What Is The Wheel Of First-Time Climate Dudes?

[hatrack]

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The wheel starts to spin when a dude who spent his entire career doing everything except climate journalism decides he’s going to be the one to do a Big Climate Journalism Moment. This moment can be an interview with a famous person, a huge piece in a fancy publication, or a documentary film executive produced by Michael Moore. Because of the bigness of said moment, it is consumed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. But because neither the author nor editor has not done much climate journalism before, however, the viral moment suffers from factual inaccuracies and misleading tropes.

That’s understandable. Climate change is a very difficult subject to cover—due in large part to the sophisticated 40-year disinformation campaign around the subject, perpetuated and funded by the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry and its powerful political allies. But that doesn’t change the fact that harmful inaccuracies have been consumed by many people. The wheel comes full circle when climate journalists have to spend massive amounts of time and intellectual energy consuming and debunking the First Time Climate Dudes’ story.

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For example, Nathaniel Rich was primarily a novelist and essayist before he was given a whole issue of the New York Times Magazine to write the 30,000-word “Losing Earth.” It was a good piece of journalism in many ways, in part because Rich is a great writer. But the story’s main takeaway was that the climate crisis is the fault of human nature. That’s a harmful and inaccurate message. So nearly every climate journalist in existence had to write a criticism of that piece after it came out, this reporter included.

Climate journalists also spent countless hours criticizing climate questions asked during the Democratic presidential debates this cycle. Over the course of 11 debates, 83 climate questions were asked—and only one was asked by a climate journalist. The most-criticized questions came from NBC’s Chuck Todd, who regularly emphasized the high cost of climate action without mentioning the catastrophic costs of inaction. He also confused mitigation with adaptation.

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https://heated.world/p/the-wheel-of-first-time-climate-dudes

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. This:

Chuck Todd, who regularly emphasized the high cost of climate action without mentioning the catastrophic costs of inaction.

Some years ago at a discussion about the costs of universal health care in this country, where almost everyone was complaining about how much it cost, I finally pointed out that health care already costs a huge amount of money here, much of which doesn't even go into actual health care. You'd have thought I suddenly started speaking Martian.

[Boomer]

2. We are doomed

If this is considered "controversial", then we're not getting ourselves out of this mess:

"The only way to save humanity now is through consumption reduction and population control."

[Mickju]

3. Why doesn't NBC see the light and fire Chuck Todd?

He has demonstrated for years that he is an incompetent fool.