I’ve asked for climate change to permeate every story in news media but oh wow, what a monkey’s paw.
…was that all the thing we humans do that are greenhouse reckless are called out.
For example, whenever there’s a beef subsidy or like a sale on beef, they should have called out how bad that is. How the Earth’s 1⅗ billion bovines, almost ⅖ of our mammalian biomass, a creature with remarkable, unprecedented trophic inefficiency (240 times worse than beans) that humans selectively bred out of aurochs; where each individual emits 50% more methane than an aurochs did and 8000% more methane than a non-ruminant mammal of equivalent size does, and where the sheer number of them are hundreds of times more than there ever were aurochs at their peak (a few million), and uses up somewhere between fifty to a hundred times more land than eating beans.
Or when the rich are being celebrated, instead show how they emit 30 times more CO2e than a normal person; to clarify, that’s only for the top 1%. Normal rich people; the richest person in your neighborhood. The billionaires emit one million times more.
When politicians come up, show how bad their climate track record is and how their future proposals would wreck the world even more. When new “energy deals” are being struck like new oil plants or gas pipelines, show how bad that is. Show how the fossil fuel industry influence and lobby for specific decisions and topics.
When there’s a war, bring up how there’s usually a huge component of contested fossil fuel supplies or transportation or food supplies or climate-related starvation. Venezuela or Iraq, it’s oil directly. The “rare earths” deal Trump extorted out of Ukraine was primarily about fossil fuels, and fossil fuels was also why he wanted Greenland. The whole reason Russia decided to try to steal Ukraine in the first place was fossil fuels and food supplies. They started out by seizing control of 80% Ukraine’s offshore oil and gas fields. Other wars are about pipelines, straits, and other ways to transport or access fossil fuels. Even the Gaza war has a fossil fuel component.
It’s pretty much all other topics too: when they go after CRT, BLM, immigrants, or LGBT+, those groups have deliberately made targets by the fossil fuel industry as distractions from their planet-wreckery.
So you can tell I was frustrated by a lack of climate stuff in the news. Almost all topics were things that directly exarcebated climate change but that aspect was almost never brought up.
I wanted climate in the news and we got climate in the news.
We have page up and page down of catastrophes like heatwaves, the aforementioned wars and famines, storms, record breaking colds and winters that paradoxically also driven by greenhouse gasses since as the Earth globally gets warmer the air can hold more water vapor which when it does get cold, which happens more often since as the arctic heats up the lowered temperature gradient causes cold winds to leak out from there.
But not peep one about why this is happening. “Whoops, there’s another wildfire, what a mystery, how could that have happened?” is more the vibe we’re getting.
Instead states like Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Alabama have laws on the books undermining climate education, and in Europe public service media like the BBC have promoted false balance on climate change or like other European countries’ public media (like here in Sweden), have provided platforms for far-right, climate-denying, fossil-industry funded parties and topics.