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Author
Gay Alcorn
is the Editor of The Age.
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COVID-19 has occupied much of our resources and energy since the start of last year, but climate change is one of, if not the most critical challenge of our times. It will affect all of us.
Across The Age and our sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, we have four specialist journalists covering climate change and the environment, and our political journalists in Canberra and Melbourne focus on it too, as do our foreign correspondents. In Melbourne, senior journalist Miki Perkins covers the environment.
As Australians know, the politics of climate change has crippled our federal governments for more than a decade, and seen our political system fail in its duty to act in the interests of citizens, again and again. Our environment and climate editor, Nick O’Malley, will be in Glasgow for the critical COP26 summit starting October 31, as will chief political correspondent, David Crowe, Europe correspondent Bevan Shields and photographer Alex Ellinghausen.
Glasgow summit How the world ran out of time |
The challenge for The Age is not about our commitment to the issue, but about how we cover climate change. Since reading Rebecca Huntley’s excellent book, How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference, I have thought about this a great deal.
The news about what is happening to our planet, and what the evidence shows will happen if we don’t act quickly to slash emissions, is bleak.
I worry it can overwhelm our readers, who may feel helpless and hopeless. As the President of COP26, Alok Sharma, said in a recent speech.
“At 1.5 degrees warming, 700 million people would be at risk of extreme heat waves. At 2 degrees, it would be 2 billion.
“At 1.5 degrees, 70 per cent of the world’s coral reefs die. At 2 degrees, they are all gone.”
These are hard things to contemplate. There are few out-and-out climate change deniers now, even if they contributed to decades of inaction in Australia and across the world. Even News Corp, a media organisation that did more than any to confuse Australians about whether climate change was real or urgent, has flipped, almost comically, and now campaigns for net zero.
Our federal government has also changed its approach after years of bitter internal division, and will take a target of net zero emissions by 2050 to Glasgow, a big and welcome step politically, even if its plan has been widely criticised as lacking detail or serious policy.
The tension now is not about deniers, but between people and countries who are wholeheartedly committed, and those who have been dragged to act on climate change because of political and business pressure but have little genuine interest in it.
What Huntley does so well is to explain the psychology of discussing climate change, which made me think about how The Age could frame our coverage. She points out that surveys have shown that few of us talk about climate change with even family or close friends, and to discuss our worries and doubts is crucial.
Glasgow summit COP26 newsletter |
To argue about the science is mostly pointless because disagreement is not about the science; it’s about people’s identity, values and worldview, about how people see the past and the future.
To get angry about what is not being done can be useful sometimes, but it won’t convince a single person to change their mind because being told your lifestyle or values are wrong only leads to defensiveness. Relentless negative coverage is likely to cause many of our readers to disengage.
Opinion polling reveals that most of us believe in climate change and think it needs to be more seriously addressed, but most of us don’t spring to action to defend our environment. One reason, writes Huntley, is because climate change is so nebulous, has happened over many years and because of the human tendency towards “optimism bias”. Our instinct is to assume things will work out.
The idea of “technology not taxes”, which our federal government espouses, goes to this instinct that something will come along to save us, rather than having to act now on what the science is telling us we need to do, especially over the next decade, to keep warming below 2 degrees and preferably 1.5 degrees. It is an entirely human instinct.
Climate change action and mitigation will cost us, and the price of acting on climate change now is off-putting. “Put simply, we’re highly sensitive to losses in the present which feel more certain, than losses in the future, which feel less certain,” writes Huntley.
So what does this mean for our coverage? If you want a backgrounder on COP26, I recommend this explainer by Nick O’Malley. If you are interested in analysis of the federal government’s plan, try this by the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood. This is a revealing piece by David Crowe about how ‘small l’ liberals lobbied for a 2050 target.
If you want to know what you can do as an individual, Henrietta Cook ranked the most useful actions we can take. And this multimedia piece shows graphically how the world is warming, and the catastrophic results. During the summit, we’ll be taking questions from our readers on climate change, and getting our reporters and analysts to answer them. You can see the start of that here. And there is lots more here, and do sign up for our environment newsletter.
Towards the end of her book, Huntley suggests tips for how to talk about climate change that are as relevant for a news organisation like The Age as it is for individuals.
They include focusing on local issues to make it personal for people (the Great Barrier Reef, Victoria’s coastline); highlighting what we have to gain from action and not just what we’ll lose; getting rid of the language of blame; being honest about the threat but avoiding catastrophic or extreme language and encouraging “active hope” no matter what the science tells us.
She writes that when we say we care about climate change, we are not really talking about the science. We are talking about the things we love and the fear of losing them. If we start from there, we’ll get somewhere.
Links
- (The Conversation) Tweets, Emails Or Hand-Written Notes? What Gets Politicians To Speak Up On Climate
- (Anthropocene) People Don’t Know What Climate Experts Are Talking About
- (AU The Conversation) Communicating Climate Change Has Never Been So Important, And This IPCC Report Pulls No Punches
- (Gizmodo) Why TV Is So Bad At Covering Climate Change
- (Yes! Magazine) Why The Shift From “Climate Change” To “Climate Emergency” Matters
- This Is Why We Should Stop Calling It Climate Change
- Why net zero by 2050 is good but not good enough
- Xi’s a likely no-show at Glasgow but it doesn’t matter much
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