:
- Newsrooms that are stretched thin
- Circus-style politics that saw disinformation spread, for example, by former President Trump
- Political journalists not necessarily knowing the nuances and facts of climate science
- Fear of alienating audiences, sponsors and advertisers with ‘unpopular’ coverage.
However, they also discussed solutions, particularly collaborations — particularly, bringing together colleagues, media outlets, and regions to expand and diversify coverage and finding creative ways to apply the climate lens to issues that resonate directly with communities and voters.
Connecting the dots
Given the gravity of the climate crisis, it was alarming to hear how hard it can be to elevate it in multiple and different jurisdictions, particularly given vested interests.
During India’s election, run over 43 days earlier this year, a deadly heatwave struck that saw at least 33 people, including election officials on duty, dying of suspected heatstroke in just one day.
That put weather on front pages, said Indian freelance journalist Ritwika Mitra, but few mainstream media outlets connected the dots to climate politics and policies.
Apart from efforts by independent media, the climate lens was rarely applied to massive farmers protests and farmer suicides, low agricultural productivity, and terrible conditions for workers in many occupations, she said, blaming lack of good data and corporate media ownership
Iván Carrillo, a Mexican freelance journalist, told the webinar there had been a similar lack of focus on climate in Mexico’s June national election, despite Hurricane Otis having not that long before “practically destroyed the city of Acapulco” and with the successful presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, being a climate scientist.
He suggested Sheinbaum might have been hesitant to raise climate issues because the popularity of Morena, her predecessor’s party, was built on social projects funded by oil and gas profits from Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company.
Pemex “is more than a public company in Mexico, it’s a symbol of nationalism”, Carrillo said, but adding he hoped the discourse would shift in the coming weeks, when Sheinbaum, who was a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), comes into office.
Even in the US, which panelists agreed will be most critical election for the planet and for global climate action, climate issues have to battle for attention. The webinars pointed to last month’s debate between Trump and Harris where the single climate policy question was the last asked, with little time left for their responses.
That’s the challenge every journalist faces, said Chase Cain, a meteorologist and national climate reporter for NBS News. His approach is to look for anything that’s in the news where he can make a climate connection.
That included drawing the link recently between Tropical Storm Francine and wildfires in California, extreme events that were at “completely different ends of the climate spectrum” but led from “one piece of atmospheric physics”.
Emphasise climate injustice
Adam Mahoney talked about efforts by Capital B to open up climate issues, and their intersections with power, justice, rights and racism, for Black or rural or more marginalised communities that are already feeling the brunt of climate injustice.
His entry into reporting on climate in Memphis was hearing that water bills were going up for the first time in the city’s history, and residents were being regularly warned to boil water for safety, “the product of climate change and industrial pollution”.
In Texas, healthcare was the biggest issue for many, but he found people were not necessarily “making the connections to the massive oil refinery in their backyard, or the fact that ExxonMobil is funding a big part of the city budget and the local hospital there and health clinics and how that dictates life there”.
His article on the lack of onsite wastewater treatment systems throughout Alabama’s so-called Black Belt opens with the recognition that this is a crisis “that has long roots dating back to slavery”. In another, he reported how Black communities had been “left to sink as insurance companies abandon the South”.
“We’re working with a disenfranchised population that is facing issues that supersede any election inequities, that are hundreds of years in the making,” he said.
“Those issues – about just putting food on your table, having a roof over your head – are always going to be number one on the docket” but the climate connections “are there, and obvious, whether we’re thinking about the [property] insurance crisis in the Gulf Coast right now… or even our food map in the way that that has been impacted by contamination and storms.”
In a strong lesson for Australian media, particularly those reporting on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues, Mahoney said impactful reporting “depends on actually building relationships with the communities that you’re reporting on, and not just dropping in and then doing one story”.
“If you are someone that can actually have conversations with folks over periods of time, it usually does get easier, even if people don’t see [an issue] in the same way that you might.”
Focus on solutions
Agreeing with the imperative to be creative, Lisa Friedman from The New York Times highlighted two stories by her colleague Coral Davenport – one reporting how climate change can cause bridges to ‘fall apart like Tinkertoys’, another on how it is making tampons more expensive.
But Friedman talked also about the challenge of addressing disinformation on climate under the former Trump administration, where “the extremists became the establishment”.
“Do you not quote someone who is openly a climate skeptic but is the administrator of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]? You can’t not, right?”, she said.
For Neela Banerjee, from NPR (National Public Radio), one solution is to “dive down” into disinformation which an NPR investigation did into potent advertisements by petrochemical companies claiming that US President Joe Biden was going to get rid of petrol-powered cars. (See also this).
Banerjee said it is getting harder to report the origins of disinformation in the US, because Supreme Court rulings have made political donations “murkier”.
But she said, NPR has found that audiences really respond to it “pulling back the curtain and showing not only what is being said and [that] it’s wrong, but [also showing] why are people saying this? What are the interests promoting certain narratives?”.
Asked how The Guardian is aiming to cover the US election, Hanman said her team was very conscious of the need to have fewer articles on tiny shifts in polling data and more on the consequences of the policies on offer, “not just for America but for the world”.
It has launched a series called The Stakes, which dives into the possible consequences of a second Trump presidency, opening with an article by US author and environmentalist Bill McKibbon, talking about the climate risk of a Trump win. McKibbon writes:
If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts.”
But Hanman said the news outlet also recognises the importance of not just telling everyone “what’s going wrong and what’s bad and what’s awful, because we could all do that forever”.
It was equally important to show readers what can to be done “to fix it”. And often that comes from local communities who have been working for years, in the absence of political or corporate leadership or support, “to come up with solutions and give people some hope”, she said.
“Guardian audiences really love those stories as much as they want to read the big headlines of doom.”
Further watching/reading:
You can watch the webinars via CCN (which also have full transcripts available):
Joseph Stiglitz: The Climate Stakes of the US Election
CBS News: The majority of Americans support climate reforms. Why won’t Congress deliver?
See Croakey’s archive of articles on climate health