By David Dodge
Almost 20 years ago CKUA Radio aired the Climate Change Show a 70-episode series aired during several prime time slots.
Ok, a little bias here as the former host and producer of the series, but there was nothing like it on the airwaves at the time and surprisingly the audience reaction was very positive.
The format was conceived by CKUA broadcaster Tony King who brought an extremely popular sentiment to the series.
This was before social media began to serve as the ideal host for malcontents, climate deniers, and purveyors of all sorts of conspiracy theories.
At the time the media was still giving disproportionate airtime to climate deniers. It would be almost 20 years before the Guardian would consciously decide to halt coverage of climate change denial and create a dedicated team to cover climate change. Of course, numerous smaller publications like the Narwal had been covering climate too.
Laura Lynch, host of What on Earth on CBC. Photo from Facebook
What on Earth Debuts in 2020
Other major media outlets followed suit and last year veteran CBC journalist Laura Lynch launched a pilot called “What on Earth” on the CBC.
Our partners at Energy vs Climate invited Laura Lynch on to their live webinar podcast to talk about climate change and the media.
“It’s been for me after all of these years of running around the world, one of the, one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done as a journalist,” says Lynch in the podcast.
“What I do feel fortunate about is that our program starts from the premise that climate change is real, that climate change is caused by human activities. So, we don’t have to be trying to do false balance and defend that every single week. We start from that as our, as our beginning point,” says Lynch.
“That’s called false balance, to put those views on the air when we know that they are not true,” says Lynch.
A recent episode of What on Earth tackled Alberta’s public inquiry into alleged foreign-funded anti-energy campaigns.
In that episode “We were tackling that very subject about the fact that these papers that have been filed with the inquiry in Alberta were classic climate denial papers,” says Lynch.
The What on Earth story quotes Martin Olszynski, an associate professor of law at the University of Calgary who called a pair of papers commissioned by the inquiry “textbook climate-change denialism.”
Covering climate change is hard
Covering climate change has always been hard, exacerbated by deeply polarized views and populist deniers such as former President Donald Trump.
And then there is social media. Despite the seemingly democratizing nature of social media, it too has been very hard on level-headed climate discussions.
“Social media has been hugely…destructive, to having those kinds of complex conversations and looking for answers because you follow on social media, the people you want to,” says Lynch.
It’s not just the science of climate change that is difficult to convey in the media, social or mainstream. Energy vs Climate co-hosts Dr. Sara Hastings-Simons and Dr. David Keith both lamented our inability to have the nuanced discussions needed to understand climate change.
“I mean, the fact is the kind of absolute state-of-the-art econometric evidence about climate impacts suggests that a country like Canada benefits for a while,” says Keith. The complex trade-offs are not covered very well in the media, Keith was saying.
And in a previous episode of Energy vs Climate it seemed pretty clear that even though the panel of experts believed Canada’s new climate plan was amazing and could theoretically achieve its climate goals, they lamented that it probably will not succeed.
“I talk about being not at all optimistic,” says Whittingham, “That we’re going to get to net-zero.”
So, Canada’s Climate Plan is pretty good, glowingly endorsed by this panel of experts, but by acknowledging it may not get Canada to net-zero by 2050 “I run the risk of just feeding frankly…the anti-climate trolls that are saying, ‘yeah, we shouldn’t bother’ versus the people on the left. ‘You’re saying I’ve got this wonderful portfolio of solutions that I’m advocating for and you’ve just cut the legs out from beneath me,’” says Whittingham.
There is a risk of people saying “why would I bother even trying,” says Lynch. But she says there is room for recognizing the frankness of the challenge of climate change. She quotes Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with The Breakthrough Institute who told What on Earth ‘there are things you can do to improve the situation, even though you may not get to your stated goals soon enough.’
What on Earth recently underlined the challenges in its coverage of the “so-called just transition.” Even with good just transition legislation, overdue from the federal government, and the millions of dollars thrown at coal transition, there will be “winners and losers.” And these nuanced discussions are exceedingly difficult in the fast-paced media that often love headlines such as “workers left behind” or “federal government fails to deliver legislation.”
Add to this the polarized and politically charged public arena, an almost totally polarized American media and social media dominated by populist half-truths and it makes dealing with these issues difficult to say the least.
Life is no Barney song
“I think a big part of that to me is understanding where people are coming from,” says Dr. Sara Hastings-Simon. It’s important she says understand where “misinformation” and “misperceptions are coming from.”
“I find it frustrating when I see… what’s going on in Texas, which is a really horrible tragedy,” says Hastings-Simon.
A flurry of initial stories blamed renewable energy only to be replaced with a blizzard of stories about “lies” in the stories “Fox News Lies About the Texas Blackouts.” The grid operator in Texas said frozen instruments at natural gas, coal, and nuclear facilities along with limited supplies of natural gas were the key causes of the brownouts and further stated “Wind generation has actually exceeded the grid operator’s daily forecasts through the weekend,” reported Chris Hayes of MSNBC in an editorial tirade.
The media had a heyday with the Texas brownouts, some blaming renewable energy, others accusing the Republicans of lying. Here is some balanced coverage from the Guardian.
But if you live in your bubble – on one side renewable energy is the root cause and if you live in the other bubble the reports were dominated by “right-wing media lies.”
And so it goes in the United States these days.
At the best of times “journalism is the first draft of history,” says Lynch. She added, “I would love to believe that our audience, especially a CBC audience, has the smarts to be able to look around to different outlets and different information.”
And if the media faces challenges social media is an unmitigated disaster when it comes to complex issues such as climate change.
“Social media has been hugely… destructive to having those kinds of complex conversations and looking for answers because you follow on social media, the people you want to follow,” says Lynch.
Life in the climate change arena is certainly no Barney song about being one big happy family.
In a world where conflict sells “We have to change the public discussion to one that’s focused on cooperation and compromise to get to good policy solutions,” says Whittingham in the podcast.
Lynch says it was “explicit from the start that our show was going to look at potential solutions.”
To make matters more complicated and nearly impossibly nuanced Keith notes there are some hard realities about climate change. “That actually decarbonizing at the speed we’d want to deal with climate change really will be hard for the energy system.”
“There will be winners and losers as we go through an energy transition,” says Hastings-Simon “And I think that’s where, you know, we need to be really thoughtful about where that cooperation and compromise will happen and where that tension exists.”
Even as I write this I am painfully aware, that the nuances of this discussion can make for boring reading. In a way it’s part of our DNA to love a story with a villain and a hero.
And even if we have nuanced discussions, it will not stop the troll who will post a clip of the weather showing a near record-breaking day of -42.5 degrees C on February 7, 2021, along with the line “But …. but ….the planet is on fire.” – Greta, the UN Climate Puppet.”
I suppose one could argue a super cold day is an example of climate change-induced weather extremes, but the point is this is not science, and nor does it explain away climate change.
So how do we create a safe space for conversations about climate change and perhaps more importantly, conversations with people in energy transitioning industries?
Smaller conversations are beautiful
Lynch recounted a discussion she had with Dr. Leah Stokes, a climate scientist from the University of California.
“She [Leah Stokes] talks about climate change all the time. She gets in the taxi. She talks to the taxi driver. She’s talking to everyone she possibly can about it,” says Lynch.
“You don’t do it in a confrontational way, you just start having conversations” and these “smaller conversations are what can really have an effect on people and they’re quite powerful.”
And this is what we have learned at Green Energy Futures as well. You can even have these conversations in a group setting, as long as the space is safe and the rhetoric is parked.
A few years ago I was invited to speak to Brazeau County Council at a live council meeting. This is the county council in the Drayton Valley area of Alberta – the heart of oil country.
I was invited by them to do an hour-long presentation focused on clean energy solutions. The media was present, members of the public were in the gallery. After the presentation, the discussion lasted the better part of an hour.
There was no blaming, no shaming, and no judging, just a conversation about how we move forward in a low carbon world.
This experience was repeated in late 2019 when I was invited to be the keynote speaker at Coal Forum 2019 in Tumbler Ridge B.C, the heart of coal and oil and gas country.
When they invited me I confess to asking them if they really knew who they were inviting.
And they said, “Oh yes, you were recommended.”
At the speaking event, the room was full of coal executives, foresters, and a strong contingent of local mayors, councillors, and members of the legislature. At the end of the talk, we had a very engaging conversation about clean energy, change, and opportunity. I too gained valuable insights into what it’s like to be someone in a coal town in the era of climate change.
I spend very little (almost no) time talking about species extinctions, extreme weather, and flooding coastlines. Instead, the conversation is about where do we go from here?
Energy vs Climate
So where do we go from here? Well, a great place to start is to listen to podcasts such as Energy vs Climate, which on the surface sounds like a typical good vs evil setup.
But it’s actually a live webinar podcast hosted by energy policy expert Ed Whittingham, Dr. Sara Hastings-Simon a physicist, and Dr. David Keith a Harvard professor and energy expert as well.
The podcasts are recorded live and there is plenty of nuance in the climate conversation here. They have done shows on nuclear energy, Canada’s climate policy, what the U.S. election means for Canadian Energy, the new hydrogen economy, and even divestment from fossil fuels.
We have partnered with them on three Green Energy Futures episodes where we have accepted the nearly impossible task of creating a 4-minute radio feature on their hour-long nuanced discussions.
What on Earth
What on Earth is a long-overdue program on CBC dedicated to covering climate change hosted by the very capable Laura Lynch. The program takes a much more popular approach than Energy vs Climate, but it’s smart, engaging, and to the point. And as Lynch says in our story above there is no debate on the science of climate change, it just is.
Recent topics include: Why Canada needs a just transition from fossil fuels, 10 tips for talking with kids about climate change, What a controversy in Alberta tells us about climate disinformation, Melting ice roads: how climate change is threatening communities in Canada’s North and much more.
Green Energy Futures partnered with Energy vs Climate on this episode. Visit energyvsclimate.com to sign up for their next live webinar episode and to listen to their panel of experts in hour-long discussions on energy and climate change topics.