 Hello. My name is Salton Nukin. I'm the director of the communications forum. Thank you all for coming tonight. I know we will have some people, some night science circles and fellows and Neiman journalism fellows who will likely be showing up in a little while, so don't be distracted by them. That's what the reserved seats are for. Before we get started, we have a bunch of cosponsors to this event, which is fantastic. And we'd like to thank all of them, including Radius at MIT, the graduate program in Science Writing at MIT, which if anyone is interested in, you should explore. It's a great program I hear. The Climate Collab, Women and Gender Studies at MIT, the MIT Center for Global Change Science, and the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. So thanks to all of them for helping out with this. Also, if you are interested in events like this, there is a mailing list right there. If you put your email address, we will let you know about future communications forums events. That means you will get somewhere between five and six emails a year. We do not email you about other events. All we will do is let you know about communications forum events. So please sign up if you are interested in these. Tonight is an incredibly exciting night. We're lucky to have these three women here. And going from stage right, are you stage right? No, you're stage left. You're right, stage left. We have Lisa Song on the end. She is an alumna of MIT's Science Writing Program and an investigative reporter at ProPublica who covers environment, energy, and climate change. Lisa joined ProPublica in 2017 after six years at Inside Climate News, where she covered climate science and environmental health. She was part of the reporting team that revealed Exxon's shift from conducting global warming research to supporting climate denial, a series that was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Even though she did not win that, do not feel bad for her because in 2013 and 2014, she reported extensively on air pollution from Texas' oil and gas boom as part of a collaboration between several newsrooms. And she is the co-author of the Dilbett disaster, which did win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Congratulations. She beat out another MIT Science Writing alum that year. Kendra Pierre Lewis is another alum of the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She's the author of the book Greenwashed, Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet, and Covers Climate for the New York Times. Previously, she's been a staff writer for popular science, where she wrote about science, the environment, and her hatred of mayonnaise. Her writing has also appeared in 538, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Modern Farmer, and Slate. And then next to me is Beth Daly, who I just found out is also a neighbor of mine. That's the most pertinent thing. She is editor and general manager of the conversation and has covered the environment, science, and education for almost two decades at the Boston Globe. She's also been an investigative reporter at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and head of strategic development for Inside Climate News before joining the conversation. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won awards from the Association of Healthcare Journalists and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Before I turn it over to them, at the end of their part of the conversation, we will have a Q&A. Please come up to one of the two mics, even if we can hear you if you speak from your seat. This is also being recorded and there's webcast and those people will not be able to hear you if you're not picked up by the mic. And also, please introduce yourself in whatever extent you feel comfortable, because we do provide write-ups for these and so then we can say, instead of man, we can say John from wherever. So without further ado, I'll let them take it away. Great, great. Thanks so much, Jeff. So this is great. It's great to have such a good crowd and such a really important topic. Not mayonnaise, but kind of jammed. Mayonnaise is very important. But so I just thought it would be really helpful, maybe start with you, Lisa, just to talk a little bit about your job and your beat and some things you've covered and then we'll go to Kendra and then we'll launch in the questions, which I have a long list, so have a conversation. Yeah, so I work in the ProPublica office in New York, which is our main headquarters and my job basically is to write about climate change and or environment and I have basically complete freedom to pursue whatever stories I want, which is incredible luxury and amazing and very few newsrooms where reporters can do that. And our specialty is investigative reporting. So we often take weeks or months or sometimes more than a year to report and research and write a single story or a single series. So we're able to dig really deeply. I think the sort of driving principle behind all of our stories is we want stories that can create impact. So trying to reveal wrongdoings, corruption, things that are not great and then hopefully, if all goes well, perhaps somebody with power can change a law or change a regulation or create a new regulation or do something to fix the problem we're revealing. So our newsroom covers kind of every beat under the sun. So we have political reporters and people who cover immigration, healthcare, the economy, education and then there's a few climate and environment reporters. So that's kind of how we're structured. So I'm a reporter on the climate desk. So The Times has a dedicated desk for climate reporting. We're about two thirds of us are in New York about a third of us are in DC. The DC people do more political and policy stuff. In New York we do or I do mostly science but I'm not on the science desk. But that is, they're not even on the same floor as us. And so it's a mixture of daily reporting stories. So if a study is coming out and then to make sure of those kinds of stories as well as doing longer reform stuff that can take weeks or months to report out while I'm doing sort of daily stories. Yeah, and so it really depends. And then there's stuff like, I call it the natural hazard beat. So hurricanes, wildfires, things that have a climate link. I really like winter. At least in the Northern Hemisphere because there are fewer of those stories that sneak up on you. Yeah, so. That's great. I have a million questions about everything about your audience and how we talk about climate change as journalists. But I think it'd be really good to talk about some of your stories first. And Lisa, I'll start with you because you've done amazing work on carbon offsets. And it was, I don't know how many people have read it here but it was an amazing, a lot of people have read it. Amazing piece of journalism that really examined from several vantage points. And I'll sort of tell the story how you got into it of something that I think intuitively people in some environmental spaces know was probably not working was this idea that you could offset carbon emissions with trees and whatnot. But Lisa actually set out to prove it quantitatively in many ways by living it more than two decades. Going back two decades. So yeah, so I think people love to hear how you got into that story and the challenges of it. And sure how it came out and how did I get into it? So the end of every count we tend to do projects on a calendar year schedule. So the end of 2018 I was free from my previous stories and kind of searching for a new story for the 2019 year. And that was when the UN climate negotiations were happening in Poland. And I started reading stories about arguments with the negotiations related to this old UN offsets program. And this was this program that had been created decades ago and the idea was a company in a developed country could pay someone in the developing world, often India, China, Brazil to build a hydro dam or build a solar power plant or something, something clean. And if they could claim that this new project was built in place of a coal power plant or something that emitted more carbon, then they would take the difference of the carbon emissions and then say, because you've built this cleaner thing, the polluter in North America or Europe could then emit that many tons of CO2 and they would be canceled out by this project elsewhere. And what was becoming clear, more than a decade after the project's launched was tons of fraud, tons of problems with verifying that the emissions reductions were real. There had been this report that came out saying something like 85% of the emissions reductions were very suspicious. And so this had been the biggest experiment with carbon offsets ever that the world had done and it was basically a complete failure. So that was kind of the context of these and even that program had decided there was one type of offset which is somebody owns part of a forest somewhere and they were gonna cut it down. But instead, they're not gonna cut it down because you were gonna pay them for the carbon offsets of what those trees are worth. And they're gonna use that money to make a living in some other way that doesn't involve logging and cutting down the trees. So this type of, it's called a forest preservation offset and even that old UN program had said these types of offsets are really difficult to quantify and verify. And so we're not going to allow you to use these. But there had been, in the past 10 years, this renewed push to try and start these programs for real on a large scale. And the state of California was debating whether to vote on this measure that would encourage these types of offsets. So I'd seen a lot of arguments among activists and environmentalists and there was a lot of vaguely worded language like oh, we know this doesn't work. We have examples of sort of trial runs where we know this doesn't work. But nobody was saying anything specific. So I started trying to report it as much as I could reading old reports, talking to the few scientists who've actually tried to study this in a quantitative way. And it became obvious that California was basing a lot of its decision on what was happening in this remote area of Brazil, the state called Acre, where they supposedly had the world's best program that was almost ready to do these kinds of offsets. So, and it became clear I had to go to Brazil, but I'd never done international reporting. I didn't speak any Portuguese, but my newsroom completely supported me. They gave me the resources to, we hired a freelance reporter from Brazil who was working in the US and she became my co-reporter. We went to Brazil together for two weeks, talked to a ton of people. And we interviewed government officials who blatantly said, we need the money from these offsets for forest preservation to keep the tree standing. We care more about the conservation money than about the quantitative truth of the offsets generated. And they were very blunt about that. And when you talk to them and you see how bad deforestation is, it's completely understandable. They have so little money to track illegal loggers and miners, they need anything they can get to keep the tree standing. And so they're sort of making a bet that it's more important to keep some tree standing than to maybe have some suspicious carbon offsets. And that kind of became a big part of the story is some of the people involved kind of know there's a lot of uncertainty. And they're willing to acknowledge that, but it becomes for them a value judgment about is it more important to keep the Amazon standing and healthy than it is to maybe emit more CO2 than we are admitting on paper. And so, but there was a whole lot of problems with these types of projects. And we found one project in Cambodia that had actually passed sort of the most rigorous standards out there, which are run by a variety of nonprofits. And we partnered with a satellite nonprofit firm that actually found through satellite analysis more than half the trees in the project had already been cut down 10 years after the project began, yet it was still on the market and selling offsets. And the way that these programs are run, they rely on people to go into the field every few years and file a report, but those people hadn't filed a report in five years and they wouldn't actually cancel the project for another 10 years at least beyond that. So we were able to tell them before their actual employees that, you might want to take a look, something is very wrong on the right. Did, and what did, I'm curious if California, was there, did they, after the story came out? You know, they eventually voted to approve the thing to encourage these offsets, but it passed by one vote. So I don't know, maybe it would have passed by more votes without the story. But I do know a lot of people in the state government did read the story. It was discussed during the final debates before the vote. You know, there's, in general, one thing I found is there's not a lot of researchers or reporters looking intensely at carbon offsets. You know, they always come from a place of good intentions and I think there can be some reluctance to probe that. And there's a lot of environmental groups who truly support carbon offsets and, you know, have invested a lot of time and energy into them. That's great. I want to come back to sort of like, as you write these climate stories, how much you think about what's happening after the fact and impact. But I'd love to talk to Kendra about, you do many, many stories, but I really liked your wildfire story that you had written sort of, that were taking place all around the world as a wildfire. And I think, can you talk a little bit about how you can see that story and put the challenges to it and. Yeah, so that was one that was assigned. They were sort of like, the Amazon was burning and I think, I don't think California was on fire yet, but people were sort of, it was still kind of recovering from last year. And they were kind of like, you know, there's, and I think the footage of like, there were, not film, but like satellite images of like parts of Sub-Saharan Africa that were on fire. And there was a lot of tweets about it and people seemed very concerned about the Amazon and they were kind of like, can you piece about how the whole, like the world is on fire? And I was like, well, we can't, because actually wildfires are declining because of agriculture, actually. So lots of places that should be burning naturally are not burning because we've chopped everything down and planted crops, so yay, I guess. But I said, what we can say is these four things. We can say, and I'll tell you the one that we ended up dropping, we can say that the Amazon is on fire because it was deliberately set and the link to climate change is not, climate change didn't start those fires, but that obviously by burning the way the Amazon is burning, it is contributing to climate change and that's not great. We can talk about fires like the ones that are happening out west, which are part of the natural ecosystem, but climate change is exacerbating this wildfire cycle in conjunction with some other factors. And we can talk about prescribed burns or cool burn, or like less intensive burns, which are deliberately set because lots of ecosystems, especially across North America, were like, I don't wanna say evolved with fire, but that's kind of the best way of saying it. And so the United States government pretty much for over a hundred years engaged in this policy of fire suppression that is also making wildfires worse. And then, I can't remember what the fourth one was. That might have, oh no, the fourth one was prescribed and that one got dropped because it didn't quite fit into the narrative that we were looking for. And the third one was, I'm blanking, I'm sorry. But basically, it was sort of like sketching out, do you remember? I'm just thinking now, because I just read it today again. Now I'm blanking out. But it was sort of like this three bullet point narrative, and that was just to help people kind of understand fire. I've low-key been obsessed with wildfires for a couple of years, which is I think why they were like, can you write this as opposed to another science reporter? And one of the things is that I have tremendous respect for wildfire, but also I think one of the things that's really harmful with the narrative and the way we talk about wildfire is many people think that all fires are bad. And so the point of that narrative was not to say that it was great that the Amazon was on fire, it was not great, but to say that this is why it's not great and to really kind of have that understanding that fire is highly context-dependent, whether or not it is a good fire or a bad fire. And yeah, and so that was fun, I guess. It was really interesting. I ran into a fire researcher that I sometimes used but didn't use for the story. Shortly after and he was like it was one of the best stories on wildfire, he'd write about the whole situation and I was really grateful, because that was the other thing was it was true that Sub-Saharan Africa was very much on fire, but at the time, the area that was on fire, there's concern now about the Congo, like the rainforest in the Congo and that's a different category, but it was the Savannah that was on fire and that tends to burn kind of dramatically every year because there's like human start fires, but also lightning can start fires and these tend to get started by lightning. And so that was also a combination of those kinds of fires and ag fires. And so helping people kind of understand that nuance is really important because as we move into a warming world, they're going to be more of these kinds of discussions happening. Both those stories struck me as incredibly well-reported, of course, but also both of them were so well-explained, it felt it was very clear, like you walked away saying, oh, I get it. And I wonder when you pursue these stories, how much are you thinking about your audience and who is your audience? And you can speak both from your organizational standpoint, but also personally, because sometimes those can be very different. So do you want to start? I think it's a little bit different for me than because I'm just doing so many more stories than Lisa is doing. And so in general, I assume most people don't want to read a climate change story, even if they accept the science and are relatively engaged when you click on a link about climate change, you're generally not expecting having news. So I kind of go into every story with kind of that in mind and also the idea that people are smart but uninformed, which I think is useful. So I try and describe all the terms, I try and kind of really explain it to people in ways that are easy for them to wrap their heads around because I live in, like that story that you liked, that came, that was a day and a half's worth of work, basically, I walked in on Monday and they wanted it. And it's not taken me much longer. But the background of that is I had been obsessed with wildfires for two years. So that was just me being like, well, I know all of this stuff and I know all of the people to call. And so behind that day and a half of work was like two years of reading and studying and being obsessed with wildfires and going out on a prescribed burn. But someone's reading that story, like who's on the other side? Like who are you imagining or who do you hope is reading it? And you know, someone who lives in California, someone who's freaking out about the Amazon, somebody who was thinking about parking a hot car on grass during a drought. But basically, I'm very fortunate to work with an amazing art director on our team. And so I'm very lucky to have a lot of evocative imagery and graphics and those sorts of things to kind of entice people in when the study's kind of heavy. But yeah, generally, I don't have like this specific person in mind beyond maybe like slightly curious, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit more about it, but Lisa, I want you to explain for your audiences, because I think it is different. Yeah, I think it's slightly different. You know, we are writing for a general audience. We assume that our audience knows what climate change is and maybe is at least slightly worried about it. But beyond that, we don't expect them to know any of the jargon or terminology. So we are writing not for climate wonks. We want them to read it as well, but they're gonna read it anyway, because it's probably part of their job. But we really want the general audience who, and like Kendra said, it's really hard to get people to read climate stories for fun because often they're not fun. It's sort of doom and gloom beat is what we call it. And for this one, I think because it was so counter-intuitive, the idea that everyone has a warm and fuzzy feeling when you talk about saving trees and particularly saving the Amazon and you want to pay money to rural communities so they can find a more sustainable livelihood and then in return they save those trees and you cancel out your carbon emissions from when you're driving or from this particular company, that sounds great. Poking holes in that can sometimes feel not great, but I think there was enough curiosity about what it actually means to look deeply into it that we hoped people would respond. And we did get a lot of readers. The other, obviously people we want to read are people, because we were writing about something as California was about to make this important decision, we obviously wanted all of the board members and the regulators and anyone involved in that decision to read it so they could be better informed. We wanted residents in California who cared about the Amazon and cared about this decision to read it. And so, I know because I was told by residents in California that it was read by a lot of people within the state and people involved in this decision so that's always a good thing. Yeah, I mean, I often wonder when you're, and I guess I did it too when I was writing a story. It's about the, also it's about the language that we use and I'd love you to address that because maybe a few months back in September the Guardian and several others have decided to call, I think one, the Guardian started the Climate Emergency, they were gonna call Climate Changer as a Climate Emergency. And there were several other efforts to sort of get journalists together and journalism organizations together to write about climate in a certain way, using certain language with a sense of urgency. And it is quite controversial among journalism organizations and journalists individually. And I just love for you guys to talk about that. How much does choosing the right language, or I guess what language do you use and what's allowed in your organization? And if you think that's helping, once again, it'd be a long question, but what I really wanna get at is this idea of middle ground, right? Like this idea of if a journalist's role, I'm not saying everyone accepts that, is to help inform sort of the general population on both sides, are you choosing language to try to get at that? Are you saying no, it's an urgent issue, we're gonna only write about it like that to the exclusion of some people? I don't know if that was that clear, but. Yeah, I don't think that we have institutional rules on this. It really comes down to the story. I tend to just use the term climate change because it's accurate and everyone knows what it is and you're not distracting them. Sometimes I'll also use global warming to avoid repetition perhaps in a paragraph. I think I used the word climate crisis in a recent story I wrote about cap and trade in California, but I believe it was in the context of explaining that we're now in an era where even in the past year or two, the public understanding and feeling of urgency over the climate crisis has expanded tremendously. And so I thought, I think it was either a sentence like that or something about, we are now at a point where people realize how quickly and how drastically we need to act. And so it was in that context that I think I used the term crisis, but I don't think I even talked about it actively with my editor, it just made sense given what I was writing about and it felt like the right word. But I don't think we have blanket rules on what terms to use when. So I work in a very large institution. We have a style guide. It is long and very detailed. And sometimes there are funny words, I can't think of one right now but I had written something and my editor changed it and I was like, why? And he pointed to the style guide and it doesn't like that structure of phrase or something. And I was like, okay. It was like wonky enough. And our CMS tells you that it doesn't like certain words, which is fun, so we don't use climate crisis. And I don't have, that's just our rule and that's it. I think in terms of conveying, so I did a story recently that a lot of people did about how climate change is going to make future generations sick. And it's a really sad and kind of troubling scenario like what happens to kids who live in a four degree Celsius world because that's kind of the trajectory we're on. And so I had these experts say various things about what that actually means. But a friend of mine read it and she said it made her cry. Another friend read it and it made her cry. It was pretty much a bit downer. And I was like, but it was surprising to me because it was a study story. It was based on a Lancet report that had come out. I knew it wasn't the only person who had covered it. And so I read after the fact other people's reporting and I noticed that what I'd done differently and it wasn't deliberate, I don't think, was that I didn't actually talk that much about, I talked about the impacts, but I didn't talk about the impacts in a very scientific way. So like one of the facts of a warming world is there's going to be more small, particulate pollution in the air. And it's there partly because we're burning fossil fuels and that creates it and partly because as it gets hotter, forests burn and that creates it. So it's like this double whammy. And I talked to this researcher and I was like, why is it that kids are more susceptible than we are? And she was like, their hearts beat faster and they breathe more quickly. And I don't remember if that's like, I'm ruining it. The quote was much better. But the turn of phrase, anyone who's ever held a child, you can almost immediately kind of feel it, which is why I felt it was important, which is why I put it in the piece. And I think that those sorts of choices are what people felt like. There's a guy, a developer who sits not next to me, but we hang out in one of the open spaces a lot. And he's a developer, so he's not a reporter. And he turns to me and he's like, I read your article. I was like, well, I skimmed it. And I was like, fair. And he was like, I just had a kid. It kind of bummed me out. And I was like, both like, oh, I'm sorry. But also that was like, good. Like, you were the person who should be bummed out because you had a kid. So like, and your kid can't do anything about this, but you can. So sorry, I don't know where I'm going with that. But apparently it resonated with a lot of people. And it was mostly because I made the decision to use really evocative language and to really tie it concretely to children. And so another fact is that they are going to have more, they're going to overheat more, and part of the reason they overheat more is because they go outside more. And everyone remembers playing outside as a kid. And I had listened to the youth climate marches, which are happening. And so I made a decision to sort of, one of the speakers had talked about how this is all happening on the backdrop of the youth climate marches. And so like, and kids today are actually wondering whether or not they should have children. And I remember that one of the protesters had said something, or one of the activists that had been purchasing Jamie or Golan, I think, had given congressional testimony earlier this year. It was her, Greta, and two people I'm linking on right now. And she had said something about how everyone who will come up to her after the talk and telling her she has such a bright future in front of her was lying to her face because she was committed to a planet that was dying. And I'm getting preclumped. So when I saw it the first time, I had a gut punch. And it just felt like a good quote to end the piece on. And so I did. Because I'm probably the only person who watched the congressional hearing. And so I don't know how many people actually heard her say it, just because apart from the current impeachment proceedings, congressional hearings are not generally must-see TV. And so I think you don't always, I think the problem with freezes like climate crisis or climate emergency is that you run the risk of them just becoming another thing people say. We have the war on terrorism. We have the war on cancer. We have all of these languages. But we haven't actually solved those problems. And so I think naming things appropriately matters. But I think it can become too easy that the words are sort of decoupled from the problem. And so I think it can also become a crutch. And so in some ways our decision not to use it means that I have to work harder to convey the scale of the problem. And I think that is a good thing, because the problem is really big. And so I need people to kind of get a gut punch when they're reading about that scale. Yeah. No, I think that's really interesting, because it's sort of the I think that was long. You know, it's like, no, it's not always. It's show, you know, it's show, don't tell, or preacher, or whatnot. But still on that same subject, I'm curious. So, well, climate stories are a bummer, right? And sometimes we don't click on them. It's hard being a journalist covering it, I know. So how do you do it, right? How do you do it, because a goal of a journalist is to get someone to read the story, right? So if you're kind of up against something, which we all know it's pervasive right now in societies, that people are like, I don't even want to look at the news, this, that, everything. So how do you approach stories trying to get people into them to read them, because that's your goal. I mean, I think it's just find a story. I think that's relatable, you know. And that's why we went after the offset story so much with going to Brazil. The combination of the great art direction, we hired a local photographer who knows that part of Brazil really well. His English was also really good, and he took these amazing photos that we used throughout the story. We also hired an illustrator to draw some illustrations for it. It was just a really compelling story visually, and we hoped that would draw some readers in. But also, again, offsets are something that I think a lot of people can understand, and perhaps many people have personally bought offsets. You know, if you take a plane flight, oftentimes, at the end, there's a button you can click, and you pay $5, and you offset your emissions, and you feel great about yourself. There's just not a lot of transparency about exactly what projects you're funding, and certainly holes in how the monitoring process for those projects are going, as we showed through our reporting. So I definitely got a lot of feedback from readers who said, hey, I bought carbon offsets a while back. Now, I'm wondering if they actually worked, or I'm wondering how well they worked. And I personally, maybe five or seven years ago, I remember buying some offsets myself shortly after the UN, I think, started a portal where you could easily buy offsets. And I bought it a few times and didn't think much about it and moved on. And in the course of reporting this story, I flew all the way to Brazil, first to Sao Paulo, and then all the way west to the extreme western part of Brazil, then flew to a city in the middle, and then back to Sao Paulo, and I flew so many miles. And then I got back and thought, I don't know what offsets I can buy, because I don't know if I can trust anything, because I had reported on the story on how untrustworthy many of them are. So I was stuck in a position thinking, I can't even make myself feel better about the carbon that I spewed while reporting this. And I don't have a good solution for that. I would perhaps like to write a story, maybe to find the best offset projects out there, because there are good ones. They just may not be involving these tree projects in the same way. But there's a whole world of many other offset type projects out there that I haven't looked deeply into. And I was wondering if for Kendra, you're right, I loved your close at last story. It was really good, and I think you have more, because you're doing these long, you have more freedom to try to find things that I think that people feel like they can actually help solve a little bit, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, because it feels as important. So we have this feature in our newsletter called One Thing You Can Do, and it says tension, because we recognize the limits of individual actions, and so we don't wanna give people a bunch of, I don't know, don't use a straw. Advice that we know doesn't actually shift the actual impact, but at the same time, people want to do something, and so sometimes the one thing you can do is literally a thing like wash your clothes on cold, and sometimes the one thing you can do is one I think we said was go to your community board meetings and go to your board meetings and actually get engaged in where things are getting cited in your community and are you citing things in flood zones? Are you guys going to be on the hook for a tremendous amount of money in the future? But one of the things that we were constantly getting a lot of emails about was like, well, what about clothes? What about sustainable fashion? The footprint of fashion is so big. And the problem with fashion is that a lot of companies are saying that they're doing great things, but once you start talking to the experts about how much transparency is actually behind what they're doing, it gets really fuzzy, and basically the only company name that comes up repeatedly over and over again is Patagonia. And even by Patagonia's own measure, they're not doing enough, and I'm not being critical of them, but they themselves recognize the limits of what they have accomplished, and also you can't live in Patagonia everywhere. I don't think they make suits yet, so that itself offers some limits. And then there were these companies, like a lot of the fast fashion companies are doing things like offering up 100% organic cotton t-shirts, and that makes you feel good because you're not using pesticides, but cotton t-shirt, organic cotton often uses more water, and it's often grown in very thirsty places, so you're actually trading off to very, like I don't know how you do that accounting, but the one thing that we know is that if you buy something and it lasts a long time, you've already reduced your footprint, so the one thing you can do is buy less clothes. But if you're sort of under the age of 40, 45, you've probably knocked her up in an era where clothes actually last. So like, how do you buy clothes that last if you don't know what to look for? And so that was sort of the genesis of this piece, which is how do you buy clothes that last? And it really resonated with readers. We, like I mentioned, we're an art director, so we actually hired a fashion photographer to go out and visualize all of, I really wanted to crash your photo shoot, but I didn't, to visualize all of the tips, and it was like really beautifully and artfully shot. And we put it in a little Easter egg, which was like a fake Instagram account, so if you like found it. And we did like some of the clips on Instagram, so that would, you know, because there were a lot of influencers. And then there were other things that I did that I didn't even, I did kind of consciously, which is often, so there is this like slow fashion movement and there are some really kind of famous names within that movement. Like, so Olivia Firth, who's Colin Firth's wife has like, is a big purveyor of slow fashion, but I kind of made a conscious decision not to use some of the biggest names in slow fashion. I actually went the opposite route and I found like women of color who often don't get enough recognition within the influencer movement, and I spend way too much time on the internet. And I found a PhD student in the UK who's running a slow fashion project and I chose to highlight them instead. And, you know, she emailed me and she was like, we had, I don't remember the number, but like, you know, like the amount of traffic she'd like normally gets in a year, I got her in a week, which was like just like a nice aside. And like somebody tagged me and somebody tagged the influencer and let her know that she was mentioned in my story, I didn't think to tell her, not because it wasn't a bad story, like it was, you think to warn people when you're writing something terrible about them, but when you're writing something nice about them, you don't think about going down. And I didn't, and she was like, was like so shocked and so pleased. And so it was just like this added benefit that I didn't think about, like I didn't think, I don't know, this is dumb, but I didn't think how nice it is to be in the New York Times when you're from a group that isn't often represented in the Times. So that was really nice, I don't know why I threw that in there, but it was really nice. No, it was, and it's a story that you can actually, you know, people really wanna feel a sense of solution and that felt like you could do something. Yeah, and it was, and the other reason, sorry, the other reason we went that route is we didn't wanna tell people, like if you, we didn't wanna be like by this brand and the brand is very expensive. And so if you're going to a thrift shop, the tips still work. If you're going to like, under the fancies department store, the tips still work. Even if you're going to fast fashion retailer, the tips work. And so that was the other reason we kind of decided to go in that direction. That's great. The, I don't wanna monopolize all the time, but I do wanna talk about something that's really important, that is someone who's not writing right now, but I struggled with it and I think a lot of journalists struggle with it and it's environmental justice because it's so incredibly important. But I'll tell you sort of like I talked to some, I kind of did a survey of some journal friends of mine in the environmental field and I know a lot of them. And most of them are older, they're like my age, you know, in the 50s. And they said it's really hard to write about because it's super important, but sometimes the stories can feel familiar. And I don't know if you feel that way or not, but so that's the first question. If you feel that way. And secondly, whether or not, how do you write about environmental justice? So it's part of this climate beat and so it's sort of woven into it in a way that, or do you just hit it straight on every single time and is that as effective? So I think that oftentimes environmental justice may be sort of one step removed from the central thing you're writing about it if it's a pure climate story. But other times it fits in really well and when it does, you definitely need to tell that. And I think, I didn't think about the Brazil story as a climate justice story or environmental justice, but there is an element in there of it, right? And part of the reason why offsets are, a lot of people support offsets is this idea that the global North, you know, has profited and gained so many riches and privileges from the ability to emit carbon dioxide unchecked and that the countries that have more poverty and are in the global South, we are now saying you can't emit CO2 and not enjoy, we're not allowing you to enjoy the cheap fast route to get richer and that's just not right. And so perhaps if we can move some money from the global North to the global South to help them protect trees and at the same time, alleviate some of our guilt and emitting then everything will be perfect and work out. But of course that doesn't work and so what our story was saying is the best way to do that is just for the global North to be generous and pay the sort of money to help others adapt. But because our political climate is such that we are not generous enough, rich nations feel they need to get something in return and that's where the offsets come in. So it becomes, you know, there is an element in theme about poverty woven in and justice and we quoted community members who say, you know, the easiest way for me to send my kids to school to get electricity and running water is to cut down trees and have cattle and I can earn hundreds of times more money by selling some cattle for beef than by doing these supposedly sustainable alternative livelihoods that people in the US want me to do and just pay me a few dollars. So that is an element of it but I didn't approach the story thinking about it as an EJ story, it just sort of happened. And then sometimes in other stories, you know, sometimes I do stories where it doesn't fit in and doesn't make it into the story or makes it in in a sort of abbreviated form. And other times it just really depends on what the central story is you're trying to tell. So I guess I feel like for me there are two strands. I have done a couple sort of explicit environmental justice stories, so one I did, I was listening to a podcast about, it doesn't matter what, but anyway, somebody referenced the fact that in parts of California and parts of LA that black and brown communities are physically hotter than like white communities. So in summer they get hotter. And I was like, oh, that's weird. And so I did some digging. I found there, they mentioned, they didn't interview her but they mentioned the researcher's name. So I found her and I called her up and I didn't have a story, but it was very much like, hey, I just think that's interesting. What else have you got? And one of the things that she said was communities that are more segregated in the United States have higher overall levels of air pollution than communities that are more integrated. And I was like, huh, that's weird. And the problem, but I ran into a problem. So I worked for a newspaper, which means it needs to be new. And her research was a couple of years old. By chance, we were doing the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King. So they were doing this big package. And I was like, King said something about how segregation was bad. Maybe I can tie the two together. And so I talked to these researchers and then my editor at the time was really awesome. And it was like, I think based on what you've got so far, you should talk to a King historian. So I found a King historian who's great. He actually talked to me outside the barber shop. And I did a story about how King said segregation was not just bad for black people, it's bad for white people. And when it comes to pollution, it's true or something like that. I don't remember the exact title. It's been a couple of years. Because of that story, a few months later, Al Gore's people reached out and they said, hey, we're going to North Carolina to hang out with Robin Barber. Do you want to come? And I said, heck yeah. And so they were going down to North Carolina because you guys know who Robin Barber is. For those of you who don't know, he's an African-American preacher from North Carolina. And for the past, I don't know, five, maybe longer, but he was running this campaign called Moral Monday. So every Monday, it was a lot of getting people to vote and getting arrested for social political reasons around equity and racial equity. And I guess it was last year, he was relaunching Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign and he was adding eco justice to the platform. That's why Al Gore was coming down. So I went down to North Carolina. I toured a community that had been impacted by coal ash. I drove out, I had some issues with my flight. So I ended up driving out after everybody and went out to the facility just to see the plant. And I interviewed a lot of people who found that they had a lot of, who claim that they had a lot of elements from coal ash. And in the no surprises story, I called the energy company that they were blaming and it's the first time I'm mostly a science reporter. So I talked to scientists and they liked me and I liked them and it's great. I mean, I'm being a little bit glib, but it was the first time I'd ever really had a straight adversarial interview. So it literally ended with a PR person screaming at me and then I hung up the phone very shaken and then the PR person emailed my boss. So that was a new experience to me. How could they figure out who your boss was? I don't know, I really don't. That's very different, well. Yeah, so that was exciting. So there are those stories. And then on the other side, like recently I did a story, a really short story of very image driven about the abletion of the coral reefs in Hawaii. And so I was talking to this researcher and I was like, hey, you know, most, and this is a thing that I think about a lot with coral reefs, which is that most people who live in the United States will never see one. Except for Florida and our islands in the Caribbean and Hawaii, we don't really have any like incontinent United States that are apart from cold water, but that's not what I'm talking about. And you need submarine for those anyway. This is a problem I'm doing too much. But so I always whenever possible try to link it back to people who are impacted. And because coral reefs are like really critical ecosystems in the areas of the world, tropical coral reefs are really critical for food in the parts of the world where they show up. So I was talking to this researcher and I was like, hey, is there someone in Hawaii that I can talk to who like this matters too in a way that's more than just science. So he found me, this guy who's great, who lives in one of the last traditional Hawaiian villages on that island and so I interviewed him and I put him in the story. And so that's the other way that I think eco justice plays out is that there's a thread in sort of eco justice movements which is community speak for themselves which often makes it really difficult to talk to eco justice groups because they don't want to talk to you. They're like, go talk to this person's community and you're like, great, but I want to talk about the work you're doing. No, go talk to this person in the community, but what about the work you're doing? And so I think as a reporter, that is actually a really valid thing is like let people speak for themselves. And it doesn't always have to be this like, this thing is happening to them. They are participants in what is happening. I'm not saying that they're causing it, but they are actors in this process and so it helps to allow them to have that voice. And so that's the other way that I think is valid and also, yeah, is trying to find that voice, making sure that as much as possible if you're reporting touches on a community that someone in that community is in your story, which is a no easy, especially if you're used to talking to scientists all the time. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting because that idea of including people in the stories as opposed to right going to someone, this is happening to someone, changes the whole dynamic of a story and can make it much richer. I think everyone knows that when they see it. It just still doesn't happen very often actually. It takes effort and thought and you both have, and this may not be completely true for you, but luxury of resources in some time, right? I mean, I'm sure you're incredibly busy but so two things. If you have a question, I don't want to hoard, so please start. There is one thing that I want to, and this is something that I learned the hard way that's happened to me twice where I showed up in towns and there was a large Native American population and nobody told me. So when you're talking to researchers and you're like, is there anyone else I should talk to, even non-scientists, you should kind of be more explicit that it's like, are there community members that I should talk to? Because people forget. They get into their brain and they forget and it's the same with sourcing. I will tell someone, is there a woman? Can I, you know, like, I've got three dudes. Can I find a woman? Can I find a woman of color? Can I find, you know, a person of color? When I did that King piece, I found an African-American King historian because all of my experts on the piece were white. It was really important to have that voice in there. I didn't, yeah. Yeah, it's great. So if you have a question, come to the mic. I have a lot more questions, but please and we'll start getting a conversation going. But just on this, I think that's great. A lot of other journalists don't have those resources, right? Like you guys are very lucky, I think, in that. So two questions. It's not really advice for journalists, but it's, how do you, can you do that quickly? And second of all, this is a bigger question, but what angles not being covered in climate that you feel, just personally? The first one, is there something that we're missing? Cause there's a lot of climate news out there, right? So what are we not doing? I got one. Yeah, a drought, cause it's really hard to cover cause it's super slow moving. And like dirt looks like, what do you shoot? What do you photograph? So it has this tremendous impact. It's really important, but it is very difficult to talk about. And then you end up with like the Cape Town problem where everyone was like, Cape Town's running out of water and then Cape Town didn't run out of water. So like there's this real risk of becoming like the boy who called Wolf. And I'm not trying to minimize Cape Town's problems, but like, so like, yeah, drought in particular is really difficult. Yeah, you know, I, okay, this is gonna sound funny because I don't do this, but I would love to see more solutions, climate journalism in a way that is perhaps more analytical and talking about, here's the thing that actually worked and is anyone actually working to maybe scale it up? So it's not just one neighborhood or one town. I spent a lot of time after Hurricane Harvey reporting on the hurricane in Houston. I was reporting actually from my office in New York, which was difficult, but one thing that we kept hearing was, oh, you know, the greatest success story in relocating an entire town or an entire community after flooding is this town in Illinois. I think it was called Valmyre or something. And then I called up the former mayor Valmyre and he's like, yeah, there were, you know, like 300 of us or something. It was some very small number. And I'm looking at the data from the city of Houston with thousands upon thousands of requests for buyouts after the hurricane and just thinking this wonderful success story, which everyone knows about, is completely not applicable to the disaster you're seeing in Houston. Yet everyone talks about it like we should follow their example. And I'm thinking, who is actually gonna make this work? And so we ended up doing a story which was not a solution story about how backed up Houston's system was and that the Houston and Harris County had probably the most sophisticated system for trying to get as much money as possible for buyouts. And they were really working hard. They had all this great data and effort, but they were something like 10 years behind on their backlog. You know, it was tremendous, the demand for people who wanted money to relocate to less flood prone places versus the actual resources they had. And you know, I would love to just see more coverage of solutions that work and how to apply them in multiple places. I wanna talk more about solutions, but do you have a question and then we can come back to it. Just if you could tell me. Yeah, hi, I'm afraid that I had to be late. So if you already covered this, feel free to embarrass me publicly. I'm cool with that. I was wondering, you know, within the past year, there has been a truly astonishing increase in awareness surrounding climate change. There have been, you know, millions of people protesting and all this kind of stuff. And I was wondering as climate reporters, what kind of additional kind of benefits and challenges does that offer to your coverage now that there's like more of kind of a kind of laser focus than ever before on the issue? I think the benefit is that people are paying attention. And I think institutionally, more people are paying attention, but also I think it's interesting there's a split. So like I think print and new media gets it and they really are devoting resources and trying to convey like the magnitude of climate coverage. I think except for like Vice had that show in HBO, they were kind of the one exception. I think it's less true with TV news. And I think people overestimate our reach, not as many people, oh, I'm guessing, you know, like millions of people a night watch TV and I don't think any print publication has that equivalent of, you know, like I don't think that, and I don't look at my numbers, they don't let us, but I don't think that that many people read, like, you know, like, you know, 10 million people tune in to like cable news shows and I eat in an hour. I don't think I get 10 million people clicking on my story, do you know what I'm saying? And so I think that is the debt, like, yeah. So I think there's that split. I think the upside is the tension. I think the downside is, and I noticed this a lot, this is kind of what was also sort of the thread running through that fire story, is that there's a lot of miscommunication. I think that there are a lot of reporters who haven't covered science and haven't covered climate change before, who are now becoming climate change reporters and it's great, the more the merrier, I'm not mis-merging them, but I did, this is kind of a jerk, but like there was a fire that happened. I'm not gonna say where, because then you'll be able to find the reporting. And it was a natural fire. It was like, there was some, I mean, there were some issues with the ecosystem around ag, but basically like it's a fire-based ecosystem. Nobody lives near it. It made local media because there are mandatory reporting requirements when smoke hits a road, but it was like, it was a nothing burger fire that blew up all over social media because an outlet chose to report on it and make it a really big deal and say it was climate change and it just, and I was like, am I? It wasn't, another, a fire scientist that I really liked was on Twitter, was yelling at people and I was like, cool, I'm not wrong. I was like, it's gonna rain tomorrow. Like it really is okay, it is fine. And that drives me nuts because I often feel like you only get one shot and so once people have the wrong idea in their head, it's really hard to change their minds. So, go ahead. Hi, my name is Leanne. Thank you so much. I learned a lot from this panel. I had two related questions and I think there are continuations of the themes that were talked about today. One is about this resurgence of the political movement around climate change and climate justice. And I think previously we thought like science literacy was the solution to climate denialism and it seems like now like power literacy is also really important for general audiences to understand the political economy of the society that we live in where we support fossil fuels. And I was just wondering what you guys thought about that like whether that is part of your goal as journalists and the related question is whether any aspect of your reporting would change if the primary audience were activists and not necessarily people in power who had the power to change legislation, for example, but the people who actually could use this to organize and be activists. Thank you. You know, I think that, I'll answer the second question first. If our primary audience was activists, probably the biggest change would be not having to explain everything from scratch and being able to use more jargon perhaps. And so that's why I feel, I feel like activists should be reading our stories and shouldn't have any trouble understanding it because it's just stating a lot of what they already know in plain language. And on the issue of power and balance, one thing that's become very clear and I think can make stories and makes a really compelling story is the idea that a lot of people think the environmental movement is a monolith and it really isn't and it's increasingly clear that there's often a real split between the big national, well-funded environmental organizations and the smaller localized environmental justice organizations that are often run by communities of color and based locally and I just did a story on cap and trade in California and those two groups were on polar opposites of how they felt about cap and trade. And so I covered that, the story covered the differences and those opinions and also you end up finding, I think, justice elements that you may not necessarily think of because you also have to think about economic injustice including from people who don't see themselves as climate activists and how they can sometimes be used by either side. So one unexpected story I found when I wrote about cap and trade was I heard, sorry, cap and trade is this confusing market mechanism where you give out a bunch of limited permits to emit CO2 and then companies buy them and they can trade so it allows companies to maybe emit more than they did the year before but as long as someone else is emitting less than they were than everything balances out. But what I had discovered in reporting on this was there was a lot of flaws in the cap and trade program in California and I started hearing rumors that there had been this public regulatory hearing and that there were these groups of minority residents who seemed to have shown up at the meeting and perhaps were being managed by oil and gas somehow to talk about how making cap and trade more stringent would increase fuel prices and impact them on a economic level adversely. And it was a weird rumor and I started looking at this. So I watched the video five hour video of the hearing and then I noticed very clearly this block of black pastors from Los Angeles. They stated their names in the video so I looked them up and started calling them. I visited two of them and they basically said, oh yeah, we were approached by this consulting firm who said they would fly us to Sacramento for the hearing so we could talk about our economic concerns with this regulation. And then through lobbying records, I figured out that consulting firm was being paid by this nonprofit that was mostly funded by oil and gas. And the thing was these pastors did not know their trip was funded by oil and gas interests. They were not told that and in fact they had a history of local advocacy against oil and gas drilling in their own neighborhoods. So this was a case where they had no idea what was going on and when I told them they were very disappointed and very shocked, you know, they were very proud of their local environmental activism. They definitely cared about their communities and the economic concerns they shared at the hearing were genuine but it was a total shock to them that they had been funded by interests that were opposite of what they normally supported. And so I think drilling down to those kinds of power dynamics and revealing them is just a really important thing for all stories. Yeah, I don't know if I can add anything. That's a great question. Go ahead. Hi, my name is Jonas and I live in Germany currently. And so one thing that I observe is that there's quite a big difference in climate awareness but probably also reporting between say like Europe and the US. And so I wonder if you had any insights like what might contribute to this and also if you have any particular challenges of maybe like reporting of a global problem like climate change to a US audience. So I mean like we do still have I mean one of the biggest differences is we do still have a sustained climate denialist movement. And so one of the things when I bring this up today I always want to put in context is actually only about 13% of people in the United States don't accept the science of climate change. So they're in the sheer minority. There are some people when you include people who are like I don't know what is happening you get to about 30%. So that's 13% denialist and 17% to sort of head scratching but the overwhelming majority of Americans you can look this up it's Yale climate communication has really good stats on this. The overwhelming majority of Americans except the science I think there are only two counties in the United States where it's less than 50%. So that's just like I want to make that really clear that that's kind of the backdrop which we're operating under as Lisa's reporting has unveiled the and what's her name? Naomi Areske over at Harvard has done a lot of great work sort of highlighting the degree to which oil and gas companies have worked to perpetuate this disinformation. This disinformation campaign has only essentially happened in four countries. It's happened in the United States primarily a little bit has happened in the UK. It's happening in Australia still and a little bit in Canada. And so what that has meant is that while other countries had sort of accepted the science and their news media had accepted the science a really long time ago when inside climate news started when? 10 years ago? 2009 I think. It was somewhat radical that they were reporting on climate change from the position that it was happening and that they weren't going to debate the science anymore. So there's been a really large shift within media to sort of report from the perspective that climate change is happening and we're done with the debate and that's just sort of how where the position we're operating from. And so I think that's partly what factors into how that conversation is happening. If you're wondering why there's such a sustained denialist movement in the United States in those four countries part of it is a strong fossil fuel sector with the exception of the UK. All of these countries have large private fossil fuel sectors so that's a huge part of it. Part of it is this idea of freedom and this idea of the frontier and this idea that you can't mess with me. Neo-liberal capitalism basically and English. And it's not that there's anything unique about English. It just makes it really easy to disseminate the information between those countries. So I'm sure if we were speaking German then Germany might have more of a problem. Just so, and so in some sense we are historically really behind in other countries in terms of popular media sort of reporting on it as a fact so that's a huge part of it. And then we have governments that don't accept the science either. So it's not just that the 13% if they were not in positions of power the discussion might be very different but we have a president who is on record is not accepting the science and we have many politicians and positions of power who don't accept the science and so we are in a position I think as a country where we can't just sort of say this is what's happening and act on it. We're still in some ways redoing that debate. It's not playing out in the media anymore. It is playing out politically but that does mean when a politician says something that about climate change that it's not happening we still in many cases have an obligation depending on the context to report that. And so that means that like, yeah, does that make any sense? Sorry, I like that dot, dot. No, it doesn't make sense. I mean, it's interesting. Let me get another, let me get a question in but I'd like to follow up on that after. Yeah, my name is George Mokre. For the last 10 years I've been publishing a free weekly that looks at what's happening at the colleges and universities and the community about energy and other things. A lot of it is about climate change because there's all these discussions all the time around here. First, a piece of information. I started buying a bundle of trees from Heffern International in the 80s, right? And after about 10 or 20 years I realized if I buy a bundle of trees every year which is about 100 trees that are then planted out by indigenous people through Heffern International that's carbon offset, right? So when I fly, I buy a bundle of trees from Heffern International and they don't advertise it as being carbon offset but I think that it is. About 20 years ago I asked science fiction writers about positive futures and they didn't have any idea. They're very few positive futures. If we look at our media, if we look at our fiction, we don't have it. Everything, we're still Mad Max, right? It's still about oil and gas but there are all those kinds of solutions that are there. So how do we overcome this lack of imagination about solutions, even simple solutions, very simple solutions like the idea of carbon offset through a tree program which is not related to climate change or the fact that I carry a $10 solar bike light on my backpack which can also charge something which would also be essential power for the billion or so people who don't have access to light or a cell phone and it's 10 bucks retail or online. And we're not recognizing this stuff. So how do you do this? How do you get the solutions out there? How do you talk about carbon drawdown? How do you talk about soil carbon sequestration that all of these things are there or Tom Garo's idea of bio rock which keeps corals alive when they're bleaching? So are you talking not just from a consumer standpoint but in general solutions? Well, there seems to be a lack of imagination in the culture about any kind of positive future that is not from the 1950s. There's a book called, if someone has a phone I think it's the great disruption or the great, oh God, I can't remember, I can picture the cover, it's blue and relatively recent and I will, I don't know. I think, is it, who's it by? No, no, no, no, this guy is like Indian. Thank you, what's the book? What? The Great Derangement, thank you. The Great what? The Great Derangement who talks a little, yeah, derangement who talks a little bit about that tension how a lot of the futures are in serious novels tends to be relegated to science fiction and how there aren't a lot of positive futures. But I would say the best example I can think of is Black Panther and not just because of Vibranium and not just because it was an awesome movie but also if you look at Black Panther there is an urban core and there's a countryside but it doesn't actually have suburbs and the city center doesn't have paved roads. So those visions are out there, they're just, you have to look a little bit more to see them and in case you have to be really nerdy to notice details that like there are no paved roads in Wakanda and there are actually no roads in Wakanda because you know it flies so the sidewalks I should say are unpaved. But at the beginning I said this issue that we talked a little bit earlier about, can everyone here know about the solution journalism project? Network I think? Network, have you guys heard of it? So it's a cool effort to write about solutions to problems with the rigor that you apply to investigative journalism and it's a good idea. It's very hard to do though and I just love Lisa, just touch on solutions like is it important for journalists to visit your job to give everyday solutions to people as well as sort of broader solutions to explain them and how do you balance that against the need to report on the news and this? Yeah, yeah. You know I think we do oftentimes that ProPublica will spend an entire year writing about the problem in increasingly depressing chapters of a story and then maybe at the end of the year a few stories about solutions. Here is one state that is doing this thing well whereas the state we wrote about is failing at it or here's one company that is making some inroads, here's one happy story about this thing. We don't do it very often because that is not the core of why we're here but we have sometimes created depending on the project kind of users guides to help people advocate for themselves. So we have these great healthcare journalists who've created guides on when you're at the hospital here's what you do to make sure you don't get charged and get ridiculous surprise bills. Here are the steps of what to do. Couple years ago one of my colleagues did a great series on the problem of maternal mortality in the US, how women giving birth in the US are at much higher risk of injury and deaths than almost any other developed nation and at the end of that we publish an entire user's guide on if you are the spouse or family member of the person giving birth in the hospital here are the steps you take to make sure all of your concerns are addressed to make sure the risks are taken care of as much as possible. Here's what you do to reduce the risk that your loved one might suffer or die or get injured in the process. So I think those kinds of practical guides are very important. I have not found a way to do one of those in my reporting so far but I think a lot of daily newspapers and other publications do a better job on and do a lot more reporting on consumer oriented advice. And there's certainly a lot of stories out there saying, okay, what can you as a single person do for climate change? And oftentimes it comes down to voting, vote and get involved in local politics because that's where you as an individual often can make the biggest difference. I also think like, I think with the Globe just did that awesome article about how bad traffic is in Boston. And the thing is is like everybody, like transportation planners know that building roads doesn't reduce congestion it just adds to it, right? Like there are all of these things that like the solutions are like known. It's just that the political will isn't there to do them. So that's the other tension, right? Like we need mass investment and mass transit. That's the only thing that actually reduces traffic but like we don't do that in this country. So like, yeah, so like that's the other tension with solution stories is that sometimes the solutions are just so obvious and everybody knows what they are, but like there's no movement on them often for value and sociopolitical reasons as opposed to for technical reasons. Go ahead. Hi, thanks. I'm Jenny, I'm with Living on Earth we're a public radio program that Lisa Song interned at. I think a few years ago. And we have a podcast as well, so please subscribe. But one thing I'm thinking about a lot right now is the upcoming UNFCCC conference of the parties climate meetings that are gonna happen in Madrid after being moved from Chile, from Santiago and there's gonna be a lot of discussion there. Of course, the US is stepping back from its role in this global movement to have some kind of agreement about what are we doing about climate change? So I'm wondering to what extent you feel that kind of conversation like covering these meetings is important to your audiences and something that you should be informing them about because I feel like it's not that covered in the media. It's just not that sexy of a thing to report on. And also how do you try to go about that and sort of like draw out the most salient important parts of that kind of like really high-level diplomacy for your general audiences? I'm laughing because at Inside Climate News it was always a great discussion about should you go to the, anyway. I mean, I'm gonna be honest and say it's really boring to go and cover those conferences. It's a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of jargon, way more acronyms than anyone should ever have to deal with. And unfortunately, oftentimes there's not a lot of movement. I covered some of the events. I went to some of the events in September during Climate Week in New York because I was right there. And I came away with it thinking nobody's really talking about reducing the use of fossil fuels, which is the bottom line thing you need. Everyone is talking about, there was so much more discussion of carbon trading and offsets, but nobody used the word offsets and they used all these other euphemisms. And I complained enough about it that my editor just said, why don't you just write that story? So I ended up writing a story that was not focused on the step-by-step events of the meeting, but on this one slice about a topic that I'd spent months researching and could write about quickly and with authority. And that's sort of how we tend to cover those events. We don't cover, we know there were hundreds and hundreds of reporters covering these meetings actually during Climate Week. It was very encouraging to see the giant media tent filled to capacity. So there was plenty of daily coverage of what's actually happening. And we try to cover these kinds of things only when it falls into something that we can offer that's unique and new. And I think, I'm not sure why it seems like the reporting on these kinds of UN meetings tends to be more robust in a lot of European publications than US ones. I don't cover the COP, I have a coworker who does most of our foreign and international stuff and she has spent a lot of time at the UN and so she covers COP, I've never been to a COP and during Climate Week I only went to the side meetings. Yeah, it's very incremental and I don't know who's first. She's been waiting. Oh, okay, sorry, go ahead. Hi, so I think many of us here at MIT were engineers and scientists. So I was wondering if you have any advice for us on how to best communicate our work to journalists. I like punds, no. I mean, it often helps if you're doing something super technical it really does help to have a really good analogy that you can give out. Ideally, if you're talking to a lot of journalists have more than one so it doesn't look like we're all ripping each other off. And then also why does it matter is so really important. And sometimes if you have a really compelling story so I did, this isn't at the time, this is when I was at Pops Eye, there's an annual award. I think it's like the Golden Goose Award or something I don't remember but it rewards sort of basic science that have yielded unusual benefits and so that year it was like a guy who studied like an insect or something and found an unusual glue. I don't remember the third guy, sorry. And this woman who essentially, she was the one who helped identify kit rate in frogs. And I was kind of like, man, do I really have to do this? Do I really have to write an article about an award? It doesn't get your blood racing but I called her so I wanted to call one of them so I called her just by chance and she had this amazing story essentially of like studying science in college and getting her master's degree. And then she's an older woman and then quitting, deciding to be a stay-at-home mom for a really long time. And then somebody called her because at that point she was still the foremost expert in this kit rate because nobody cared about it. And somebody convinced her to do a little bit, they had a grant and somebody convinced her to come out of retirement. So she'd been out of the lab for like 20 years and do something in their lab for them and she got the bug again, went back to get her PhD like in her 40s I think and couldn't get funding to run her own lab. So it was literally carving out weird lab space out of somebody else's lab. And when they first were sort of identifying what Kittred was they were like, oh, they found somebody else and they contacted them. They're like, do you know what this is? And they're like, I don't know but you should talk to this woman. And they did. And so it was like this really great story of this woman's life. And it wouldn't have that, like it would have been a much less rich article if she hadn't opened up to me. So sometimes if you're serious to like why you've got to do the thing that you're doing is really lovely. Like don't be afraid of sharing that. I think that analogy people give is if you're studying something technical and you want a reporter to understand, pretend you're talking to your drunk uncle. You know, like someone who cares and really wants to understand but needs things broken down simply. So that can help. And then if you're really interested in being a frequent source to reporters there are actually trainings that are available to help scientists better communicate to the media. And I think those trainings can also teach you some of the rules of the road for journalism. So you're not shocked by how you may be described by the journalist and you kind of know that the practices and what's accepted and not in journalism. I'm just gonna jump in because I was a science reporter for many years at the Globe and I used to teach at MDL science communication to postdocs for a while. And it's like building a relationship with the journalist early on is really important. And I'm also gonna make a plug for my, so I don't feel like it's a plug for anything commercial but I think it's important, the conversation which is a nonprofit and a dependent news site but what we do is something different. We work with academics, postdocs can write for us, master students if they have a professor and we help translate their research under their byline into public interest journalism that then goes out on the AP wire, goes to the Washington Post, many, many other places. So I'm just saying that's an option because every journalist I know goes on the conversation every day and then calls up all the people, we help write and get some on the radio interviews and you know what I mean? So I'm just throwing it out there because it's a good resource to get in front of journalists in a different way. But, is that helpful? Yeah. Okay, great, and go ahead. Thank you, my name is Betty and I think what I have to ask, comment on is related to what George said and he gave me courage to stand up. You were talking about how it's kind of a downer so the problem of getting people to read about this and I'm thinking of some publications. I mean, one question is whether you know the magazine Yes. Oh yeah. Which is a quarterly, I had a subscription to it for a year but I actually talked the Cambridge Public Library into subscribing to it. And as you know then, if you're familiar with it, I mean, these are positive stories obviously and a lot of these things are grassroots. I mean, it's what people are doing at the local level. So I think it does kind of give people hope and exposes them to possible. If not solution, solutions, I was like too big, too grand, but things that people can do at least. And then there are these publications like this is the Nature Conservancy, the publication that they put out, which is also a quarterly. And obviously the Sierra Club does the same kind of thing but anyway, these are all kind of positive stories. Maybe part of their purpose is to get people to join and to contribute to their organizations but they're not made up. So I just wonder how you feel about these kind of publications. Like yes, and the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club which really do have a lot of good stories. Yeah, I think it's more advocacy based because they're spurring public action, right? Right, yeah. I mean, I read a lot of climate stories. You know, I usually start my mornings by getting the climate nexus newsletter. Trying to think of that's the right name but they do a roundup every day of climate related stories from the day before and I'll read and skim a lot. I'm on Twitter a lot. And I try to keep some general understanding of all kinds of climate, everything happening in the climate space even though I only write about small sections of it. And when good solution stories come out, I read them. It just depends on, but like I said, it tends not to be the focus of the kind of work that I do routinely. Sort of similar. You know, I read Sierra, I read Audubon. But those are just different outlets. And also I do a lot of like study reporting. And so there aren't that many positive climate change studies. I don't know why. I think we know why. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Connor. So when you're talking about the phrase climate crisis earlier and just, you know, the phrases that get used over and over again, remind me of this thing from last year during the California fires where Trump started using this phrase, I think forest management and that the problem is forest management. And I was like, huh, is he talking about controlled burns? That's really interesting. But then someone clued me into, no, actually this is like a Trojan horse for logging. And I was like, oh, well that completely could have gotten me unless someone had pointed this out. So anyway, I guess I was just curious, is this something that you feel like comes up a lot? These sort of Trojan horse phrases, I guess? And are there any in particular that you try to avoid or you're thinking about right now? I try not to repeat political talking points, which is hard because political talking points become like language. So I'm not saying I'm like perfect at it, but I do try to avoid them. I spend a lot of time with this source.com coming up with the phrases. I can't think of another one offhand. I mean, this one's kind of obvious, but I really try avoiding forest fire because most, especially like the California fires, a lot of them are not in forests or in chaparral, they're in grasslands or brushlands. So that's just like one that I try. And then you end up with like a lot of like wonky wildland management because you're trying not to say forest. To things like that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I can't think of any kind of political... I just thought of one. Off the top of my head. It's more that we try to just avoid the jargony thing altogether, right? So in cap and trade, the actual permits you buy are called allowances. And I was thinking, nobody cares what an allowance is. Nobody needs to understand that word. So we just use the word permit. And so even if there was some political slant to the word allowance, even if there was, we just don't have to worry about it because we're using a normal common everyday word. And so I think the thing we watch out for most is if a word is being used in the context of some jargon specific policy thing and it perhaps means something different from the way normal people understand it, then we find a way to take care of that usually by using a synonym somehow. So I thought of one. I'm not very successful because, it's not editors, but I try not to use the phrase natural disaster. I try, I kind of agree with natural hazard or disaster experts, which is a disaster is a natural hazard that meets a human population. So if you have a tornado and it doesn't, and I don't know, it goes through nowhere or like no community, then it's not a disaster, it's just a tornado. And I think the problem with a natural disaster is it ignores the fact that oftentimes there are systems and processes that put people into harm's way, so it makes it seem inevitable and that's not true. Hi. First of all, thank you so much for this amazing conversation. I'm an environmental journalist from Brazil, actually. And, yeah. So first I have only a brief comment to add into something you mentioned, Kendra. I think the disinformation campaign, when far beyond this four countries that you mentioned, I agree that's exactly where the thing was stronger, but whatever happens here has several severe implications for the developing countries, especially with big markets like Brazil. So, and an important thing to say, I'm sorry for talking so much, but an important thing to say is that there's, what is happening in Brazil right now is the disinformation campaign produced by the government. It is very important to whatever story you go to cover that, to be aware of that, especially with the fires. The more, the current index was released, the first station index, index was released Monday and it is proven that the fires in August are directly connected with the increase in the first station. So we are not seeing a growth that is connected with past years. We are actually going back to 10 years backwards. You know, it's a different situation. It's much worse. Bolsonaro is a terrible person and he's lying. He's saying that fires are cultural, that fires are natural in the rainforest, which is not true. The rainforest is not an ecosystem for it. I actually talked about that in the piece, not about them being natural, but about how like- Which is a really good piece by the way. Oh, thank you. About the fact that indigenous people, when they set fires, they set them differently and they allowed the land to regrow. And so yeah, I agree with you. I was not at all implying that what was happening in the Amazon was like, natural. Yeah, no, I'm sorry to connect the two topics, but I'm actually agreeing with you. Okay. I don't mean to lecture, but I'm more like taking advantage of this opportunity to state what is happening in Brazil because it's so important. Whatever happens in the rainforest for the next two decades is gonna have implications for the whole world. Bolsonaro is the biggest threat for climate change right now. So all that said, I'm sorry about that. I just wanna ask you, don't you think as a journalist, I think we are spending too much energy and time discussing vocabulary. Like it is a huge crisis. And we are like discussing about making it more, making it nicer for readers, you know? It's a crisis. We have to say what is happening. It's a huge problem. So don't you think that instead of speaking about that, we should be speaking about how to make it more personal, how to make our coverage more personal to people? I think they go together though. I think like, I guess that's what I was saying earlier, which is when I can't, when I, because I can't say climate crisis because I can't use, I can't say inflammatory language as a knee jerk. I have to talk to people. I have to link it back to what's happening to people and what's happening to communities. And let that tell the story as opposed to saying like, we're all gonna die. Which we are, but you know, I really. I think it's really interesting. I mean, this idea of climate crisis sort of denotes, you're saying it is a crisis, but while it's a problem, some people, it's just true. You may not see it as a crisis, right? Their perception of risk is very different potentially, right? They see as hunger for children in X is the crisis. So I think, I just was curious how you think about that, right? Do you call something a crisis as you, it's very important, but you call that the crisis or something else? And do you go down a slippery slope and you start doing that? I don't know. I think the thing that I'm most concerned about is that some people think that they can opt out of the problem that like, oh, it'll be a problem in Bangladesh or we got an email one time from someone in California. He was like, I don't live on the coast. So why should I care about climate change? And so that has, you know, I mean, I joked for a while that I had no sea level rise, no coral reef rule. And I don't, it's not like a hard and fast rule, but I do think that because you're so visual and because it's just so easy to, you know, you can go to Louisiana and you can see that, you know, the areas that are flooding can go to Virginia and you can see the areas that are flooding. It becomes an easy crutch to use that as a narrative. And the risk, and that was why I brought up drought earlier is the risk that we run into is that people who are going to be horrifically affected in really severe ways don't know it because unfortunately it's like not visual enough. I did, I joked that I'm on the animal beat, but I did this story about how bears, black bears won't hibernate as it gets warmer. And yeah, and so the crutch of it, you're like, well, why do I care? I'm not a bear, but like the problem is that if they don't hibernate, like bears, black bears are like just smart enough to be a problem. And so if they don't hibernate, they do things like they break into people's homes and then you have to put them down or you hit them with your car and you die, this has happened. So like if the longer they're weak, the more these kinds of incidents happen. And so like in the story, just because of a weird settlement in Nevada, there was this whole list of all of these like bear complaints that people put in. And so I put the complaints in the story and it was like some of it was like, you know, I went outside and there was a bear swimming in my pool. Like that is scary. Do you want to say something? We saw you. Great, go ahead. I'm sure. First of all, thank you so much. And I actually also work with Jenny at Living on Earth. So something I think a lot about when I think of journalism and also very relevant environmental journalism is bias. And it's so hard to balance between, as we were talking before, advocacy versus being objective and also the different solutions and like how do you not like focus on one versus another? And as journalists, I'd love to hear your perspective on how you balance these different biases. I mean, both the New York Times and ProPublica have reputations for a certain bias in the political spectrum. Is that something that you ever consider when you're pitching a story or what is that process in terms of recognizing that you're having not just multiple sides of the story but the right sides and putting significant weight to everything that might matter and ignoring the noise? I mean, first, I don't think it's bias to say that the planet should be livable. Like, I'm guessing, you know, if people say, because you write about climate change and you want the planet to be inhabitable by humans for a sustainable period of time and that counts as bias, then I think that's a problem. So, and also, we go after the facts. So we are starting from the baseline that climate change is real. It's a serious problem. And we're not, you know, and then that is like the baseline assumption when you read any of our climate stories. I think the other thing that we take very seriously is we have a no surprises rule. So before a publication, particularly with our longer investigations, we contact every person quoted and mentioned in the story and we do a fact check, right? It doesn't mean if they say something, doesn't mean we let them control what we say, but we make it very clear to them, we're gonna tell you how we quote you in the story or how we talk about you in the story and we're gonna check the facts. And if you can show us objectively that we've gotten something wrong, we'll fix it. But if, you know, maybe you said something in a little more emphatic way than perhaps you would like, but it's still factually correct, we may not change it. So I think dealing with that helps make people understand how seriously we take it and our approach. And, you know, I've talked to sources who may not be happy, but they appreciate that we do that fact checking, you know, very rigorously. And I've even done things like, I've had experiences where I've talked to the authors of a report and say, this is how we summarize your report in one sentence. And they might say something like, well, I don't think that's accurate. And then I'm saying, here is the exact line in your study that says what we're saying. So I've had instances where I end up fact checking them and make them realize that's actually what their report is saying. Because it's, look, it's known as that the media has a liberal bias. So I don't think, I'm just curious how you deal with it. So I think that in media in general, there's a really big discussion right now around what is bias and what is neutrality. And also neutrality has been through a white male affluent gaze and there's been a lot of pushback against that. Rightly, I think, because they aren't the world. And that is a fact, right? Like, and there's a really good paper that's called the weirdest people in the world. And the weird, I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Western educated about the bias inherent in a lot of psychological studies because they're all on Western or unlike us mainly. So I don't operate from the, I operate from the perspective that we're all biased. I even tweeted out that I have a pro-earth bias. I'm definitely biased in that regard. But so that doesn't, I feel like where that bias, where anyone's bias comes up is in the stories that you choose to report on more than how you execute those stories. And so I'm constantly consumed with the stories that I'm not telling and the stories that I wanna tell and figuring out how I can tell those stories is like what kind of consumes my time as opposed to whether or not someone is going to email me or call me a con, which has happened because they're gonna do that anyway and I don't really care if the facts are right. Yeah. I'm just gonna add that I think you should, you know, sometimes- I'm on the radio, sorry. I think sometimes there may be a different, because climate change has become so politicized, there's sometimes a different standard applied to what people perceive as bias in climate journalists. So if you're an education journalist, it's pretty much taken for granted that your position is, children should have a good education in their school and have adequate resources and like not be abused by the staff or the teachers and having that as your baseline assumption does not make you biased. You know, in the same way that business reporters have the baseline assumption when the economy grows, it's good. No business reporter probably is going around saying, let's have a recession, we need a recession. Like, if we can accept those basic truths as not being biased in those other beats, then I don't see why, like Kendra said, being pro-earth should be considered a bias. And I've, I mean, I've tweeted this before, so I'm, and someone's probably quoted me on this, but like what she was saying about business reporter, one of my perpetual frustrations is when you're watching the debate and there's some TV reporter interviewing a candidate that is talking about their economic platform, the person interviewing them is a millionaire. That is a bias. They do not have the same economic interests as the vast majority of Americans, but that is somehow fine. That is unremarked upon. We've accepted that as normal. But if you're a woman or if you're a person of color, there's implicit in a lot of journalism this viewpoint that you're biased. Somehow that is, that is bias. So I think, yeah, so that's why I hate that question and why I think bias is, I think we're all biased. It's a good question. Just want to get to everyone, so go ahead. Sorry, it didn't mean I hate that question, but I'm so getting fired. I just, I think, because I think people, so go ahead. Yeah, I had one question already, so feel free to just skip it or give a very short answer. But I would be interested in like your, your mode of having impact as journalists. Like you said before that you like your work to be read by like politicians or people who have power to change something. And I guess you also have some sort of power to like move people on a spectrum from, I want you to panic, to like feel good solution stories maybe, or I guess you have a lot of different ways to have impact on people. And I would be interested in like how does work. Even as they approach stories, are they thinking about what kind of impact they want on the people or the end result? I'm thinking more the end result. Like you said you were pro-earth, right? And so probably there's some hope that through your work, your journalism, you might move the needle a bit. And I was wondering like through what means to what does this happen? Sure, I mean I think it's, it can be particularly difficult to move the needle on climate change because it's become so politicized and it's so difficult to talk about for many people. And I think that, I think perhaps what has actually happened in the past couple of years is does give me optimism because the public's urgency about climate change has gone up exponentially. The public's anger in some ways in recognizing that there's no getting away from reducing fossil fuel usage and reducing the actual production of fossil fuels. And this one message that activists have spent years trying to get out the idea of leave it in the ground. There's a lot of fossil fuel reserves. We simply cannot afford to dig up and burn if we are to keep the planet at a reasonable temperature. That has gotten into the public conscious in a much bigger way and there is a lot more attempts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable through various lawsuits. ExxonMobil was just on trial in New York a few weeks ago. And through the idea that yes, there are things we can do as individuals to help with the climate solution but ultimately we are gonna need huge systemic changes to solve this in a reasonable way and doing that we're not gonna get there just by recycling your lunch tofu container or something. I think for me I think a lot about the notion of informed consent. And so we are making a decision as a society, as a planet about the future of this planet but many of us are doing it very passively. And so for me it's making sure that whatever direction we go in. So let's say we go to the worst case scenario that people are almost making that we're making a clear eyed decision that we do wanna jump off this cliff as opposed to it being something that is happening to us. This picks up on a little bit of what you were just saying, Lisa, what are your impressions about the fossil fuel industry companies and the automobile industry and so on toward this problem? I'm sure you encounter them in your reporting and I'd be curious to hear what your impressions are about where they stand regarding the issue, solutions, their responsibility, so on. I mean I think in the past few years there's been a lot of both reporting and academic research that has unearthed how long fossil fuel and utilities and some car companies have understood that their main products are contributing to climate change. I was part of the team at Inside Climate wrote those stories about Exxon's history in really good climate research and how that was very different from their later move into funding disinformation campaigns. There's been a lot of academics digging through archives, finding oil company involvement in climate related research as far back as the 60s. And so I think this is the history of what they knew is becoming clearer and clearer and now there is I think increasing accountability from the public to try to get them to change their core business model. And there was a really good story actually in the New York Times by your colleague about I think she attended some conference where fossil fuel executives were saying, look at how much money we spent the past year on various clean energy initiatives and the reporter did the calculations and did the math and said, but even the company spending the most that was only a few percent of their overall spending. So you can see that despite the big numbers being thrown around, it's a marginal priority for them compared to their continued work in getting the oil and gas. And so I think that those kinds of the truth about what they're doing and the extent of their investment in various fossil fuel alternatives is getting more and more attention and people are paying more attention and trying to hold them accountable in increasing ways. Are you good? Okay, go ahead Phil. Yeah, Phil McConaughey, Inside Climate News. First of all to say it's great to see three Inside Climate News alums on the panel today. But a question for both of you, Lisa and Kendra about kind of work and process. Lisa, you have an incredible luxury of having months or a year or possibly more to work on a single story. And I'm wondering how do you keep momentum? How do you keep yourself going with such a long deadline? And then I'll ask them both and then I'll let you both respond. And then Kendra for you, as you're writing so many stories, how do you carve out time to do bigger stories, more enterprise stories? How do you work to get that in? How do you find the time to do that? I guess for momentum it's, I talk a lot with my editor, it helps to have someone to talk to whether it's a colleague you're working with or an editor to just keep checking in and make sure, am I going in the right direction? Am I finding enough new things that this is starting to feel like a real story? Checking in to make sure I'm not diving into some weird rabbit hole that's useless and going to waste my time. Because the whole point of having a lot of time to work on a story is you wanna make sure you're spending your time efficiently so that the final product is worth it. And so, do a lot of check-ins, I try to write summaries for myself sometimes during the reporting process or memos and outlines and just anything I can to make sure the shape of the story is turning out in a way that seems worth it. And oftentimes, because it's an investigation, you're driven by the idea that this is really important info and the public needs to know it and that in itself is often just a great motivator. For me, I kind of feel like I'm a cutie ass monkey. So I would love to say that like, oh, I carve out an hour every day to work on my longer form things, I do not. So I basically wait for there to stop being fires or a lull in scientific research and then I hide and scroll away on the thing that I've been working on for a longer period of time and then something inevitably pops up and I have to shove it in a dark corner and then a week or two goes by and I go back to it or longer. I'm doing a story now that I started in January and I'm finally writing it and I knew I interviewed someone and I could not find the file because I also switched computers halfway and phones because of course you do and I was like, I know I interviewed him and I was like, maybe I talked to him on the phone and because my computer is enough of a mess, I didn't delete the folder that contains all of the files from my old phone, even though it's a duplicate file and it was in there and I found it because I found the email where we agreed to have the interview and then I sorted the audio files by D. So, yeah, I don't have a really good answer for you. But you do it, you get it done. Yeah. You know, we're supposed to be done in eight and it is like exactly eight so I just want to give a round of applause for a big thank you and a really good thank you.