We have cable news for the market, but not the planet it’s on
Do we really care about the fate of the planet?
Millions of people across the world are becoming acquainted with the hottest temperatures they’ve ever experienced. Just weeks ago, parts of India crept over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Nearly 2,000 people have died from the heat in Spain and Portugal. More than 100 million people – 28 states – in the U.S. are under heat advisories this week, with places like Oklahoma City breaking temperature records (110 degrees) dating back to the Dust Bowl.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has balked at declaring a national climate emergency – a baffling display of cold feet in the face of national and global disaster, especially after indicating to the public that an emergency would be declared. Such a walk-back begs the question: what else would have to happen for this crisis to earn the designation of “emergency”?
Even without the daily travesties – flooding, wildfires, power outages, heat sickness, and so on – the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest report is dire enough. “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said IPCC co-chair Hans-Otto Pörtner.
To those in power, for an emergency to materialize not from some external threat, but instead from the ongoing conditions and structural forces of the time is inconvenient. We ask the government, why not declare climate a national emergency? Because to do so would be to admit our inadequacy. To declare emergency would be to concede our systems as faulty, as at least partially responsible for the emergency itself.
And so, the very basic systems of life that have led us to now continue to take precedence. Not only our insistence in – or at least deference to – our status quo, but just as well our passive capital-bound behavior. Search no further than our TVs.
Go to any restaurant, airport, gym, whatever, and take a look at what’s on television. Beyond sports, mainstream cable news, any run-of-the-mill sitcom, it’s not unlikely that you’ll catch the familiar sights: bold projections emblazoned on screen, interpreted by a coffee-drunk anchor and their expert guests who offer sage Objective Apolitical analysis; ever-flowing scrolls of acronyms and numbers and percent changes; green and red arrow-adorned line graphs hailed as crystal balls.
We have cable news dedicated to the market, but not the planet it's on. A compelling observation only in so far as how obvious it is – the banality of it is what makes it so powerfully bleak, so profoundly dumb. The wealthiest 10% of people in this country own 89% of the U.S. stock market. Meanwhile, 100% of people happen to exist on this planet. Though, granted, the wealthiest 10% of people in the world emit almost half the world’s total emissions – with America’s richest being the highest polluters – the stakes of the planet are still obviously much more shared and collectively-consequential than the stock market. “Climate underlies everything we know as humans: food, water, shelter, joy,” meteorologist and founder of climate-weather service Currently Eric Holthaus tells me. “All the things we do are directly tied to our ability to interact with the world around us.”
Nevertheless, market infatuation blares on, despite it being symptomatic of a broader cultural dissonance that has led us to today’s dire conditions. But someone who views market economics as logical and traceable, if not as God’s own will, ought to understand that the “science” of economics is undergirded by assumption and preference – elements that do not hold an inherent, infallible logic. Climate scientist and professor Andrew Dessler writes:
The idea behind a cost-benefit analysis seems simple enough: Evaluate a policy by comparing the costs of enacting the policy to the policy’s benefits. If costs exceed benefits, then the policy is not a good idea; if benefits exceed costs, then it is.
[But] cost-benefit analyses require economists to make judgements about what a “good” outcome looks like…economists can get any answer they want by simply changing the assumptions. Want to get a really high cost of reducing emissions? Just assume that future innovation in energy technology is slow. You can get the opposite conclusion by assuming a rapid rate of innovation.
The fossil fuel industry has taken advantage of how easy it is to manipulate these cost estimates. Academic research has documented that economists hired by oil companies “used models that inflated predicted costs while ignoring policy benefits, and their results were often portrayed to the public as independent rather than industry-sponsored. Their work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the U.S. over a span of decades.”
So, by neatly swinging a few variables, the “science” of economics imbues value (the kind that keeps millions tuned to financial news) into this constructed thing called The Market while the very real, tangible value of the natural world – ascertained from the hard science of physics and biology, if not simply from the air we breathe or places we live or animals and plants we share this planet with – is left by the wayside.
Of course, it’s not as if every individual in this country chooses a culture like this. Even if we are not active contributors to such a capital-lust society, we are passive participants, or are simply subject to it. “Greed is a misnomer, it’s not enough,” political and climate organizer Shabd Singh tells me. “It’s literally like fish in water. The profit motive is the oil that greases our world.”
Just as cost-benefit logic is often inappropriately deemed as Law, so too does supply-and-demand enjoy deceptive consecration. The notion that news and media organizations structure their focus solely based on demand – on What The People Want – ignores a few basic ideas. One, that the press is meant to serve the public interest. Second, that news companies, namely large and influential ones, base much of their strategy on profit. And finally, these entities can fall short of the former objective by virtue of the latter dynamic. “Media narratives are quite clearly not driven by interest so much as they are driven by profit,” Singh says. “Profit has very little to do with any kind of social outcome. The profit motive ultimately drives a certain type of journalism that is not going to be so adversarial.”
Print outlets have their own history of propagating fossil fuel interests. But many outlets are indeed improving, not to mention the strong contributions produced by many journalists at these outlets. “After many years of abject failure, I think that serious media – various organs and networks that aren't owned by Rupert Murdoch – have gotten much better in the last four or five years,” environmentalist Bill McKibben tells me. “They treat climate like a crisis, and provide often detailed and innovative coverage of what's going on. But they aren't managing to transmit a truly accurate picture – that is, that we need change very fast to meet the challenge.”
Consequently, the media seems sometimes incapable of striking the correct combination of honest urgency and actually conveying helpful information. Climate strategist Ruhie Kumar finds that sensational climate headlines, while conveying urgency, seldom also inform the public of how we could avoid said urgency. The IPCC report, covered in whatever mainstream coverage it can garner, is boiled down to just another headline of the times, a road construction sign blinking with all capital letters: DANGER. DEAD END. When large media does dedicate time to climate, if it doesn’t sugarcoat the risks, it can perhaps over-dramatize them.
However, beyond being a last-chance blaring warning sign, the IPCC report is an imploring signal of hope. “If you notice the coverage of the report, it doesn't focus on solutions. But the report actually has recommendations,” Kumar says.
And so, despite all that ails our culture when it comes to seriously caring about climate, there is an optimism to be had, one that will only grow if we vie to share it with others. “This is a political problem, not a technical or scientific one. It’s a problem of getting people to work together to solve it,” Andrew Dessler says. “If that’s really what’s holding you back, then you have to be optimistic about the problem.”
This optimism is kindled by the passionate, intelligent people dedicating themselves to report on the welfare of our planet, reveal the injustices of climate destruction, and expose which powerful entities are largely responsible for climate change. It’s no secret that fossil fuel interests have attempted to stymie this spirit, from infiltrating the political mechanisms meant to regulate them to the news organizations meant to oversee it all. But from fossil fuel divestment movements to the array of journalists working to hold corporate interests to account, there is escalating pushback. “No one will miss their influence on society,” Eric Holthaus says. A matter-of-fact gesture towards the basic absurdity of how much deference the industry receives – permission that nobody would actually regret revoking.
Perhaps most troublesome in all this is that there are no shortage of solutions and ideas that could readily put us on a better track. “If the world functioned off of who had the best ideas, we would be fine. We have a lot of clever solutions to transition the economy to clean energy,” Shabd Singh says. “The ideas and the know-how is there, it's literally just the opposition cutting it from moving forward.”
It’s abundantly clear where we collectively have failed. How we have enabled the exclusively powerful to get more powerful, and allowed our collective will to demand better to weaken. “We are standing at a place where if we don’t do enough, things are really going to get from bad to worse,” Ruhie Kumar says. As she reminds us though, we should dedicate as much of our attention towards the possibility of a better world as we do to the dire warnings of our worsening one.
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