2019: The Year News Discovered Global Warming; Strangely, Substantial Silence About Its Causes
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2019: Costs of Decarbonizing, But Not of Inaction
Two years later, the number of climate-related stories had soared. Much of this can be credited to the New York Times' decision to launch a climate newsletter in November 2017, much of which has ended up being repurposed by the Times on the web and in print.
By this point, linking climate change with real-world events was no longer controversial, and in fact had developed into a standard reporting formula. The warming Earth was now held responsible for creating the hottest July on record (New York Times, 8/5/19; Washington Post, 8/6/19) and leading to increased heat-related deaths across the Southwest (New York Times, 8/26/19), causing fires in Siberia (New York Times, 8/1/19) and heat waves in Greenland (New York Times, 8/2/19), turning beach houses (New York Times, 8/2/19) and homes in fire-prone areas (New York Times, 8/20/19) into riskier investments, melting frozen wolf heads in Siberia (New York Times, 8/4/19), clogging New Jersey's largest lake with toxic bacteria (New York Times, 8/5/19) and keeping it from being able to host ice boat races (Washington Post, 8/13/19), threatening the world's food (New York Times, 8/8/19) and water supplies (New York Times, 8/6/19), forcing tourists to rearrange travel plans to avoid storms (Washington Post, 8/2/19), making hurricanes stronger and wetter (New York Times, 8/8/19), melting Iceland's ice (New York Times, 8/9/19), fueling insurgencies in West Africa (New York Times, 8/20/19), endangering sea snakes (New York Times, 8/19/19) and pushing endangered right whales into shipping lanes (Washington Post, 8/1/19), threatening to make Joshua trees extinct in Joshua Tree National Park (LA Times, 8/11/19), forcing Portugal to turn to underbrush-eating goats to fight forest fires (New York Times, 8/17/19) and flooding Jakarta to the point where the Indonesian government has proposed building a new capital city elsewhere (New York Times, 8/26/19)—though it was absolved for the early arrival of Starbucks' pumpkin spice latte (New York Times, 8/13/19).
A new element, meanwhile, came via coverage of the presidential election campaign, which often touched on climate issues, though not always in the most illuminating ways. The New York Times (8/1/19) referred to several Democratic candidates at the July debates having espoused "liberal policies [on] combating climate change"—an odd way to describe attempts to save the planet, especially when the next day the same paper reported on how younger Republicans also consider climate change to be a pressing issue (8/2/19). And, as usual, the media's focus remained squarely on what the climate issue could do for candidates' campaigns, not on what candidates could do for the climate: Even a New York Times feature (8/8/19) on the Sunrise Movement's dedication to pressing for stronger environmental action by Democrats never mentioned what policies activists were seeking, aside from a brief mention of a Green New Deal, a catch-all term that means different things to different candidates (NBC News, 8/23/19).
And as two years before, discussion of the causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis remained a tiny share of newspaper coverage. A major New York Times story (8/15/19) investigated the Adani Group, an Indian fossil-fuel industry giant, for its lobbying for increased coal extraction in Australia, but didn't mention similar efforts by the fossil fuel industry in the US. (The death of David Koch on August 23 did prompt brief notes on his anti-climate action lobbying in the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post, though the Post undercut this somewhat by summing up Koch's actions merely as having "a profound effect on American politics while making him an uncommonly polarizing figure."
The only major-newspaper story in August 2019 to substantially cover lobbyist attempts to obstruct action on climate change in the U.S. was one in the Los Angeles Times (8/11/19) on accusations that the California gas utility SoCal Gas had used ratepayer dollars to lobby against natural gas use—and it covered it solely as a local story.
Most of the advice to readers on reducing their own personal carbon footprints focused overseas as well. Copenhagen residents were reported to be biking more (LA Times, 8/8/19), while Swedes were cutting down on air travel in a phenomenon dubbed flygskam, or "flight shame" (Washington Post, 8/2/19). (An August 24 op-ed in the Times by travel writer Seth Kugel did note the possibility of Americans cutting down on air travel, but cautioned against "self-flagellation," and opined that taking airplanes was probably fine so long as our trip "maximizes your connection with the place you're visiting," while repeating the canard about biofuels from two years prior.)
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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/01/media-climate-crisis-dont-organize-mourn
