Newsplaining We got it wrong

By: 
Ethan Stoetzer

In March of 2015, The Guardian, a United Kingdom news outlet that covers global news, launched a story campaign entitled “The Biggest Story in the World.” It featured newspaper articles, online features, videos, social media, podcasts — basically every medium anyone had access to — about how journalism screwed up the greatest story ever to come across the human race.
It was a story of dozens of bad guys and good guys, each with their own tragic flaws and super power; it was a story of corruption, backroom deals, the search for truth and those who sought to hide it; it was a story of love and death, of addiction and disease, and of pain and pleasure; it was the story of the few and the many, and the race against time to stop the bleeding.
It was the story of climate change.
Journalism dropped the ball on climate change.
For reference as the story continues, climate is not weather and weather is not climate. Climate is a particular pattern of weather in a particular region, while weather is a moment of observable barometric and livable conditions. Just because it snows doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t real. It means that the weather forecast called for snow. Climate change is when it is no longer below freezing for a majority of 365 days at the north and southern poles; it’s when weather patterns change, when summers grow longer and winters don’t snow.
Journalism got those facts wrong too. And with the U.S. now departing from the Paris Climate Agreement, the pain of being wrong not only stings, but stabs and throbs, each pulse tougher to get through than the last, for the agreement was a pillar of hope and reconciliation of the failures on the part of businesses, global leaders and the folks who archive it for eternity.
Climate change is not a hoax. NASA reports that the current parts per million of Carbon Dioxide in the air is 400, approximately 90 parts per million more than peak 100,000 year intervals. Global sea levels have risen eight inches over the last century. 16 of the last 17 years on record have experienced higher recorded temperatures than previously recorded, with 2016 approximately two degrees higher than normal temperatures.
I could go on but we’ve already been told all of this. You’ve been told that the climate is changing, that the ice caps are melting, the water is warming up and becoming more acidic and that algae is poisoning the waters Gulf of Mexico. You’ve been told this and you’ve probably been told that you’ve probably been told that it’s all your fault, that you need to start taking care of the planet, as if that fate of six billion people was your fault.
The truth is it’s not your fault. The fate of the Earth does not rest on your shoulders. You were lied to. But that doesn’t make climate change a hoax. Journalism was wrong to tell you it was your fault, and tell you that you could no longer partake in the life that you’ve held dear for several generations.
The truth is that one person doesn’t make a difference, at least not this time.
The truth is that much of the damage of climate change wasn’t caused by the generation in power; it was caused before that. So it’s not your fault. The biggest mess up was journalism telling people to stop living their lives the way they wanted to.
You like your tractor, you like farming the way you want to farm, you like taking a fast ride through the country in your car… the problem was that the world leaders were doctors, who saw you dying and decided to keep sending you home to continue dying, never treating you.
Climate change is like cancer. You don’t know about it until it’s almost too late. Sure, Armageddon isn’t coming tomorrow, I can promise you that. I’d even venture to say that the end of the world due to climate change wouldn’t come in 15 years. But after that, I don’t know, and that’s the part journalism got wrong, is trying to convey that point to a human race that likes routine and despises change. We don’t like having to give up sugars and bread. We don’t like being told what to do. It’s like when your parents told you that you couldn’t watch TV anymore or that you couldn’t go back for seconds. We’re all adults and we have the right to do what we want.
Journalism failed to tell the story of our world leaders being bought, of our interests being voted against.
Our leaders should have passed laws. Our leaders should have never subsidized oil, so that we would develop efficient vehicles and efficient fuels. Our leaders shouldn’t have allowed jobs to go overseas and contribute to the global pollution of developing nations.
Our businesses should have been burdened with the costs of carbon dioxide emissions. Our biotech companies and our chemical companies should be doing better jobs in making better fertilizer and our communities should have built more efficient waterways.
In no way shape or form is that the fault of a farmer trying to make ends meet. But in the end, the consequences will fall on him or her, when the regions north of here become hospitable to grow corn and soybeans, driving commodity down, while Coke-a-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle control the water supply to feed the crops.
It was the greatest story ever told, culminating in the Paris Agreement, in which none of the burden fell on you individually. We don’t know if it would have worked. But like Stage Four Melanoma, no one knows if treatment will work. No one knows how many surgeries it will take. But don’t we all deserve a fighting chance?
The Americans are stubborn. They are fighters, they are survivors. We deserved a fighting chance to beat climate change.
Tim McIlrath, singer for the Chicago Punk Rock group Rise Against in the late 90s through now once wrote, “if there’s a God you better pray that this sleeping giant never wakes.”
And pray we probably we should.

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