peter dykstra
Climate politics, Pogo edition
Will an old comic strip expression define upcoming global climate talks?
Is anyone really, truly surprised that President Biden's relatively ambitious plan to address climate change is being axed so quickly from his infrastructure package?
A poll this month by Cambridge University found less than fifty percent of citizens in seven Western European nations were willing to accept major changes like outlawing gasoline or diesel vehicles or restrictions on meat-eating diets.
And that's Europe.
Climate change polls
In the U.S., several polls earlier this year found a huge partisan gap in whether or not climate change was a serious problem at all: Among Democrats, 75 percent found the problem urgent enough to require immediate action; 21 percent of Republicans thought so.
In a Gallup Poll last year, 23 percent of Americans reported eating less meat than the year before, but the predominant reason was health of their innards, not the health of their environment. McDonalds can cite billions and billions of reasons why cattlemen can sleep safely for many nights to come.
Republican climate denial
Office-holding Republicans who took climate change seriously did so at their own peril. Florida's Carlos Curbelo, tapped to chair the bipartisan Congressional Climate Caucus, lost his seat in 2018. Others were "primaried" – beaten by more conservative Republicans in the preliminaries – or retired to avoid a primary loss. Even the GOP's two conspicuous Trump dissenters, Wyoming's Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of southern Illinois, serve where Coal is King, and they tend to vote that way. Cheney sports a 2 percent lifetime rating on the League of Conservation scorecard; Kinzinger a whopping 8 percent.
Republican senators from climate-vulnerable states, like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski or John Kennedy of Louisiana, also represent oil-and-gas-dependent states and will reliably vote their carbon consciences.
So throw in coal-state Dem Joe Manchin, and the major clean energy boost in Biden's platform is toast.
Big Oil's 'Big Lie'
Big Oil is dropping millions on airing its own Big Lie in ads during news and talk shows. The American Petroleum Institute's breezy spots cast Big Oil as "the leader" in reducing American emissions, even as it lavishes its Congressional apologists with campaign cash.
And while the petrochemical industry still loves cars, trucks, planes and ships, it's actively dating other polluting suitors. Immense plastics plants are planned for Louisiana, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, negating many of the gains achieved in cutting greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. The Daily Climate had that story, about the growth of this new market for oil, earlier this week.
Pogo's famous line
Douglas Fischer / EHS
We go back to Pogo J. Possum's famous line – "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
The McCarthy-era comic strip offered the quip as commentary on Americans' talent for acting in their own worst interest.
Next week, the world's nations will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, to weigh the next steps in cutting greenhouse gases and limiting the climate catastrophe awaiting us all.
President Biden's chief climate emissary, John Kerry, called Glasgow "the last best hope" for climate action. He added that failure by the U.S. Congress to deliver something on climate will send the worst possible signal to the world.
And the world's other colossal greenhouse emitters, China and India, are talking the talk but showing little actual progress.
Glasgow will open with raised urgency, raised ambitions – and raised doubts.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
On 'Noble' journalists and prizes
This year's Pulitzer winners and finalists feature five – count 'em – five environmental entries.
On April 26, our President suggested that reporters who earned "Noble" (sic) Prizes for reporting on "the Russian hoax" return their awards. The President should have caught his own misspelling, since he'd be a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Twitterature, if it weren't a Fake Award.
He also should have known that it's the Pulitzer Prizes, not the Nobels, for which journalists compete. And this year, a Pulitzer went to one of his favorite purveyors of "fake news" for reporting on another of his favorite "hoaxes," climate change. Multiple Washington Post journalists shared the Explanatory Journalism Pulitzer for a multi-part series on climate change impacts.
Environment almost clears the bar
Four more of what we now call "legacy" media were 2020 Pulitzer finalists reporting on science/environment themes. What the President likes to call the "failing" New York Times failed once more. Fifteen of its stories on the Trump Administration's own failures to follow science at EPA, NOAA, the Interior Department and other agencies earned Finalist honors in the Public Service category.
Nestor Ramos of the Boston Globe was a feature writing finalist for a report on the devastating climate impacts on the oversized sandbar known as Cape Cod. The Wall Street Journal staff were Investigative Pulitzer finalists for series on the California utility giant PG&E and its culpability in causing the wildfires that erased the town of Paradise, California. Editorial writer Jill Burcum of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was an opinion finalist for a piece on proposed nickel mines near the Boundary Waters Canoe area on the Canadian border.
'Groundbreaking' reporting?
A winner and four finalists is a pretty good haul for a beat that many, including its practitioners, consider to be long-neglected. In recognizing the Post, the Pulitzer jury called the work a "groundbreaking series." Good? Absolutely. Thorough? Thoroughly. Deserving reporters, editors and support staff? Yes. Both the Post and the New York Times have been assembling all-star teams on the beat for several years.
But groundbreaking, it's not. Traditional newsrooms, nonprofits, and even broadcasters have been breaking this ground for quite a while now. The Pulitzer Board has recognized groundbreaking work on the environment most years for the past three decades.
Environmental reporting that won a Pulitzer
- In 2018, Jack E. Davis won the History prize for his book The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,an "important environmental history." The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat won for its Breaking News coverage of wildfires.
- 2016 winners include the Associated Press for unveiling lawlessness in international fisheries; and the New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz on the Cascadia Fault, the Pacific Northwest's seismic disaster waiting to happen.
- In 2015, the Seattle Times was honored for reporting on manmade influences on a lethal landslide; and Dianna Marcum of the L.A. Times for Feature Writing on victims of a major drought.
- Dan Fagin won the Nonfiction Prize in 2014 for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, about a pollution-plagued Jersey Shore town. The Center for Public Integrity's Chris Hamby was honored for investigating the systematic shafting of coal miners stricken with black lung disease.
- The 2013 National Reporting Pulitzer went to staffers of Inside Climate News, a then-obscure non-profit, on risks and regulatory mismanagement of oil pipelines.
The Pulitzer for 'I told you so'
Several years ago at a meeting organized by Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, I introduced Mark Schleifstein as having shared in two Pulitzers at the Times-Picayune for his work on Louisiana's battery of environmental threats, from Hurricane Katrina to Gulf fisheries to vanishing wetlands. The veteran environment reporter smiled quietly and corrected me by holding up three fingers. He's also been a finalist twice more.
Sadly, environmental journalists might sweep the field in the as-yet imaginary Pulitzer category I'd like to see. Reporters whose work predicted coalfield catastrophes, chemical calamities, hurricane horrors and other disasters would be prime candidates for the Pulitzer Prize for I-Told-You-So. I wrote about this for Ensia in 2017.
Smart today, smarter tomorrow
What's the moral of this story? There are several, take your pick. Environmental stories are sort of like critically-successful films that only play in 30-seat art cinemas in college towns and Bohemian neighborhoods. They deserve better. Despite the dire straits that so many newspapers are in, cutting your special beat reporters is cutting your relevance to your community. TV news operations should follow CNN and NBC and restore the environment, or climate change, as a full-time beat.
These Pulitzer-worthy environmental stories, and thousands more, look smart today and with precious few exceptions, will look even smarter in 20 years. When that happens, don't say I didn't tell you so.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist. His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher, Environmental Health Sciences. Contact him at pdykstra@ehn.org(opens in new tab) or on Twitter at @Pdykstra.
Peter Dykstra: SEJ enters middle age with grace
And more importantly, with new blood, as the beat goes on
I've made it to most of the Society of Environmental Journalists' 29 annual conferences, but not this one.
SEJ is the Jimmy Carter of non-profits – overlooked in real-time, but looking better and smarter with each passing year. This year's conference wraps up Sunday in Fort Collins, Colo (follow the action on social media via #SEJ2019)
SEJ's first national conference took place in 1991. It's now older than many of its members. At least one or two of its current Board members were fetuses back then. Most of its charter members are in their sixties, seventies, or beyond. Or gone. The membership used to be weighted toward full-time environment writers for daily newspapers. Now, the core is freelance journalists (though I've been trying to push the frequently more accurate term "subsistence journalists").
New blood working the beat
The beat has been re-energized in such legacy media giants as the Washington Post and New York Times. But SEJ's strength also lies in a proliferation of new sites doing dynamic investigative work and vivid storytelling.
Here are but a few:
The Intercept
Bankrolled six years ago by EBay entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, this website has rattled cages across the political landscape. Sharon Lerner is their prolific investigative reporter on the environment.
Southerly Magazine
A collection of long-reads on environmental issues in the American South. The year-old startup is the work of Lyndsey Gilpin, who seeks to fill in the gaps in a region vastly underserved in environmental reporting and storytelling.
The Revelator
Two years ago, the Arizona-based advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity launched a news site, The Revelator. Its well-told stories on species, habitats, and politics rapidly became a must-read.
Heated
A few months ago, Emily Atkin took her unique blend of insight and smart-ass from a very established place, The New Republic, to her new four-times-weekly newsletter, Heated.
Inside Climate News
When a startup site wins a Pulitzer, as Inside Climate News did six years ago, it suddenly no longer looks like a startup. But publisher David Sassoon's masterful adherence to an ambitious business plan can stand as a model for all others. It turns 12 years old this month.
Undark
Another Pulitzer winner, MIT's Deborah Blum, puts out a stream of big-think pieces at Undark. Its tagline: Truth, beauty, science.
And the list goes on...
There are too many other quality sites to mention, but here are four more that shouldn't be ignored: The solution-oriented theme of Ensia; the urban-ish tone of Citylab; the food-oriented scoops of FERN; and the saltwater stories of Hakai.
One recent casualty in the perilous world of nonprofit publishing is Pacific Standard, whose deep dives into environmental stories will be missed. It main funder pulled the plug in August.
Climate news goes mainstream
With climate change finally breaking through as a frontline issue for virtually all news outlets, and a zillion other plagues – ocean plastics, glyphosate, water quality, Trump's regulatory purge – making waves, our beat is poised to rise in prominence for the worst of all reasons: Out home planet is literally a hot mess.
We also press forward with an uncomfortable form of vindication: The planet is indeed warming up, and despite some strong efforts, getting dirtier. Species are indeed disappearing. So are habitats, from Arctic ice to tropical forests. Just like SEJ members and others have been reporting for decades.
The beat continues to face traditional foes: Indifference or timidity on the part of some bosses; the shaky financial footing for all journalism; well-heeled, slick, and often unprincipled interests who like to portray our news as Fake News.
But the beat goes on, and it's more crucial than ever.
Peter Dykstra: From impeach to impair
Billionaire Tom Steyer could make real progress on climate action. Instead he joined the circus.
In 2010, billionaire hedge-fund investor Tom Steyer took a giant step back from Wall Street, quitting his firm and pledging his fortune to a slate of charitable causes, notably the existential threat posed by climate change. And the money flowed –
to energy research projects and NGO'S focused on raising awareness, or raising hell, over inaction on climate change.And he was making progress—until he announced that he was joining the bloated field of Democratic presidential hopefuls.
In November 2016, Donald Trump's stunning victory over Hillary Clinton changed everything for America, and for Steyer. Only months into the Trump presidency, Tom Steyer became more ubiquitous than plaque psoriasis ads on cable news broadcasts, starring in his own 30-second calls to impeach Donald Trump. He poured a reported $10 million into the campaign.
Steyer was calm, almost shy, in firmly describing Trump's "clear and present danger." Response to the www.Needtoimpeach.com petition was impressive. Combined with efforts from Moveon.org and other groups, Steyer delivered 10 million petition signatures to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in early 2019.
But since climate denial is not an impeachable offense, it marked a major departure for Steyer.
Rewarding 'Fox & Friends'
He spent millions on broadcast ads, promoting the petition while paradoxically shipping the sales checks to reward cable news outlets – notorious delinquents on climate coverage. Steyer even spent a reported $700,000 on ad placement in Fox & Friends, the morning show said to be a must-watch for Trump.
As late as January, Steyer waved off questions about his own presidential ambitions. Then, earlier this month, he cannonballed into the crowded Democratic pool to join the two dozen already treading water there. In his announcement video, Steyer laid out the challenges in classic Liberal fashion. Climate change rated two lines of the four-minute piece.
Turning a firehose of philanthropy on himself
To me, Steyer has swapped out any claim to moral authority for an exercise in both narcissism and futility. In all likelihood, the late-arriving Steyer won't even qualify for the ludicrous spectacle of marching hopefuls out to podiums in groups of ten, with each candidate getting less than ten minutes to make their case to America.
To advocates of action on climate change, this has to be tragic: Steyer has turned his firehose of climate philanthropy on himself. Meanwhile, several presidential hopefuls whose prospects are scarcely better than Steyer's could instead be focused on chasing climate deniers out of the Senate.
The GOP Senate goes unchallenged
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock could challenge Republican Sen. Steve Daines next year. (You forgot Bullock was running for President, didn't you?) Ex-Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper could run against incumbent Sen. Cory Gardner – despite the fact that Gardner's 10% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters makes him one of the greenest GOP Senators.
Two of the Big Blue Wave could challenge Texas incumbent Sen. John Cornyn—Beto O'Rourke or Julian Castro. And South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigeig would have two opportunities to unseat either of Indiana's two Republican Senators, but they wouldn't face reelection until 2022 and 2024, respectively.
If Tom Steyer doesn't burn off his enthusiasm or his cash supply on his D.O.A. vanity presidential run, he could fund them all, help topple Mitch McConnell's Senate stranglehold and guide the U.S. to right its sunken ship of state on climate.
Peter Dykstra: Of ice and men.
Melting glaciers and ice caps reveal a changing world – and a more than a few corpses
Two years ago, a Sherpa mountaineering guide came across a chilling sight on the Tibetan approach to Mount Everest: The frozen hand of an unsuccessful climber, exposed.
Nearly 5,000 men and women have reached the summit of the world's tallest mountain. An estimated 300 died trying, or, more frequently, died on the descent. Two-thirds of those bodies have never been recovered. But as Everest warms with the rest of the world, its snow- and ice-cover lessens, and dwindling glaciers move more quickly, Nature is giving up thawing corpses. Stephen King must surely be taking copious notes.
"Because of global warming, the ice sheet and glaciers are fast melting, and the dead bodies that remained buried all these years are now becoming exposed," guide leader Ang Tshering Sherpa told the BBC. The Sherpas have tried to bring the bodies down off the mountain, but every effort is delayed: A frozen corpse weighs about twice as much as a thawed one.
'Pyramids of human excrement'
But wait! There's more! Since the duo of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first conquered the mountain in 1953, the mountain has become a veritable conga line of climbers during the weeks-long window of good weather each spring. And the masses have left masses of abandoned gear, oxygen tanks, and a "fecal time bomb" behind. Tons of human waste, also presumably unfreezing, now adorn the path to the Top of the World. Good times.
Spy satellites and water loss
A study led by Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Observatory has accessed declassified spy-satellite photos of the Himalayas to estimate that ice and snow melt there has roughly doubled since 1975. Spy satellites? That's not because Everest has become a high-altitude sh*t-show. Himalayan snowmelt slakes the thirst and waters the crops of nearly a billion people in Bangaladesh, India, Pakistan, and parts of China. Snow-less Himalayas would be an existential threat to that huge population. If you want to know why climate change is a global security issue, here's Exhibit A.
Peeking under the ice
It's not the first time that Cold War sleuthery was turned into unintended service for climate science. For twenty years, University of Washington scientists have accessed declassified logs of both U.S. and Russian nuclear submarines as they conducted routine patrols beneath Arctic ice. A routine function of such patrols was to measure the thickness of Arctic sea ice -- the better to poke through said ice and blast the world to smithereens.
The data show a steady and alarming loss of ice thickness over half a century. Since the mid-seventies, satellites have provided a reliable measure of the demise of Arctic ice. But we can thank the American and Soviet navies for providing an extended record of climate change – slow motion mutually assured destruction, 21st century style.
Peter Dykstra: The 800-lb (cheap, plastic) gorilla in our oceans
Decades of warnings. A global environmental threat. Climate change isn't the only mess we're ignoring.
Save for one word, Walter Brooke (1914-1986) had an unremarkable career as a Hollywood bit player, usually as a mid-level military officer fighting Indians or Nazis.
But in the 1967 film The Graduate, Brooke slung his arm around the shoulder of a young Dustin Hoffman and offered a vision of the future:
'Plastics'
"Plastics"
Half a century later, Brooke's career advice looks more and more like an albatross around the necks of humanity – and for that matter, around the necks of albatrosses.
In 1950, 17 years before Brooke's career counsel, the world produced an estimated two million metric tons of plastic. By 2015, that had jumped to 380 million metric tons – more than humanity's own weight in plastic.
'Smog' of plastic
Trash floating in Lake Jackson, south of Atlanta, after a rain
An estimated 150 million metric tons of plastic now swirl in our waterways:
- abandoned, miles-long driftnets that ensnare fish and seabirds;
- drink bottles and soccer balls washed down storm sewers into rivers and lakes (see this news clip of runoff plastic in Lake Jackson, downstream from a half-million or so metro Atlanta homes);
- single-use bags, straws, cups and cigarette filters by the billions;
- long-lasting microbeads of plastic built into soaps and detergents;
- and partly decomposed plastic bits that cloud the water and clog the bellies of fish, birds and marine mammals – a veritable "smog of the sea."
40+ years of warnings
Marine litter spoiling the view in Norway.
You can't say we weren't warned.
On April 5, 1989, a team of NOAA scientists presented an ominous, peer-reviewed work on the mounting dangers of ocean-borne plastic debris. Not surprisingly, their warnings went unheeded by all but a handful of marine scientists and activists.
I was feeling good about myself finding the 30 year-old plastics paper, and I mentioned it in the weekly segment I do for Public Radio International's Living On Earth.Then, the sleuths at a very useful web publication called The Revelator found others from the 1970's. That's how long we've known about the crisis we've been building.
Ugly death by plastic
Darrell Blatchley, director of D'Bone Collector Museum Inc., pulls plastic waste from the stomach of a Cuvier's beaked whale that washed ashore in Compostela Valley, in the Philippines.
Last week, an item worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records washed in from the Philippines, where the carcass of a Cuvier's beaked whale (really more an oversized dolphin than a great whale) yielded 88 pounds of plastic bags.
Like so many other environmental ills, the plastic pollution of the oceans is something we've known about for decades. Like climate change or ocean acidification, the solutions to plastics pollution are daunting. They don't involve the shutting of a lone drainpipe or smokestack. They involve altering the consumptive mindsets of nearly all of us about how we produce, consume, and dispose of plastics.
We've developed the ability to alter the acid/alkaline chemistry of the vast oceans, and we're filling them up with things inimical to life. Now all we have to do is develop the ability to stop ourselves.
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Here's a trailer from "The Smog of the Sea," a new documentary on ocean plastics featuring musician Jack Johnson