Originally created in 2004, Prometheus is a project of University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Prometheus is designed to create an informal outlet for news, information, and opinion on science and technology policy.
Climate change is a very serious issue. It puts millions of people in different countries across the world at risk of more extreme weather events, food shortages and rising sea levels, among other natural changes.
Advocates have been calling on the government and the public to help address the growing effects of climate change. However, it has been a challenge to encourage officials to make policy changes, like limiting use of fossil fuels, and the public to make lifestyle changes that would protect the environment, especially from pollution.
But people may start noticing climate change if advocate change their approach. Campaigns commonly appear serious, warning people that increasing greenhouse gas emissions are harming the planet.
Such “gloomy and threatening science-centered discussions” may have little effect on the minds of the public. That is why researchers want future campaigns to make people laugh about climate change to get more attention.
People may get the message of campaigns easier through comedy, according to Maxwell Boykoff, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He explored the importance of humor in fighting climate change in his new book titled “Creative (Climate) Communications.”
“Rather than “dumbing down” science for the public, this is a “smartening up” approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic,” Boykoff, who is also director of Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at CU Boulder, said in an article posted on The Conversation. “Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action.”
The book highlights how emotional, tactile, visceral and experiential communication could motivate people and “arouse action and engagement.” Boykoff cited that such methods have been used by shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “Last Week Tonight,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “Full Frontal” and “The Daily Show” to discuss climate change and engage audience.
Hosts use jokes to increase understanding and engagement. One study showed that “comedy can lower defenses,” allowing people to accept ideas and new ways of thinking or acting.
“A comic approach might seem to trivialize climate change, which has life-and-death implications for millions of people, especially the world’s poorest and most vulnerable residents,” Boykoff added. “But a greater risk would be for people to stop talking about the problem entirely, and miss the chance to reimagine and actively engage in their collective futures.”
To utilize humor and help spread awareness of climate change, Boykoff helped establish the Inside the Greenhouse initiative at CU Boulder. The program combines creative fields to form new climate communication strategies.
The university also hosts the “Stand Up for Climate Change” comedy project. It allows professors and students to perform sketch comedy routines at the campus.
According to Boykoff, adding humor to climate change campaigns appeared effective to expand awareness, learning, conversations and inspiration among performers and audiences. Read more …
Amid deadly wildfires in California and increased flooding along the U.S. East Coast in 2019, most Americans say the effects of climate change are already upon us — and that the U.S. government isn’t doing enough to stop it, according to a new public opinion survey.
In the nationwide poll, 62 percent of U.S. adults said climate change is affecting their local community to some extent or a great deal, bringing more flooding and unusually warm weather, altering ecosystems, driving wildfires or exacerbating drought, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., reports November 25. That’s slightly up from the 59 percent who said the same in Pew’s 2018 poll.
“What it looks like is happening is a larger portion of Americans are accepting that climate change is with us and poses a hazard,” says Risa Palm, an urban geographer at Georgia State University in Atlanta not involved in the study.
The results follow what many environmental activists consider a watershed year for climate change awareness, marked by student protests and a speech by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg chastising world leaders at the United Nations for ignoring climate science (SN: 3/14/19).
“This study finds some familiar patterns in the public divides over climate and energy issues, but also areas where opinion among political groups has shifted,” says Cary Funk, the director of science and society research at Pew.
The Pew survey — which questioned 3,627 randomly selected adults from October 1 to October 13 — also revealed how views vary between regional and demographic groups, as well as trends in what people think that action should look like. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points. Here are four big takeaways.
1. People’s views depend on where they live.
Those most likely to report local effects from climate change lived along the Pacific Coast, which is facing rising sea levels (SN: 9/25/19) and has battled deadly wildfires despite electricity blackouts aimed at preventing more fires (SN: 11/1/19). Among West Coasters, 72 percent said climate change is affecting their area either a great deal (28 percent) or some (44 percent). By comparison, the percent of people living in the Northeast, Midwest and South who said climate change was altering conditions where they live ranged from 59 percent to 63 percent.
Regional differences
Americans living in U.S. states along the Pacific Coast were most likely to say that climate change is affecting their local community either somewhat or a great deal. Residents of central mountain states were least likely to say they see climate change effects in their backyards.
Whether people lived near a coastline also mattered. About 67 percent of respondents living within 40 kilometers of a coast said they saw local climate change effects. That coincides with a sharp rise in tidal flooding since 2000 along the U.S. East Coast (SN: 7/15/19). By comparison, 59 percent of people living more than 480 kilometers inland saw local climate change effects, including longer periods of unusually hot days, droughts and water shortages (SN: 6/5/19).
2. Most people think the U.S. government should do more.
A total of 67 percent said the government should be taking more action against climate change. That included strong support among Democrats (90 percent), as well as a big jump among liberal and moderate Republicans: 65 percent in that group are calling for more climate action, compared with 53 percent in the group in 2018. Younger Republicans were also more likely than older Republicans to say they wanted to see more action from the government. Views among conservative Republicans on this issue were only slightly changed, with 24 percent supporting more government climate action versus 22 percent in 2018.
“If Republican leaders don’t take [climate and energy] more seriously, it’s possible young voters may shrug and say ‘OK, Boomer,’ the next time they ask for their vote,” said John Kotcher, a communications researcher at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication in Fairfax, Va.
3. Most believe U.S. energy policy priorities need to change.
More than three-quarters, or 77 percent, of respondents said the United States needs to wind down its production and use of fossil fuels, the source of most climate-warming carbon emissions (SN: 7/1/19). To achieve that, 92 percent favor expanding solar power, and 85 percent want more wind power. Meanwhile, support was far lower for nuclear power (49 percent), offshore oil and gas drilling (42 percent), coal (35 percent) and hydraulic fracturing, which yields natural gas (38 percent).
The survey “helps us put our finger on the proverbial pulse of public sentiment,” says Max Boykoff, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We need to understand where people are on these issues, and find that common ground” to move forward with climate and energy policy. Read more …
Climate change is already harming the health of people around the world and it will only get worse without intervention, according to a new report co-authored by University of Colorado Boulder faculty.
With contributions from 120 experts at 35 institutions around the world, the 2019 Lancet Countdown report paints a grim picture of what the world will look like without a drastic change in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Though the consequences of climate change — including disease outbreak, air pollution, wildfire risk, heat exposure and food and water insecurity — impact all age groups, children and the elderly are the most vulnerable to dying because of those impacts, according to the report.
Max Boykoff, an associate professor at CU Boulder and director of the Center for Science and Technology Research, was on the CU Boulder team that looked at how media outlets have covered climate change and public health.
While more news coverage is linking climate change to public health issues, it’s still not commensurate with the scale of the problem, Boykoff said.
“The bottom line is that we are currently facing and we need to confront many challenges connected between public health and climate change,” Boykoff said. “We need to very fundamentally and substantially and boldly take new, larger scale approaches to engagement through policy action, research and business engagement to reduce the threats on public health for people in this world now and going forward into the future.”
The report finds that air pollution already contributes to millions of deaths every year — approximately 7 million in 2016, according to the World Health Organization.
CU Boulder Assistant Professor Colleen Reid, who researches climate change and health, said air pollution and health problems caused by wildfires in California and Oregon do not bode well for Colorado.
“We’ve been spared from significant smoke impacts for the last few years, but that’s not to say Colorado will be spared in the future,” she said. “We can expect there to be significant air pollution impacts from wildfires in the future.”
Greenhouse gases are also a concern for the Front Range — specifically tropospheric ozone that’s formed through the chemical reactions of other pollutants, Reid said.
Children are the most vulnerable to many of the impacts of climate change, according to the report, and rising global temperatures increase the transmission of diseases that are most harmful to children, including intestinal illnesses and dengue fever.
There are some bright spots in the report, including evidence that positive change is taking place, such as the increased use of renewable energy and electric vehicles and improved air quality in Europe.
But for the most part, countries seem to be taking a “business as usual” approach that will result “in a fundamentally altered world,” according to the report.
“The life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change,” the report states. “Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives.”
CSTPR Faculty Affiliate and ENVS Assistant Professor Cassandra Brooks has been invited to be science faculty on the forthcoming Homeward Bound Project women’s leadership expedition to Antarctica. Homeward Bound is a ground-breaking, global leadership initiative, set against the backdrop of Antarctica, which aims to heighten the influence and impact of women in making decisions that shape our planet. Launched in 2016, the inaugural program culminated in the largest-ever female expedition to Antarctica. Homeward Bound has now led three cohorts of women through the annual state-of-the-art program and Antarctic voyage. Professor Brooks has been invited to be faculty on the fourth which is due to depart for Antarctica on November 22, 2019. This voyage will be the largest ever all-women expedition to Antarctica.
On November 13, Colorado State Senator Kerry Donovan came to the University of Colorado to participate in the third of CSTPR’s seminar series “Public Discussion: Policies on Climate and Environment” (co-Hosted with the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization). Senator Donovan, who is from District 5 and represents Chaffee, Delta, Eagle, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Lake and Pitkin counties, participated in a Q&A session with CSTPR Director, Max Boykoff. The discussion was recorded and can be viewed here.
CSTPR’s Max Boykoff and Olivia Pearman were one of over 60 experts from around the world that contributed to the 2019 Lancet Report on Health and Climate Change.The authors say every child born today will be affected by climate change. How we respond will shape the health of children across the globe, at every stage of their lives. CIRES News.
Climate change is already damaging the health of the world’s children and is set to shape the wellbeing of an entire generation unless the world meets Paris Agreement targets to limit warming to well below 2˚C, according to a major new report published in The Lancet.
“It’s important to better understand the links between climate change and public health,” said CIRES fellow Max Boykoff, who contributed to the report with an investigation into media coverage of climate change and public health. “They demonstrate the immediacy of these intersecting challenges—we must approach with careful urgency to alleviate their negative impacts.”
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change is a comprehensive yearly analysis tracking progress across 41 key indicators, demonstrating what action to meet Paris Agreement targets—or business as usual—means for human health. The project is a collaboration between 120 experts from 35 institutions including the World Health Organisation (WHO), World Bank, University College London, Tsinghua University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
The report highlights key climate change-related impacts:
Infants will be among the worst affected by crop failures
Children will be particularly susceptible to infectious disease outbreaks
Air quality will worsen—further damaging heart and lung health
Throughout their adult lives, extreme weather events will intensify
“This year, the accelerating impacts of climate change have become clearer than ever,” says Professor Hugh Montgomery, Co-Chair of The Lancet Countdown and Director of the Institute for Human Health and Performance at University College London. “The highest recorded temperatures in Western Europe and wildfires in Siberia, Queensland, and California triggered asthma, respiratory infections and heat stroke. Sea levels are now rising at an ever concerning rate. Our children recognize this Climate Emergency and demand action to protect them. We must listen, and respond.”
For the world to meet its UN climate goals and protect the health of the next generation, the energy landscape will have to change drastically, and soon, the report warns. Nothing short of a 7.4% annual cut in fossil CO2 emissions from 2019 to 2050 will limit global warming to the more ambitious goal of 1.5°C.
According to Boykoff, tracing media coverage of these issues helps to put our finger on the pulse of public discussions about their interactions and threats to human-environment wellbeing.
“We find that in newspapers across the world don’t tend to report health and climate change as interconnected issues,” said Olivia Pearman, a PhD student working with Boykoff and another coauthor on the report. “While coverage of these issues together has been increasing in recent years, this observation speaks to the need for continued, sustained recognition and discussion of the interactions between human health and the environment.”
This press release has been modified from Lancet Communications. Read more here.
More and more voices call the state of the climate an “emergency” or “crisis.” Is that effective? And how do we respond to it?
As the effects of climate change become more apparent, warnings that it represents an “emergency” or a “crisis” are gaining steam. Experts don’t yet know how effective this language might be — but they say the way we react to it is going to be crucial.
“I think a lot of people are sensing that there is sort of amped up messaging that’s going on.”
Max Boykoff is a director at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. He studies climate change communication and its effects. He’s familiar with the trend of activists, governments and scientists calling it a climate “emergency.”
“I’ve noticed the increase as well, just more anecdotally, though, than systematically,” he said.
These warnings can sound especially sharp compared to the conservative climate predictions of groups like the IPCC. But it’s too early to tell just how much they might help. Boykoff tells Newsy it will take time to formally measure whether new language for the problem causes a new response from stakeholders.
Starting right away, though, there’s a risk: If a message to impress the urgency of the situation becomes too strong, it might make people decide it’s too late to fix.
“You’re kind of instilling a bit of fear in people using the words ’emergency’ and ‘crisis’,” Boykoff said. “It can have a paralyzing effect.”
With that said, climate threats aren’t always as abstract as they used to be. What once felt like a distant problem is now happening right on some doorsteps, and the scientific evidence keeps piling up to support climate connections and risks.
Boykoff expects the trend of urgent warnings will continue. Whether they ultimately hurt or help, he says, may depend on what we do about them.
“The critical part is, ‘OK, as we’ve done this, as many other groups have declared emergencies and crises, what happens next?'”
Findings from a United States national survey of TV weathercasters
by K.M. Timm, E.W. Maibach, M. Boykoff, T.A. Myers, and M.A. Broeckelman-Post, Weather, Climate, and Society (2019) doi: 10.1175/WCAS-D-19-0063.1
Abstract: The journalistic norm of balance bas been described as the practice of giving equal weight to different sides of a story; false balance is balanced reporting when the weight of evidence strongly favors one side over others—for example, the reality of human-caused climate change. False balance is problematic because it skews public perception of expert agreement. Through formative interviews and a survey of American weathercasters about climate change reporting, we found that objectivity and balance—topics that have frequently been studied with environmental journalists—are also relevant to understanding climate change reporting among weathercasters. Questions about the practice of and reasons for presenting an opposing viewpoint when reporting on climate change were included in a 2017 census survey of weathercasters working in the United States (N=480; response rate=22%). When reporting on climate change, 35% of weathercasters present an opposing viewpoint ‘always’ or ‘most of the time.’ Their rationale for reporting opposing viewpoints included the journalistic norms of objectivity and balanced reporting (53%), their perceived uncertainty of climate science (21%), to acknowledge differences of opinion (17%), to maintain credibility (14%), and to strengthen the story (7%). These findings show that climate change reporting from weathercasters sometimes includes opposing viewpoints, and possibly a false balance, but further research is necessary. Moreover, prior research has shown that the climate reporting practices among weathercasters are evolving rapidly and so the problem of false balance reporting may already be self-correcting. Read more …
October media attention to climate change and global warming went down 8% from record levels of coverage in September 2019. However, it was still up 48% throughout the world from October 2018. While Middle East and North America coverage was up 10% and 7% respectively from the previous month, it was down in all other regions. At the country level, coverage also dropped from high levels in September in all countries we monitor, with the exception of increases in three countries: the United Kingdom (+8%), New Zealand (+5%) and Canada (+49%).
In particular, New Zealand’s record September 2019 coverage followed by continued 5% increase in October 2019 showed sustained media discussions of climate change and global warming.
Figure 1. Number of news stories per day per outlet in October 2019 across the New Zealand newspapers The New Zealand Herald, The DominionPost, and The Press.
In October 2019, Canadian coverage of climate change indeed went up 49% from the previous month of September 2019. Canadian coverage also reached record levels, and this was largely attributed to the role that climate change played in the October 21 General Election for Prime Minister (see Figure 2). For example, journalist Chris Turner reporting for the Globe & Mail noted, “Climate change has never before played as central a role in a Canadian federal election as it did this year, and Mr. Trudeau ran hard on his record as the only leader offering both credible action on climate change and continued support for Canada’s oil and gas sector. The Liberals were, as Mr. Trudeau once put it, the only ones who saw both pipelines and wind turbines in Canada’s energy future. This was Mr. Trudeau’s grand climate bargain – better market access for oil and gas in a sort of trade for consensus on a workable path to a low-carbon economy – and Canadians have given him a shot at seeing that bargain through. I’d argue his legacy as a Prime Minister will ultimately rest on whether he can deliver on it. Mr. Trudeau’s reference to a referendum on the next 40 years was not self-aggrandizing on the climate front”. Meanwhile, over at The Toronto Star journalists Peter Lowen and Michael Bernstein reported after the election that “voters who turned away from the federal Conservatives were overwhelmingly concerned about climate change. Of the voters who did not vote for Scheer’s Conservatives, 20 per cent said they would have considered supporting the party. Among this Conservative-friendly pool of available voters, 77 per cent said climate change was among their top voting issues. Those same voters were unimpressed with the Conservative platform on climate change, giving it an average grade of D. What those results tell us is that the Conservatives left thousands of votes on the table, especially in battleground regions like Toronto and the 905 belt around Canada’s largest city. Had those people switched their vote to the Conservatives, we might be looking at a very different government today. If Conservatives are going to win elections in the future, they will need to advance a more credible plan on climate change — and that begins with not only accepting, but embracing, the reality of the carbon tax and rebate”.
Figure 2. Number of news stories per day per outlet in October 2019 across the Canadian newspapers Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star and The National Post.
Figure 3 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through October 2019.
This month, we integrate 17 new sources across 14 countries: five new sources in Asia, 11 new sources in Africa and 1 new source in the Middle East. These are:
The Malaysian Reserve (Malaysia), Today (Singapore), The Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka), The Daily News (Sri Lanka) and The New Nation (Bangladesh) in Asia;
Daily Trust (Nigeria), Vanguard (Nigeria), The New Times (Rwanda), Daily Nation (Kenya), The Times of Zambia (Zambia), New Era Namibia (Namibia), The Citizen (Tanzania), Pa Potentiel (Congo), L’Observateur Paalga (Burkina Faso), La Nouvelle Tribune (Morocco) and Sud Quotidien (Senegal) in Africa;
Dawn (Pakistan) in the Middle East.
This work increases our explanatory power regarding print media coverage of climate change in these regions now with 23 sources in Asia, 15 sources in Africa and 6 sources in the Middle East along with 20 sources in North America, 13 sources in Latin America, 8 sources in Oceania and 28 sources in Europe. This brings the number of print sources that our Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) monitor up to 100 sources across 54 countries. Including television and radio with newspaper sources, we at MeCCO now monitor 113 sources total across 55 countries. (For more details about each source, visit our ‘Source Fact Sheet’ page on the MeCCO website.
This month, further political and economic connections with climate issues dominated media coverage around the world. For example, October began with discussions emanating from an International Monetary Fund (IMF) about putting a price on carbon. The IMF proposed that funds gathered through the pricing scheme would be dedicated to offset increases in energy prices. The report also posited that implementation of a $75 per ton tax on carbon by 2030 could keep warming to 2 degrees C. The IMF prognosticated that it would also lead to approximately 30% greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in the United States (US) and up to 45% GHG emissions reductions in China, India and other developing nations. This set of IMF pronouncements signaled further acceptance of carbon pricing in business and finance communities as a tool to effectively combat climate change.
Consequently, this report generated substantial media attention. For example, CNBC reporter Emma Newburger reported, “Increasing the price of carbon is the most efficient and powerful method of combating global warming and reducing air pollution, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. While the idea of carbon taxes on fossil fuel corporations has been spreading across the globe in the past couple decades, increasing prices on carbon emissions has received widespread backlash from those who argue the tax would raise energy bills. But economists have long contended that raising the cost of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas is the best way to mitigate climate change, and that revenue raised from the tax can be returned to consumers through rebates and dividends”.
Meanwhile, Washington Post journalists Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman wrote, “A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday. The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy — especially from the burning of coal — but the economic disruption could be offset by routing the money raised straight back to citizens … The IMF report comes out as financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risks associated with climate change, including damage from sea-level rise, extreme weather events and billions in fossil fuel reserves that might be in excess of what can be burned while also limiting warming. The Federal Reserve, for example, is taking a closer look at how climate change may pose a risk to economic stability. In the United States, a $75 tax would cut emissions by nearly 30 percent but would cause on average a 53 percent increase in electricity costs and a 20 percent rise for gasoline at projected 2030 prices, the analysis in the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor found. But it would also generate revenue equivalent to 1 percent of gross domestic product, an enormous amount of money that could be redistributed and, if spread equally, would end up being a fiscally progressive policy, rather than one disproportionately targeting the poor. The impact of a $75-per-ton tax would also hit countries differently depending on burning or exporting coal, which produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy generated when it is burned. In developing nations such as China, India and South Africa, a $75 carbon tax reduces emissions even more — by as much as 45 percent — and generates proportionately more revenue, as high as 3.5 percent of GDP in South Africa’s case, the IMF found”.
In later October, the political and economic met the legal as a set of court cases and congressional hearings involving ExxonMobil and climate change captured media attention. The events that captured media coverage took place in New York, Boston and in Washington D.C. In New York, ExxonMobil defended itself against claims that it misled investors about the risks of climate change for oil and gas explorations, drilling, distribution and sales. In Boston, ExxonMobil faced a suit that was broader in scope that included misleading investors and consumers through false advertising. In Washington D.C., two hearings – one through the House Oversight Committee and a second through the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis – also examined these movements of ExxonMobil. In addition, these hearings more broadly discussed the role of ‘Dark Money’ (covert contributions made from fossil fuel industry groups to organizations that sought to slow or stop climate policy action) and disinformation in contemporary US climate politics.
Media coverage of these hearings abounded, particularly in US and UK sources. For an example of coverage surrounding the New York State court case, Wall Street Journal journalist Corinne Ramey penned a story entitled ‘Exxon Misled Investors Over Climate Change, Court Told’. She reported, “To illustrate how Exxon Mobil Corp. allegedly deceived investors about its climate-change accounting, a lawyer from the New York attorney general’s office showed a packed Manhattan courtroom Tuesday a multicolored world map the company presented to shareholders. In red were countries including the U.S. and Canada where Exxon said it was planning for tougher climate-change regulation, showing the number the company used to calculate the higher cost”. For an example of coverage of US House hearings regarding ExxonMobil, disinformation and climate change, US-based Guardian journalist Emily Holden authored an article entitled, ‘Exxon sowed doubt about climate crisis, House Democrats hear in testimony’. She began the article by writing that the House Oversight “Subcommittee laid out four decades of evidence just a day after oil behemoth began a trial over misleading investors”. She continued, “House Democrats on Wednesday laid out four decades of evidence that oil behemoth Exxon knew since the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels was heating the planet and intentionally sowed doubt about the climate crisis. The testimony came in a hearing in a House oversight subcommittee on civil rights just a day after ExxonMobil began a trial in New York City over misleading investors on the business risks from government rules meant to address the climate crisis. Exxon’s role in hiding the mounting emergency has been widely publicized for four years, since the publication of an investigation by InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia Journalism School. Court proceedings and additional reporting have found more proof of Exxon’s longtime knowledge of the problem”. Read more …
This show is all about how we talk, write, joke, and otherwise communicate about the climate crisis. It’s about who constructed existing narratives around climate change and which voices are given the biggest microphones when it comes to climate communication. It’s about how to approach difficult climate conversations with friends and family, and how and when to make people laugh, or cry, or feel hope when it comes to the climate crisis in front of us.
Terra Verde host and Earth Island Journal Managing Editor Zoe Loftus-Farren talks with Susanne Moser, a geographer, independent scholar and consultant working on climate adaptation, resilience, effective climate change communication, and more, and Max Boykoff, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, and author of the recently published book Creative Climate Communication. Listen here.
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MeCCO Monthly Summary: The New Normal
Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
October 2019 Summary
October media attention to climate change and global warming went down 8% from record levels of coverage in September 2019. However, it was still up 48% throughout the world from October 2018. While Middle East and North America coverage was up 10% and 7% respectively from the previous month, it was down in all other regions. At the country level, coverage also dropped from high levels in September in all countries we monitor, with the exception of increases in three countries: the United Kingdom (+8%), New Zealand (+5%) and Canada (+49%).
In particular, New Zealand’s record September 2019 coverage followed by continued 5% increase in October 2019 showed sustained media discussions of climate change and global warming.
Figure 1. Number of news stories per day per outlet in October 2019 across the New Zealand newspapers The New Zealand Herald, The DominionPost, and The Press.
In October 2019, Canadian coverage of climate change indeed went up 49% from the previous month of September 2019. Canadian coverage also reached record levels, and this was largely attributed to the role that climate change played in the October 21 General Election for Prime Minister (see Figure 2). For example, journalist Chris Turner reporting for the Globe & Mail noted, “Climate change has never before played as central a role in a Canadian federal election as it did this year, and Mr. Trudeau ran hard on his record as the only leader offering both credible action on climate change and continued support for Canada’s oil and gas sector. The Liberals were, as Mr. Trudeau once put it, the only ones who saw both pipelines and wind turbines in Canada’s energy future. This was Mr. Trudeau’s grand climate bargain – better market access for oil and gas in a sort of trade for consensus on a workable path to a low-carbon economy – and Canadians have given him a shot at seeing that bargain through. I’d argue his legacy as a Prime Minister will ultimately rest on whether he can deliver on it. Mr. Trudeau’s reference to a referendum on the next 40 years was not self-aggrandizing on the climate front”. Meanwhile, over at The Toronto Star journalists Peter Lowen and Michael Bernstein reported after the election that “voters who turned away from the federal Conservatives were overwhelmingly concerned about climate change. Of the voters who did not vote for Scheer’s Conservatives, 20 per cent said they would have considered supporting the party. Among this Conservative-friendly pool of available voters, 77 per cent said climate change was among their top voting issues. Those same voters were unimpressed with the Conservative platform on climate change, giving it an average grade of D. What those results tell us is that the Conservatives left thousands of votes on the table, especially in battleground regions like Toronto and the 905 belt around Canada’s largest city. Had those people switched their vote to the Conservatives, we might be looking at a very different government today. If Conservatives are going to win elections in the future, they will need to advance a more credible plan on climate change — and that begins with not only accepting, but embracing, the reality of the carbon tax and rebate”.
Figure 2. Number of news stories per day per outlet in October 2019 across the Canadian newspapers Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star and The National Post.
Figure 3 shows trends in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through October 2019.
This month, we integrate 17 new sources across 14 countries: five new sources in Asia, 11 new sources in Africa and 1 new source in the Middle East. These are:
This work increases our explanatory power regarding print media coverage of climate change in these regions now with 23 sources in Asia, 15 sources in Africa and 6 sources in the Middle East along with 20 sources in North America, 13 sources in Latin America, 8 sources in Oceania and 28 sources in Europe. This brings the number of print sources that our Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) monitor up to 100 sources across 54 countries. Including television and radio with newspaper sources, we at MeCCO now monitor 113 sources total across 55 countries. (For more details about each source, visit our ‘Source Fact Sheet’ page on the MeCCO website.
This month, further political and economic connections with climate issues dominated media coverage around the world. For example, October began with discussions emanating from an International Monetary Fund (IMF) about putting a price on carbon. The IMF proposed that funds gathered through the pricing scheme would be dedicated to offset increases in energy prices. The report also posited that implementation of a $75 per ton tax on carbon by 2030 could keep warming to 2 degrees C. The IMF prognosticated that it would also lead to approximately 30% greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in the United States (US) and up to 45% GHG emissions reductions in China, India and other developing nations. This set of IMF pronouncements signaled further acceptance of carbon pricing in business and finance communities as a tool to effectively combat climate change.
Consequently, this report generated substantial media attention. For example, CNBC reporter Emma Newburger reported, “Increasing the price of carbon is the most efficient and powerful method of combating global warming and reducing air pollution, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. While the idea of carbon taxes on fossil fuel corporations has been spreading across the globe in the past couple decades, increasing prices on carbon emissions has received widespread backlash from those who argue the tax would raise energy bills. But economists have long contended that raising the cost of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas is the best way to mitigate climate change, and that revenue raised from the tax can be returned to consumers through rebates and dividends”.
Meanwhile, Washington Post journalists Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman wrote, “A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday. The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy — especially from the burning of coal — but the economic disruption could be offset by routing the money raised straight back to citizens … The IMF report comes out as financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risks associated with climate change, including damage from sea-level rise, extreme weather events and billions in fossil fuel reserves that might be in excess of what can be burned while also limiting warming. The Federal Reserve, for example, is taking a closer look at how climate change may pose a risk to economic stability. In the United States, a $75 tax would cut emissions by nearly 30 percent but would cause on average a 53 percent increase in electricity costs and a 20 percent rise for gasoline at projected 2030 prices, the analysis in the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor found. But it would also generate revenue equivalent to 1 percent of gross domestic product, an enormous amount of money that could be redistributed and, if spread equally, would end up being a fiscally progressive policy, rather than one disproportionately targeting the poor. The impact of a $75-per-ton tax would also hit countries differently depending on burning or exporting coal, which produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy generated when it is burned. In developing nations such as China, India and South Africa, a $75 carbon tax reduces emissions even more — by as much as 45 percent — and generates proportionately more revenue, as high as 3.5 percent of GDP in South Africa’s case, the IMF found”.
In later October, the political and economic met the legal as a set of court cases and congressional hearings involving ExxonMobil and climate change captured media attention. The events that captured media coverage took place in New York, Boston and in Washington D.C. In New York, ExxonMobil defended itself against claims that it misled investors about the risks of climate change for oil and gas explorations, drilling, distribution and sales. In Boston, ExxonMobil faced a suit that was broader in scope that included misleading investors and consumers through false advertising. In Washington D.C., two hearings – one through the House Oversight Committee and a second through the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis – also examined these movements of ExxonMobil. In addition, these hearings more broadly discussed the role of ‘Dark Money’ (covert contributions made from fossil fuel industry groups to organizations that sought to slow or stop climate policy action) and disinformation in contemporary US climate politics.
Media coverage of these hearings abounded, particularly in US and UK sources. For an example of coverage surrounding the New York State court case, Wall Street Journal journalist Corinne Ramey penned a story entitled ‘Exxon Misled Investors Over Climate Change, Court Told’. She reported, “To illustrate how Exxon Mobil Corp. allegedly deceived investors about its climate-change accounting, a lawyer from the New York attorney general’s office showed a packed Manhattan courtroom Tuesday a multicolored world map the company presented to shareholders. In red were countries including the U.S. and Canada where Exxon said it was planning for tougher climate-change regulation, showing the number the company used to calculate the higher cost”. For an example of coverage of US House hearings regarding ExxonMobil, disinformation and climate change, US-based Guardian journalist Emily Holden authored an article entitled, ‘Exxon sowed doubt about climate crisis, House Democrats hear in testimony’. She began the article by writing that the House Oversight “Subcommittee laid out four decades of evidence just a day after oil behemoth began a trial over misleading investors”. She continued, “House Democrats on Wednesday laid out four decades of evidence that oil behemoth Exxon knew since the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels was heating the planet and intentionally sowed doubt about the climate crisis. The testimony came in a hearing in a House oversight subcommittee on civil rights just a day after ExxonMobil began a trial in New York City over misleading investors on the business risks from government rules meant to address the climate crisis. Exxon’s role in hiding the mounting emergency has been widely publicized for four years, since the publication of an investigation by InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia Journalism School. Court proceedings and additional reporting have found more proof of Exxon’s longtime knowledge of the problem”. Read more …