 I think we'll get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for those of you who are joining us on our webcast. My name is John Shatlovsky. I'm the director of the International Reporting Project here in New America. We've been here since August, so we're new arrivals at New America, and delighted to be here after 18 years here in Washington at Johns Hopkins SICE previously. Thank you for joining us for today. It's exactly one month since the election of the new president of the United States. And as we all know, the future of climate change is now much in the news with the incoming administration. We have a president who has so denied the existence of climate change in the past as a Chinese hoax. And we have yesterday's announcement of a new administrator for the EPA who promises to make major changes in that agency. The International Reporting Project, as I said, we've been awarding reporting fellowships for more than 18 years now. We've send more than 600 journalists to more than 110 different countries around the world to do reporting on important global issues. And many of them have done environmental stories and reports on climate change from around the world. We are delighted that a month ago, as voters were going to the polls here in the United States, a month ago we had five journalists in Marrakesh, covering the COP22 Global Climate Change Conference. In collaboration with the Stanley Foundation, we selected five journalists from around the world to spend two weeks at the climate change to see what would come of that meeting, which was a follow-up to the Paris Conference a year ago. And we're delighted today to have two of those five journalists that we supported at that conference to be with us to talk about the impact both of the US election on the future of climate change, which is, of course, on all of our minds now, but also before we forget the results of the Marrakesh Conference, which was attended by some 25,000 people from around the world from nearly 200 countries, what exactly happened at that conference? What are the outcomes? What is the future of future international climate change negotiations? Glendora Mikl, who's the deputy director of the International Reporting Project, was also in Marrakesh for two weeks, and she's going to moderate the conversation today and introduce our two panelists who are distinguished and very experienced journalists on the subject of climate change. So, again, with thanks to the Stanley Foundation that collaborated with us on this program, and thanks to you for joining us today. Without any further ado, let me turn it over to Glendora for introductions. Being here, I will introduce you briefly. Zach Coleman is the deputy energy and environment editor at the Christian Science Monitor based here in Washington, and Susan Phillips is an energy and environment reporter for NBR Member Station, W-H-Y-Y in Philadelphia. They have both long histories already on reporting on climate change and environment issues. They have both been separately, Night Science Journalism Fellows at MIT, and they have spent those two weeks in Marrakesh, as John already mentioned, reporting on the COP 22 climate change conference. So, we don't want to spend the entire time talking about Trump, of course, or the U.S. administration, because the U.S. role is not the only part of these climate change talks, but I think it is appropriate to start there. Just given the context, day two of this two week conference was the U.S. elections. And I think it's fair to say, but I would like you both to elaborate that it probably changed much of the content of that conference. So, I'm wondering if you could both talk a little bit about what you intended to cover at COP 22, what stories you pitched us, and then what you actually ended up reporting on if there's a discrepancy there. So, Susan, do you want to start us off? Sure. So, I mean, I went to the COP thinking I do a few stories about what happened there, but I knew that it wasn't the, I guess, the signature large event that Paris was the year before. So, the audience back home, they would have needed, I'm a radio reporter, so it's a general audience. They would need to even be reminded what's going on and what happened in Paris. So, I knew it would be pretty simple in terms of what I would do for the actual climate talks, but while there, I also wanted to do features out in the field, but also from the climate talks itself that would relate back to a local regional office, local regional audience in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware area, and coal mining, for instance, is a big issue because Southwestern Pennsylvania has a lot of coal miners and that was a big issue for, I'm sure know about the election and about the Clean Power Plan and there had been a lot of layoffs in Southwestern Pennsylvania and a lot of struggling coal towns. So, I thought, well, I really wanna find out from these folks here, what do they have to say to coal miners back home? Because basically they're at this climate change, working to make sure that these coal miners don't have jobs anymore. Or at least the jobs that they've had for generations. So that was one idea and then, I mean, I think the other idea was to go to the solar plant, which I ended up not going to. But pretty much, I mean, I did, when I got there, I did a setup piece. Hey, this is happening, everyone. And then I did a larger feature ahead of election day that was just basically, you know, what do Moroccans think about the election? What do they think about Trump? And when I woke up in the middle of the night, somebody had texted me that Trump won. I was like, oh, shit, okay. So everything's changed now and the story's changed now. And basically it all shifted to, here we have a global diplomatic community here. And what do they think of the Trump election and what's gonna happen with the climate talks that everyone was so optimistic about coming into this conference? So it really shifted a lot. Yeah, and I just think that the world became very small on November 8th because like most Americans, I'm one of those dumb people who only speaks English. And I couldn't hear a lot of the conversations or couldn't understand a lot of the conversations that were happening on November 8th, but one thing I could hear a lot was Trump. It was what everyone was talking about. And consequently it became what we had to report about. Originally I had gone in with the idea of doing some features on climate smart agriculture, early warning systems for drought and extreme weather events, how you create a more sustainable urban infrastructure to deal with rising sea levels, things of that nature. Still got to do quite a bit of that, not all of it, but at the same time you had to start putting out these fires because we didn't really, I don't think this was something that we planned. I mean, I think that there were a lot of reporters at the COP who said, if Clinton won, we don't really know what we would have reported on anyway, but now that Trump's won, there's a lot to report on. And it's true, you have to report on fallout. What I ended up focusing on was climate finance as a test for a sort of post maybe U.S.-led climate order because there were plenty of people at the conference who said, well, we'll be able to push ahead. It's fine. We're gonna have to do what we can, but it's fine. The U.S. won't completely recede, and even if they do, others will step up. But this whole disparity between developed and developing countries on who's going to pay for adjusting to a new climate change world is something that will be tested by the lack of U.S. leadership. If the U.S. pulls out of an aggressive role in climate, then it kind of gives the signal to other countries that might not want to do heavy lifting that they can pull out too. So that became the real story, and there were people, countries there who were concerned that if the U.S. isn't going to pitch in financially or help secure, leverage more dollars from other countries that the whole financing element, which has really never been solved in the international climate debate, will also fall apart. So that's the thing to watch going forward. And there's still plenty of reporting on that to be done. I want to come back in a second to what you were talking about in terms of reporting to local communities, because that's just one other thing I will point out about IRP's fellowships. You two are both American journalists, but you were actually the only American journalist that IRP took. In addition to the two of you, we took a Honduran photojournalist who works primarily in Central and South America, a South African journalist based in London who reports mainly on agriculture and food issues, and a Kenyan journalist who reports largely on the East Africa region for SABC, the South African Broadcasting Corporation. So we purposely tried to make sure that we do have people who are speaking to different audiences and through different mediums, and the two of you do represent different mediums, your radio, your mostly print. So I want to come back to talking how you speak to local audiences in a second, but I want to follow up with you a little bit on policy, because you are based here in Washington and you do frequently speak with U.S. officials. You interviewed outgoing EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy on Monday. I'm wondering if there is anything that you learned from covering this conference, from looking at things from an international perspective, or maybe specifically when we actually got out of the conference venue and went to speak with some sort of far-flung communities in Morocco who had not actually heard the term climate change, but who had felt the effects. Is there anything that you brought back with you that might help inform the kinds of questions or the way you ask questions to U.S. or international officials in the future? So I think that this is exactly one of the reasons I wanted to go out to Morocco to begin with. As a monitor, we just started a new vertical, new semi-autonomous publication called Inhabit that's focusing on the environment, energy, and climate change, and one of our missions is to kind of explain climate science and climate change and the impacts that it's having in a way that is relatable to people in different parts of the country and in different parts of the world. So in the U.S., obviously people know that climate change is a subject that people talk about, whether you believe in it or not. You're aware that is a conversation that's happening. In Morocco, that's not necessarily the case. We went to a mountain village in the High Atlas Mountains where we were talking to people about the changes that they had seen in their community and how it was affecting them in agriculture primarily, but when you ask them, do you know what the term climate change is, they would say no, what is that? And I think that that's important to recognize that you don't really necessarily need to know the word climate change. You might not even need to understand that everything that's happening is climate change. As long as there's an awareness amongst people that something is different and that they need to adapt to it in some way, I think that's the starting point of a conversation with people. And I think that's, it's certainly not what a lot of environmental groups would have you say, they believe very much that people need to understand you need to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, but we're talking to people here who are using walnuts as their currency. I mean, this is not something where they are contributing a massive amount of emissions themselves, but they need to figure out how do we live in this world that's changing. We were talking to people who noticed that the snow melt was much decreased in the Atlas Mountains. Around the time we were there, it's usually snowy on the Atlas Mountains. There was hardly any snow, maybe a light dusting. They said the water doesn't come through this river anymore when we need it to come through. So they're aware of this and they're adapting to it. And I think that as long as you can meet people where they are on some of these issues and start to have a conversation about what they're seeing, that's kind of where you can begin to have a more robust climate conversation rather than coming at them and saying, climate change is happening, how do you not know that's not climate change? Ask them what they're seeing and start where they're at. I think you both will probably have something to say about this question, but coming back to talking to local audiences, I think that one narrative that sort of emerged from the conference was that even though so many of the topics that you were talking about were very high level and speaking international agreements that were being spoken of, you have to find a way to make that relevant to your listeners at home. And I think that's especially part of the goal of your job because you work for NPR, but you also work locally for W-H-Y-Y. And so so many people just wanna know how does this affect me or what might have been talked about at an international climate conference that I could possibly care about here in Philadelphia? How do you do that? What's the way to get people interested at a local level? So I mean, I think the main thing is how is it gonna impact them, right, I mean? And again, it's what every good journalist knows how to do pretty much find a good character that can illustrate the impact. And one of the stories I ended up doing while I was there was, there was a local sort of contingent of academics and students who had come to the COP from the Philadelphia area, from universities around the Philadelphia area. And I just sat down with them one day and talked to them about their experiences and what were they thinking before they came and then how the Trump election impacted them and what they saw and what are they taking away from this international conference. And I think using people who the radio listener would relate to because maybe they know they have a son or daughter that goes to Drexel or Lehigh, I mean, there's always some kind of connection if you can get a local person who had a stake in the conference and explain what their work is. And also, just through that story, through the voices of the local people, you can touch on the issues that actually were taking, that were actually being discussed at the conference and one of them was the fact that cities and states now, everyone's sort of looking to them to keep the fire going for the next four years, not that it could match what the US, federal government could do in terms of reducing emissions, but what I found and I think Zach would agree is it was really hard to find anybody at the COP whether it was somebody from an NGO, the State Department, diplomats, anyone, activists who would admit that somehow the election was gonna just kill the Paris Agreement. I mean, it was almost like an existential crisis for them. They could not admit that. So any kind of thread of positive silver lining, they could hold on to, they grabbed and held on to like a life raft. And one of those was the fact that, well, we've got California, and California's here, they've got a delegation and they're committed to reducing emissions and then we have all these blue cities all over the place and they're dedicated to reducing emissions. So maybe we can keep this thing together through that. Yeah, that did seem to be a point of optimism against all the uncertainties that it did seem as if, okay, yes, a lot has been agreed at an international level, but now much of it will be in the hands of local leaders and communities. Did you have anything that you wanted to add to that? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of talk of some of these bluer states and cities leading the way, but I mean, sure, you have California, California has so much renewable energy that they aren't even gonna be able to use it all in their grid and they're trying to export it to other states that don't want it. So there's only so much that you can do if you're California or if you're Massachusetts. At some point from the US perspective, you're gonna need someone like Wyoming or Nevada or any number of Southeast states to also realize this is in their best interest because the coastal states can't do it all themselves. There's a point of diminishing marginal returns and you can't expect all of them to do all the work for the states that aren't gonna do anything. The silver lining stuff, yeah, that was definitely present. I think that there is still a lot the cities will be able to do, a lot the corporations can still do, but it's kind of crazy how the Obama administration started sounding like a Cato board meeting over the course of the election. I mean, it was all free markets, states, cities. And I think that markets are trending in that direction, sure. But at the same time, Gene McCarthy has said you need the clean power plan to lock in all the progress and the forward momentum on renewables. Well, the markets were really doing it all. You don't need anything to lock it in. So there is this recognition that, yeah, you still need to push forward quite aggressively and that leaving states and cities up to their own devices without any sort of policy push might not get you there. Well, I think it's clear that journalism is going to be playing a continually important role in getting these issues discussed. And I'm wondering if there are topics that you noticed at the conference were probably under covered because everything was so suddenly devoted to the election. I know certainly financing is something you talked about and we're able to cover a bit, but that's a huge thing. Financing these adaptation and mitigation strategies that have been spoken of impacts on indigenous populations, climate refugees, which is still not a term that's actually recognized by the UN, were there particular conversations you had with groups who were lamenting the fact that their particular issue was not going where they had hoped it would during this conference because it was overshadowed by the American elections? I feel like every group felt that way. I mean, we felt that way. I mean, we had stories we wanted to do and we couldn't do them because everyone wanted to talk about the election. I think that there was a good amount of frustration that the refugee issue didn't get a little bit more airing, but it's a kind of politically tricky time to do that. You talk about opening up the Human Rights Convention refugees and then you have a whole number of countries who are gonna wanna play with the language to keep refugees out of their own countries for any number of reasons right now. So that's one of the reasons you can't go to that. Those protections for a climate perspective because you might end up in a backdoor way eliminating protections for refugees that already exist. So there's a lot of overlapping kind of problems with that, but the financial one has long dogged this whole process and that will continue to be the case next time around too. And we'll have to see, I think a lot depends on what the US is able to put forward too. I mean, you're talking about getting $100 billion by 2020 in overall climate aid. Trump will still be present around then. I don't know if it'll always be a Republican Congress through those four years, but it will be from the next two. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Yeah, did you have anything to, any stories you think were probably should have been covered but just didn't any groups, anyone you spoke to, any conversations you had that people were especially frustrated? I think, I mean, the climate conference itself was so overwhelming. It was almost like a three ring circus of human misery via climate change. I mean, every day there was so many little meetings or seminars or events about this particular aspect of climate change or that particular aspect of climate change and who's suffering. I think that when we're talking about finance, the big issue is with these least developed countries because they need money to adapt and mitigate and that was sort of a linchpin of the Paris Agreement. If the rich countries were able to give financing to the poorest countries, then the poorest countries were able to sign on and reduce their emissions and whatnot and I know Zach and I sat down with one gentleman from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose job it was to advocate for these least developed nations and this was after the Trump election and he was very diplomatic. I mean, that was kind of amazing to me. I never covered any diplomatic events before but it's kind of impressed me at how good diplomats are at being diplomatic but he did talk about the struggles of his country and other countries and what would happen and I asked him, look, what keeps you up at night? And he said, my daughter, because there's more malaria, there's more mosquitoes because of the increase in I guess the more hot days and more breeding grounds for mosquitoes and mosquitoes are being found at higher latitudes or higher elevations and so my daughter is getting malaria more and so she's crying a lot and she's getting sick and that's what we're dealing with. And so I think those kind of stories were probably everywhere at the time but yeah, it's just a matter of what you're gonna prioritize and again, how to bring it back to a local audience or a national audience. Well, I think you briefly mentioned the language of journalism which I think is gonna be maybe even more closely examined than usual. I mean, John, you mentioned last night when we got the announcement that Trump had picked the new EPA administrator, it was an interesting little sort of side event in the journalism community to see that the New York Times had originally headlined their article on that announcement. They had called him a climate change dissenter and there was such an outcry over that terminology that within an hour they had revised the headline to call him a climate change denier and I wonder any sort of, I don't know, any extra scrutiny towards linguistics or anything that you anticipate might be sort of added to the uphill battle that sometimes climate and environment journalists already have to face when we are looking at an administration that may be giving credence to more climate change deniers? I mean, I just, I have what, AP changed into doubter like a year or so ago, I really don't know who uses that. Not that I do the headlines but we went with climate change skeptic to describe Scott Pruitt. I think that there's a lot of, actually when you look at some things, there is some nuance in what it means to be a skeptic. I mean, you can totally agree that climate change is happening and that temperatures are rising and that means sea level will rise but have a complete disagreement on how much the planet is going to warm based on certain models. I understand there's, the models aren't perfect and there's variants in all of that and in some respects that's good skepticism but it's not gonna, I don't know, I struggle with it because I think that it is in some ways a complicated issue. Science is not easy behind it and there's a lot of true but irrelevant facts that people can, depending on their news source that they're credible will focus on and that can mislead people. Doesn't mean that the facts about the science are untrue, it's just in the broader sense of the literature it's not as relevant. So it's a confusing field and there needs to be more clarity about it. I don't think it's necessarily right to demonize people who aren't public servants but if you're a public servant, you're deemed to be pretty smart, I would hope and you're trusted with a lot and you want them to be well informed. I'm not asking half the internet commenters in the world to run the EPA but I hope the person who's running the EPA is well informed about the science behind the stuff he's regulating. So I think that's the task here is to, for journalists, when the science is being misinterpreted or used improperly to support a certain action or aim then journalists have to come in and explain what the science is and how it's being convoluted. Yeah, I mean, I think that, there are those who understand the science of climate change very well but that doesn't help their bottom line and so they will manipulate the facts and manipulate people who aren't as well informed as them and I think it definitely is the job of journalists to hold them accountable for sure but again, I definitely see sort of two different camps in the people who genuinely don't believe in climate change for whatever reason and those who are smart enough and aren't educated enough to believe in it but yet willfully manipulate the facts for their own bottom line and you know. Yeah, it's an interesting and important distinction. I'm aware of time and I wanna make sure that we have plenty of time for questions so I will just ask one more sort of broad question before I open up to the audience. This COP, COP 22 was billed as the Action COP after Paris last year where all of the discussions and high level agreements happened. Do you think there was an overall outcome to this year's conference? Come back and try again. I, you know, going into the conference everybody kind of understood that this was going to be a nuts and bolts kind of thing. We'll never know what more might have been accomplished had the US election not turned out the way it did. I think that definitely set people back a little bit but you know, from the beginning of the conference people said the end goal here is to just get to 2018 and set that as a deadline for some real, for basically the actual framework that's gonna underpin all the accounting for these emission reductions and the review process and holding people accountable. So I think that's exactly what happened. Any ideas on an overall outcome or was there one? I mean, I agree with what Zach just said and I think that coming into the conference there were a lot of people hopeful that, okay, the latest science says that our goals from Paris weren't really good enough. We need to go further and, you know, the least developed countries were, you know, thinking we're gonna have to get more money out of these people. But that didn't really seem to happen like Zach said. It was like, okay, let's just keep this thing going, you know. Yeah, I will say. I think there was the one thing I noticed that I had never thought of until actually it's pointed out by a woman who moderated a panel you were on in Morocco. It's already been announced that next year's conference will be held in Bonn but sort of hosted by Fiji and it's almost a shame that it won't be held in Fiji because of a consequence that I had never thought of and the woman who moderated your panel said that before this conference came to Morocco, most Moroccans didn't know much about climate change, didn't know about recycling and that one side effect of hosting a conference which receives its fair share of criticism, spending all this money, bringing all these people together every year, one side effect is that now Moroccans know about climate change. They know about simple measures like recycling that they didn't six months ago before this conference and become such a big deal for a country like Morocco. So I think there is that tiny silver lining there as well as we're all looking to grab onto some silver linings but I definitely want to hear from the audience to see what kind of, all right, let's start over here, right here, or Jim in. Hi, thank you very much for holding this and thank you for reporting on what you saw. Yes, I'm Dr. Mindy Reiser, I'm a sociologist and I've worked internationally and one of my questions deals with that but before the question of an observation, I think you've talked about cities and states being innovative and entrepreneurial but the world of the foundations will have to take up some of this and perhaps they will band together and allocate some really creative funding for innovative projects. My question is this, I've worked in the post-Soviet Union, the republics. So I'm wondering what Russia had to say, I realized that it was not a three-winged circus, a five-winged circus and you couldn't be everywhere but I wonder if you had a chance to hear or see any journalists from Russia, any interventions and I'm also curious about China, what they said and any colleagues who were working in the Chinese press if you had any counters with them either. I mean, I didn't talk to anyone from Russia unfortunately. China though, they were very much willing to take their leadership role, I mean that they're kind of the de facto leaders and I think that they're relishing the opportunity to have the kind of soft power as climate leaders that up until recently they never could have imagined having. For years they were kind of viewed as the climate laggard and an obstacle in international negotiations, at least that's how it was held up from the US perspective and that prevented the US from doing anything majorly aggressive on climate internationally for a while. But now they're going full bore, China is and I don't anticipate that changing, it's a domestic concern for them as well with the air pollution they have. So that's something that I don't see them pulling back on but I'm not a China reporter, I don't profess to know the Politburo very well so I'm gonna have to stop there on that. Yeah, similarly it's an interesting question because there was a lot of talk about China and we heard about China and their commitment despite Trump, same with India but I don't remember hearing much about Russia or any events with Russia and I don't remember actually ever seeing any Russian journalists although that doesn't mean they weren't there. Larry King wasn't there? No, I'm just, Russia today joke everybody. So yeah, there was a big, this huge, big tent like structure with all the journalists in the same place but I don't remember seeing anyone. No, yeah, that's a good point and a good observation. I also don't recall and there were areas in this massive structure that was the conference where each country did have a setup if they wanted it and I don't recall seeing one from Russia. But to the sociologists here, reporting is not empiricism so they were probably Russian. Yeah, I'm sure they were there. And there were 1,200 accredited journalists at this thing so yeah, we might have missed a few of them. They're Indians. Yeah, they were there. They were there, yeah, yeah. And India obviously was an active participant in the talk. Hi, Emily Gallagher, New America Resource Security. I had a question because in Paris, one of the big successes was that there was not just public leaders but there was also private sector leaders and really led the way in some really innovative things I've never done at COPs before. Was there any of this, any kind of organizations from anywhere in the world available at COP22? Private sector, you mean the businesses? Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. And they came out with a couple statements saying, we're forging ahead, momentum is strong. Yeah, they were very out front and center. Mars Corporation was kind of one of the bigger, they were on pretty much every panel it seemed. So yeah, I think there's definitely a commitment from the private sector. You look at big companies now, I think there was a Bloomberg story that came out around the COP that 60% of Fortune 100 companies have a climate or clean energy plan. So that's impressive. I mean, compared to where we were a few years ago, there's definitely companies taking this seriously. You know, I think it's, for them, it looks good. And I think there's just gonna have to be a mind paid to whether this is another round of greenwashing. I mean, this happened in the run-up to Cap and Trade too, where there were a lot of announcements made and it's tough to figure out whether these companies are following through because they're private. So that's the thing, you can talk a big game, but you've gotta follow through too, so we'll see what happens. And I think that's one of the difficulties in trying to report from something that is so massive and chaotic as a conference, is that oftentimes it's difficult to know what's all these events that are happening simultaneously and by default, sometimes you're most aware of organizations or groups that have the best PR. There are ones sending out the most press releases and our inboxes are just chock-full every day of things that are going on, everyone trying to get your attention. So that's one of the challenges and reasons we don't cover conferences very easily because it's difficult to sort through it and figure out what are the most relevant things. I have no idea how crazy it is to cover this conference. I mean, they're in the side event room alone are eight events going on at once and then if you really want information about what's actually happening at the conference, you're wasting your time being in the side events. You've gotta go out into the main hall or figure out where these people are taking a cigarette break or just where they go to the bathroom and you've gotta know what they look like and you've gotta be able to grab them and possibly even speak their language. So it's not necessarily the easiest thing to cover in the world. At the same time, at the end of the day, it's the same story, right? I mean, there are these, you know, you can get caught up in the like conference swirl, like these little rumors that are going around and these little nuances, but at the end of the day, it's like, well, they did what they did, you know? And they'll only put so much on their record. Yeah, yeah. Hi, I'm Andrew Tabor from the Mountain Institute and I wanted to sort of raise sort of a conundrum, which I'd be very interested in your perspectives on. My sympathies for journalists at the COP, I mean, I was there and we have a fairly active presence, you know, so many different things going on that it's really hard to know where to even begin. And you know, it's almost like every journalist that one talks to has a different COP, went to almost a different meeting because there's so many different threads. So really my question is about how does one raise the profile of important issues that just get lost in all of this big, big mess? And I'll give you a couple of examples. We work on mountain issues. One of the critical things is water. Water supplies, about half the world's water comes from mountains. Pakistan wouldn't exist as a country without the upper Indus. It's interesting that both Morocco and Peru where the last COP and then the one before Paris were, those are countries utterly dependent on mountain water sources. Those water sources are being utterly hammered by all sorts of changes, climate change, call it what you want, but there's serious, serious challenges. Morocco, if you look at the government projections and so on, population change plus changes in snowfall and so on, frankly 50 years out is that a country that has a future, I fear not. So you know, there are so many different issues. How do you choose and how can one raise the issue? I mean, I can throw out some other mountain examples. About 40% of the world's food insecure live in mountains. There's new data on this. There's tremendous problems with starvation, about 340 million people. Small island states grab huge amount of attention. Small island states have about 50 million people in them. All told, we've probably got 50 million children in mountain regions that are malnourished and their brains aren't developing properly and so on. So I could go on and on. My particular pet issue. What's the way of an organization to grab the attention of a journalist? Is that what you're interested in? Yeah. Well, I think you just kind of have to know the outlet that you're trying to get the attention of. I mean, so a lot of my colleagues will end up reporting on every turn of the screw at the cop and they might not have the time to focus on something like that unless it fits into something that is being discussed at the machinery of the cop. So for me, I'm reaching a more national audience that doesn't care so much about the ins and outs of what's actually happening in the plenary. So you reach out to that organization ahead of time and say, hey, this is something that's happening. And I know there's a lot of legwork and to figure out who that's gonna resonate with, but our inboxes just get filled during this conference with so much material that you can't even keep, you can't keep track of it all. But if you get a real personalized pitch, and it might fit in with something that you'd plan to cover, because every reporter comes to this conference with an idea of what they wanna do if they can stay on track, which is what I learned very difficult to do. So if you fit in that window ahead of the conference, like that's the way to do it. I don't think there's enough booths that you can put up or flyers you can pass out that will get you interested and it needs to really be a tailored, personalized message to someone to get someone's attention. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that, but also that's the kind of story you don't do from a conference. You know, you do that, you may have the conference as the news peg. So for instance, the best things to do would be find a reporter that's done that kind or similar reporting or, you know, and pitch them the story because they really have to go to these places to do the story. They need to talk to these people who are impacted and they're not gonna be at the conference. So, or, you know, use the conference to develop a relationship with a reporter that you think would travel to those areas and actually do those stories sometime later. That's what I would do. I think there were a lot of reporters, though, who were at the conference. We were lucky because we got to go with IRP that helped facilitate some of these side trips, but there are a lot of reporters who went out on their own and did features who weren't just always at the cop because there were plenty of feature stories from Morocco during that time. So I know that those reporters who did those were probably also covering the conference itself. So if you can get in weeks ahead of time, you know when a reporter, if you know if a reporter is going, you get in weeks ahead of time, maybe you can get them to change their plans. And that's, I mean, because if I had known about the Mountain Institute, we definitely would have connected because I was doing a lot of reporting on that. So we'll connect afterwards. So, yeah, good question. Yeah. Hi, I'm Jed Shilling. I'm actually on the board of the Mountain Institute and involved with the Millennium Institute, which is a system dynamic modeling of sustainable development issues. And one thing about climate change I interested in your reaction to what was going on at this conference is it's a global issue and we have global responsibility to deal with it. But the actions really need to be taken at local, state, national, regional levels. So what evidence did you see that countries were willing to be involved in more cross country cooperation in dealing with these issues and recognizing that this could be an important part of their foreign policy issues? Well, there's an event that World Resources Institute helped put together the High Ambition Coalition where it's countries that are trying to out-shoot their INDCs, basically. And they're going to create a clearinghouse of information and best practices to share across countries. I mean, is that kind of collaboration that can help them? Regional collaboration in Africa as well to promote renewables. There's the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative, which is it has very ambitious targets and a lot of coordination at the inter-regional level. So that kind of stuff is happening. There's some carbon markets that are even starting to form. When you talk about California, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia working together, and theoretically, if you design a good carbon market, you can have cities just join in whether their state wants to or not. I think that'd be hard to administer, but you can do that. So those kinds of conversations are happening and that's a meeting place for all those people who have like-minded ideas to work on that. And I would imagine a lot of these workshops where people are working on the rules for accountability and transparency in carbon markets. Those conversations are happening as well. We're not allowed to be in those rooms, but this is where you get people to convene once a year and then they go home to their countries and they stand to contact and hopefully they keep working on these things. I mean, I would just add that the point you made that it's local, it's not the federal level diplomatic core that actually puts all this into place. You're right. It's local communities, it's cities, it's states. And I've reported a lot about that in the past and how there's this disconnect between the local communities and what happens at these conferences. And I think at this conference, there was actually for the first time much more of a presence of local communities, I think in Paris as well. I mean, there were some major events about cities from all over the world and how they could collaborate and communicate and share ideas about what to do regarding both adaptation and mitigation. So yeah, I mean, I think you're gonna see probably more and more of that as more impacts of climate change start hitting local communities. And you know, this is not the only conference where they work on these issues. Right after this was the C40 conference in Mexico City where there were a lot of collaborative announcements on GHG emission reduction measurements and things of that nature. So there's a lot of this stuff happening. It might not have all happened at the COP, but there's plenty of these conferences. Other questions? Hi, my name is Jack Ropansky, unaffiliated. Was there much discussion among the COP officials about communication strategy and the general public? Or is this all an inside baseball kind of thing where it's just how people with the inside government agencies talk to each other? But my request actually is gained to, do you know where the poll trends are these days with the general public? Because if the general public doesn't really support something, then the politicians aren't gonna really support it. Yeah, it's a good question. My impression was that most of it was there was a lot of inside baseball, as you would imagine, because these are high-level talks plus the people there are very specialized in what they know, like oceans. The impact of ocean acidification or away seas. They're very, very specialized and they're kind of meeting with each other. In terms of communicating to the broader public about climate change, I'm sure there were events. I don't remember what they were. I don't know, maybe you had it. I don't recall any, but the whole conference is an echo chamber. I mean, if you are there, you work on these issues. It's not like you're gonna fund your own trip to Marrakesh and go into the cob just for fun. I mean, you might, I don't know, but that wasn't my idea of fun. People are already on board there. So I don't know if there's much thought paid to communicating it to the outside public. I think that's what you were there to do. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I think that's why they, I've read it, 1,200 journalists to go and cover this because yeah, I think we certainly came across many people, I mean, I had many conversations where people would say, oh, yeah, this is my 15th copper at every year and they know how to navigate it. I think much better than some of us did because it is just so sprawling and so overwhelming. Other questions? Any, all right, yeah, I think, okay, we can go back to one more. I just thought of this. In a lot of these major conferences, there's often a youth delegation or there's a separate meeting of younger people, however you describe this. Was that in evidence at this conference were there fora for young people to talk about how they see these problems and actions? They would like young people to take. Yeah, shout out to Justine over there. I helped moderate a panel for the UN Foundation for youths who are working on climate change issues. They were very present. There are youth delegates from a number of countries who go there and I think that that was a, one of the stories that probably could have been told a little bit more to be quite honest is when we talk about stories that were overshadowed is the commitment that younger generations have to climate change and you look at polls there, I mean polls amongst younger people on doing something on climate change are overwhelmingly, yes, it's real, something needs to be done. So I think that that was a very strong presence there. Yeah, and students were there, like I interviewed some of them for a local story about local people who were there for sure. Yeah, I mean there were definitely a number of events focused on youth. And I'd say that's a good point in recognizing that they are, there is much more agreement among youth that things need to be done. And interestingly, the US envoy, special envoy for climate change spoke at an event that CSAS just up the road yesterday. And one thing he noted, we think of climate change oddly now as a partisan issue, but he pointed out that the first UNFCCC negotiations happened here in Washington in 1991 under Bush 41 years. So it didn't always, it wasn't always so divisive and maybe with the next generation we'll be heading into a little more unity with how we think of this issue. All right, yeah, let's do one more and then we will try to wrap. It holds up that there's a strong generational difference in the numbers that cuts across parties. The polling does support that. But so I'm Sharon Burke and I'm here at New America. I know you touched on the election a little bit, but it must have been an extraordinary part of the story that you weren't necessarily expecting to report watching the American delegation deal with the news. Were you able to get them to talk to you about it and how fast, how did their story change? Because I mean I've heard Pershing talk about it and I mean he's still having trouble. He's by nature I think a very upbeat guy. So he probably found his voice pretty quickly, but that must have been a really interesting element of the story and were you able to cover it? Were you able to get the Americans to talk to you about it? Yeah, it's a very interesting part of the story like you said. So the first time that the press had any access to somebody from the American delegation was I think a couple days later, I think it was Saturday. There was a number of us there and it was one of these events about oceans. And this poor woman, I mean she was an undersecretary and she came and sat there and there's like an entire, there must have been about 10 different international reporters, China, Japan, Germany, all over the place. And she sat down and gave this talk about oceans that nobody cared about and there was a surprising question from the German guy, or maybe he was from AFP, I can't remember where he was from, but anyway he surprisingly asked about ocean and I asked him later like why did you ask about oceans and he was just like I don't know, I felt bad for her because once she answered his question it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, what's gonna happen with Trump? What's gonna happen with Trump? What's gonna happen with Trump? And she tried to stay as unfrazzled as possible but at one point she said something really interesting because she was getting bombarded and she said we have one president at a time. And then I pushed her a little further and she was just like I don't know, I don't know, but after that, Pershing was on message, John Curry came and he was on message. And of course like the journalists were like oh, rolling their eyes but like everybody else was like wasn't that great, you know? And so that's where I saw this existential crisis happening with everybody. I mean it was just like did everyone drink this Kool-Aid because everybody is on message and you couldn't get anyone off it, you know? So yeah, that was really interesting, the lame duckness of the US delegation. It was kind of surreal to be honest with you. Well, of course it had to be, no. Well and conversely didn't you have the microphone turned back on you the next day after the election you were asking a question as a reporter and someone said wait, wait, we have to have an American in the room, we need to ask you questions. What just happened? I mean didn't you have that happen to you just the very next day? Yeah, that was a weird event. But it was also just strange to be there as an American and have to, you were approached. I had a Saudi Arabian businessman pull the, who has a better democratic institution card on me. So I don't know, I didn't feel it was a very fair question, so I said I'm the one who's going to ask some questions. That was it. All right, we will do, yeah, we have time for one more? Yeah, Judd Schilling again, a couple of things. I was in Morocco a couple of weeks before this and they're putting a lot of renewables in in Morocco because they've got so much sunshine and wind. But my question is, was there any clarity in the discussions of the actions that need to be taken, of what the priorities were for what needed to be done in developed or developing countries to get the most attention in the short to medium run? Technologies in the short to medium run. You know, I think it's the same stuff that you hear all the time, you know, solar and wind, battery storage would be nice. Didn't hear a ton about nuclear. There was one geoengineering panel that I was aware of and you know, there wasn't a ton on carbon capture in storage from what I recall. It was pretty, pretty boilerplate, environmental group oriented, like traditional environmental group oriented solutions. So I think that was, you know, clean vehicles, things of that nature. Oh, a lot of agricultural issues. That was probably one of the bigger topics. I mean, it was turned. There was a whole day that was, the days were themed and agriculture was one of the days. It was turned the cop of action. They wanted to show people doing action. And I think that Morocco, there was actually a lot of really cool agricultural work happening to adapt to climate change. I mean, planting like prickly pear and argon trees for carbon sequestration, which is pretty smart. So yeah, there was definitely a lot on that. I would say probably half the booths in the side exhibit room were devoted to agriculture. Right, and it's my understanding, you covered more of the agriculture than I did, but it's my understanding that the least developed countries though, the poorer countries, not very happy with the end results in terms of what was decided about helping them adapt their agriculture and the funds, I guess they obviously wanted more funds and more commitment towards helping them adapt with droughts and whatnot. They sort of went away from the cop, very unhappy with what was decided. But that's often the case at the cop. I mean, the least developed countries, until there's a strong commitment to financing some of these projects, they will leave unhappy and I don't think anyone really blames them. It's just a hard thing to square. They aren't responsible for the emissions largely that have caused the problem, but the trend showed they will be producing more of the emissions in the future. So, it's just a tough issue. Do you have one more? Yeah, I think we'll do one more and then you all to join us for some coffee and refreshments in the back. Is this on? Yeah, just like a follow-up question regarding the agricultural incentives. So was there much talk about the development or incentivizing growing more perennial stable crops and some of the trials that are being done, the field trials on perennial rice, for example, and some of these other crops that could really help to reduce tillage and some of the carbon footprint of this industrialized agricultural system that has caused so much trouble? Yeah, I mean, we went to a prickly pear farm. That's not something that you have to keep replanting. It's growing in a drought hit area and it's a drought tolerant plant. These are the cactus flowers. Just to, if you're anyone not familiar, it's cactuses just grow these fruits. You have to do almost nothing to them. They were saying, we asked you, how do you get these to grow? And they said, if a paddle falls off, it'll sort of root and regrow itself, so in very, very dry climate. Yeah, and we didn't spend a ton of time out in the field, unfortunately, so we didn't get to see a whole lot in action. And frankly, I wasn't able to sit in on too many panels on agriculture, but there were a lot of panels. I mean, there's no doubt that it was a huge discussion topic. What exactly was discussed in each one? I'm not sure. Nothing to add on that? Okay, no, yeah, I wasn't in the weeds like that on agriculture, though I don't. No pun intended. No pun. All right, well, I think a pun is an excellent place to end. So we just wanna thank you all for coming. This is the first event that IRP has done since our move to New America. We hope to do many more starting in 2017. Really wanna thank Zach Coleman and Susan Phillips for making themselves available to chat with us today, and of course, thank the Stanley Foundation, who was our collaborator in this endeavor and sending our fellows to Marrakesh. So thank you all so much for coming. Please stick around and enjoy some coffee and refreshments in the back.