Transcript
[KE: I am happy to say that this transcript was copy and pasteable. When that happens I can do a blog post, more info at bottom]
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Paul: Across the globe, climate change coverage seemed to peak in about 2021. Since then, it's declined, according to a study, about 38 percent, and the decline just from 2024 to 2025 was 14 percent just in the one year. It's definitely on the decline. So as climate becomes more urgent, you would think that there'd be more high quality climate and clean energy coverage. But it's going the opposite direction for political reasons, nothing to do with what's happening with the climate, basically. [Music]
Herb: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Climate Emergency Forum. I've been looking around lately, and I think a lot of people have, sort of scratching our heads saying, what is going on with climate action? It seems like it's in retreat everywhere. And that's the focus of today's program.
Is in fact climate action becoming less intense, less aggressive as the climate crisis accelerates? And if it is, that seems to be something that could, sort of raise a question or two about the sanity of the human race.
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a question or two about the sanity of the human race.
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That's what we'll be talking about today. I'm Herb Simmens. I'm the author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future, and I will be your host. We hope that you will like and subscribe to the channel, and that you will go to our website, climateemergencyforum.org, take a look, donate if you're able to, leave us your questions and your comments.
We have with us, as always, our two regular panelists, Paul Beckwith and Peter Carter.
Paul, am I hallucinating, or in fact is climate action sort of collapsing, or at least weakening here and maybe other places on the planet?
Paul: Well, you're not hallucinating, unfortunately. I wish you were. Across the globe, climate change coverage seemed to peak in about 2021. Since then, it's declined, according to a study, about 38 percent, and the decline just from 2024 to 2025 was 14 percent just in the one year. It's definitely on the decline. A lot of the really good coverage, it's around the world, but the U.S. has a preponderance of media outlets, and, U.S. news and media gets global coverage more than, say, some of the other stations in other countries, whether it be TV or radio, et cetera, or just articles in newspapers or online.
And of course, the media, social media companies are in the U.S. for the most part that control that for the world. So it's definitely on the decline. Many companies, with their sustainability plans, they're basically trying to stay out of the limelight because they might be targeted by the guy at the top. That can lead to large negative financial implications for their companies and so on.
Just to give you a couple of examples, Bill Gates, he wrote a book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 2021. Just recently, he kind of changed his tune at the end of October of last year. He said, we should really, weigh climate change with poverty and things like that, put more money in some of these other things. He argues that too many resources are focused on emissions reductions and the environment. But I would just like to say, Bill Gates is not a climate scientist. He's just a billionaire,
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Bill Gates is not a climate scientist. He's just a billionaire
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and he doesn't want to raise the ire of the U.S. government particularly. So you can see where that's coming from. So basically, there's been, in direct terms, there's many companies and organizations that are basically undergoing appeasement to Trump at the moment. They're saying less and less about climate. Billionaires that own news organizations, major news organizations. So the climate reporting from Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press have generally been excellent. I would add The Guardian and, a number of others.
But of course, Washington Post was in the news. Jeff Bezos, Washington Post, February 4th. They gutted their climate team. So back in 2021, there are about a thousand people, about 300 people lost their jobs a couple of weeks ago at Washington Post. They had 19 people covering climate stories. Fourteen of those people lost their jobs a couple of weeks ago. So they're down to five. So in general, Bezos cut 30 percent of reporters at Washington Post. For the climate reporters, he cut 70 percent plus. So as climate becomes more urgent, you would think that there'd be more high quality climate and clean energy coverage. But it's going the opposite direction for political reasons, nothing to do with what's happening with the climate, basically. So legacy media is pulling back from reporting.
Part of it, too, is the framing of the media. we talked about this in a previous video, that if we call things a climate emergency, and then life continues maybe a bit more expensively, maybe somebody is directly affected. But you can't maintain a state of emergency indefinitely. It's got a limited shelf life. Humans have a flight and fight response. you see a bear in the woods, your adrenaline goes up, but you can't maintain that state of emergency. There's a bit of that happening, too, by us calling, not us, but by the people calling it a climate emergency, right? How long is it an emergency before people say, well, maybe it's not quite such a large emergency as we previously thought? So it's part of human behavior and human nature that's affecting these things as well.
Herb: Thanks, Paul. When I was writing my book and I coined the term media omerta, or media code of silence, and at least as of a couple of years ago when I did the research, in the United States at least, the number of hours that major TV networks covered climate was like in the single digits for a whole year, not for a day or a month or a week. I mean, it was shocking. And one of the media outlets that covered climate the most was Fox News, and they were covering it to deny that it was happening. So it is this kind of hall of mirrors we're living in. With that hall of mirrors, let me turn to Peter Carter for your thoughts.
Peter: Yeah, there's a clear retreat, a very noticeable retreat from climate change action, climate change awareness, climate change involvement. And of course, the big factor, the big influence that's making this a lot worse already is the present United States Republican Trump administration that is way more than a climate denier. They're a climate enforcer because they're a fossil fuel enforcer. So everybody knows that this administration is pushing more fossil fuels in every way imaginable, like even the last executive order was ordering the Pentagon to buy electricity specifically from coal-fired power plant, and it goes on. However, I do agree that generally, underneath that, there's been a retreat pretty generally. I think that every time there's one of these huge impacts, massive forest fires, I mean, they're happening on a regular basis, massive impact. I think the media should say this confirms that we're in a climate change emergency.
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every time there's one of these impacts, like massive forest fires [floods & extreme storms], the media should say this confirms that we're in a climate change emergency.
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It tends to go the other way, very rare for actually the media to even mention climate change when they're reporting these worst ever climate change impacts.
The other problem, which is a retreat, and I must say that there's been a retreat since the 1990s. 1990s is still a high point of politically and socially and publicly awareness of climate change and a drive for action. And then, of course, we have the COPs, the United Nations Conference of the Parties, which is what everybody focuses on and the media focuses on every year. But they are set up to fail, they failed for 30 years, they will continue to fail. Yet again, there's a draft from the next COP, COP31, among 14 action agenda items. This, of course, is from the Guardian. There's nothing about fossil fuels, nothing about transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So again, as in COP30, we and everybody has to push for fossil fuels to be included, even included in the agenda. So that's a continuous backtrack. I think that the backtracking is actually due to the climate change denial, which originates from the fossil fuel corporations. I think that they have been using a sort of psychological warfare for decades directed at the public, using their top PR people and psychologists. So I've got to suspect that that's a factor which is making things worse.
Net zero, there's a retreat from net zero, although net zero was a retreat in itself because it didn't specify that fossil fuel emissions have to stop in order to reach net zero. So, but yeah, so all of the corporations, the banks and everybody, these associations who jumped on the bandwagon of net zero in a sense, they've now bailed out. So that's a bad sign, that's a sign of a retreat. And we have record emissions, right?
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we have every motivation you could possibly imagine.
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So we have every motivation you could possibly imagine. Greenhouse gas emissions are accelerating, CO2 emissions have been accelerated, all along basically. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, that's accelerating and global warming is accelerating and it's increasing. The rate of global warming is now six times as fast as it was a few decades ago in mid-century. Six times as fast.
And also the excellent resource that we now have from Forster's team in Leeds, they give a complete thorough scientific update now every year of the state of the climate. Bill Ripple and colleagues, they've been doing one as well, which is very good. And yet again, the last update on indicators said that global warming is at an unprecedented rate.
Herb: Thanks for that grim report, Peter, but very accurate and passionate. Just to add a couple of quick points, it's not just Bill Gates, it's a story the last day or two, Tony Blair, his institute in England is calling for more oil drilling on the North Sea. Believe it or not, a climate champion of years ago, who would ever think of that? The net zero banking alliance has sort of fallen apart with the major banks around the world retreating from it, getting rid of it, and on and on.
But let me ask Peter and Paul, so you've sort of to some degree, maybe to a large degree, put some of the onus on this, on the president of my country in the United States. I won't mention his name, but I think most people have heard of him. But let me make the case and have you push back if you'd like, that maybe some of it is because we've reached the point after 20 years where it's a lot harder to cut emissions. We've cut the low hanging fruit and now you're going into the bone to mix my metaphors inappropriately perhaps. And it's more painful, it's more costly. People may lose their jobs, inconvenience. People won't be able to drive, they have to take the bus, whatever it may be. How much of it do you think is related to the fact that just that, that it's getting more difficult because it is more difficult?
Paul: Yeah, I think that part of that is going on. But I think Peter's point that we're calling this video retreat from climate action. We're seeing retreat from climate media reporting and action, but we're, as Peter pointed out, which is a key point, we're seeing an advance of fossil fuel interests. They have tremendous amounts of money so that they can push their agenda quickly through just, with money. I mean, money greases the wheel and, money contracts being withheld from companies that step above the parapet and talk about their objectives to try to cut carbon. I mean, it's just not, it's not like in the zeitgeist right now. The zeitgeist is, if you're doing this stuff, you're more likely to take the route of what may be called green hushing, right, is a term where, they may still have objectives to cut long term fossil fuel use from corporations or whatever, but they're not making reports and plans and not, they're trying to stay, keep their head sort of ducked down and they might still be doing it, but they're not really talking.
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we're seeing an advance of fossil fuel interests
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And many of these companies were accused of greenwashing in the past, saying that they have, they're, they're taking good steps to reduce emissions of employees and of their products and stuff, but they were actually doing the opposite. So they, there was a lot of trust lost with them and now they'd rather just not say anything, which is the greenhushing idea. But I mean, clearly the fossil fuel industry is as powerful as ever. Emissions are still increasing, levels of CO2 and greenhouse gases are still higher in the atmosphere. And then, but the US administration just announced that they're rescinding the EPA announcement saying that greenhouse gases are endangering people. So they're, by removing that, they're arguing that they can save $1.3 trillion because car companies can make whatever they want, et cetera.
But they're failing to see that, maybe in the short term they can have saved some money, but in the long term, I mean, they take the planet down with them. So this is a little flaw in the logic of that.
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Greenhushing
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Herb: So Peter, to what extent the, I mean, I, my position is that some portion of this is because it's getting a lot harder and more expensive. Clearly some portion of it is Donald Trump, the oil companies and everything else we've been talking about for years. What do you think about that or any other reason, I mean, to try to get behind this trend?
Peter: Well, economically, the low hanging fruit is still there. They've never been sort of noticed, nothing's been done about them. And the economics is very clear, it's being confirmed over and over and over that mitigating climate change is not a cost as the public is actually being told over and over and over. You'll find that in the media reporting on climate change, it's a huge economic benefit. The economists have confirmed that. So the low hanging fruit is simple, stop the fossil fuel subsidies, but the opposite is happening. Governments continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry in increasing amounts and they continue to push and encourage even more fossil fuel extraction projects. Herb:
Thanks Peter. Let me just quickly say, and then we'll move on back to Paul again, that where I live, we have been debating last year whether to make some significant capital improvement that would have improved our energy efficiency, but the numbers just didn't work. Even though I live in a community that probably has the highest percentage of aggressive climate action folks of any place around. And again, sometimes you just have to make the numbers work. But anyway, let me turn it back to Paul.
Paul: Yeah, it's around the planet that there seems to be less, I don't know, maybe many people have just sort of given up on the idea that they have any power to do anything. I mean, our society more and more is being run by individuals, very wealthy individuals who have tremendous sway over governments. So many young people are extremely concerned about where our planet is heading, about what's happening. And I think we're seeing more and more politicians in power that are very, very old politicians, very, very old people. And they're getting the power, and the argument is that only they have enough experience to run a country, for example.
This is why I like to see some sort of hope with, in the U.S. Like I'm thinking of AOC. She's just given some recent talks at a security conference in Munich and I think in some other places. And she's starting to sound more presidential in the way she's talking. So maybe she'll make a run at it. Is it possible? Well, she's young and she's a woman, so there'll be a lot of roadblocks against her. would the Democrats want to, say, take a risk on her?
But young people are tired, I think, of the status quo, the way things are run. So it gets to that and it gets, we're talking about, the money that's behind, say, climate change denial, the money behind some right wing politics that is doing away with a lot of different climate policies. They're also doing away with and interfering with democracy in many different countries around the world.
So we haven't even mentioned, but I think it's relevant that democracy is an endangered species around the world. We're seeing more and more authoritarianism and so on. And generally, the authoritarianism is for supporting the large companies that are funding their authoritarianism, which is fossil fuels. And social media allows countries around the world to be swayed by the companies and people that run the social media companies, which are the billionaires in the U.S. So, you can see a whole sort of system changing and it's not for the better at the moment. So what are we going to do about it? That's a big question.
Herb: Well, after Peter speaks, I'll ask you to answer that, Paul, what we're going to do. No, no, that's free. That's a question for you to answer. Oh, okay. Now, come on now. I'm going to, don't point the finger at me. Peter, what are your thoughts, having listened to Paul and having, I know, given this issue a lot of thought yourself?
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Headline: As climate crisis grows, news coverage all but disappears
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Peter: Well, I think Paul spoke extremely well and covered a lot of ground and the most important ground on what's happening with regards to the complacency on global warming climate change. Now, we've had complacency and the media has reported complacency for probably the past 15 years. That's not even mentioned now, I guess. I do agree that the democracy, I really agree with what Paul said about that. Obviously, the United States government is no longer a democracy. It's an authoritarian regime that's staying at its best. And it is influencing other countries. And we have this so-called populist right wing in a lot of countries threatening the prevailing government and threatening the democracy. So that very much is undermining any political thoughts even, or certainly political action, on mitigating the climate emergency and slashing emissions right away.
Herb: Yeah, it strikes me that the countries that are still, to some degree or other, making a valiant effort and engaging in climate action, like the UK and France and Germany, all three of them have very strong populist right wing movements that are on the verge or potentially on the verge of winning power at their national legislatures. And we may well see essentially some European version of Trumpism in the major European powers in the very near future. The future is really up for grabs, notwithstanding those of you who watched our program last week about a hot house earth and know how urgent it is to act, how necessary it is to act aggressively. So here we are and have this dilemma. Should we just throw up our hands and end this program on that note? Paul, what do you think? Where do you want to take this conversation? You want to give our viewers some hope or some realism or something else?
Paul: Well, you can do two things. You can stop cheering for the human team and you can start cheering for the climate team, the climate to take us out, and rebuild and restart. Right. I mean, that could be a sort of, you could just say humanity is finished. And if you accept that, it makes your life a lot happier and easier, right? Because you're not worried about this sort of thing. And there's many unforeseen risks that might come and really hamper society's ability. And I'm thinking of the satellites in low Earth orbit all come tumbling out of the sky and we can no longer launch any rockets into space. I did a video on that recently.
But I think that solar radiation management is the only option. And it's, it's the only option we need to cool. We need to cool our planet. We've done so much else. We've affected everything else. We need to figure out how to do it properly. Cool the planet.
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We need to figure out how to do it properly. Cool the planet.
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And while we do slash fossil fuel usage and emissions and take the China model of just going everything gung ho into clean energy, we're going to cross tipping points, I believe without any, without doing deployment of solar radiation management techniques. That's my view.
Herb: And Peter?
Peter: Yeah, I can actually finish up on a positive note. There has recently, I think just in the past couple of weeks, been released from the UK. What, in my view, is certainly one of the very best reports, assessments on our situation regarding the climate emergency and the biodiversity emergency. They're linked. A surprising source because they come from the UK Intelligence Committee, which the media says is MI5 and MI6. So the governments are making everything worse and not telling the truth. And we have the spies telling the truth in no uncertain terms. So I think it's called the UK Biodiversity Security Assessment. And it's actually all about ecosystems. And it's really, really, really good. So we need reports like this, and we need all of us to use the very best of reports and to use the very best assessments and put them out there.
Herb: Yes. And there's no shortage of the reports and no shortage of the assessments. It's getting the word out and acting on them. And that still remains to be our preeminent challenge. Yes, we've got lots of reports, lots of studies. They're important to read, to follow. And how would you like to wrap up, Paul? What are your thoughts for our viewers today?
Paul: I think that there's an old saying that it's always darkest just before the dawn. So things appear pretty dark right now. Things can turn around very quickly. New leaders, I mean, one of the advantages of having really old leaders pulling the levers of power is that they're much closer to leaving the mortal coil. Heart attacks, whatever, health. So they're not there forever.
With Trump and all his antics, I would be very concerned if he was a 30-year-old man, but he's not. He's getting up there in age, and his health isn't great. So all I'm saying is that things can change very, very quickly. And there's a few people who have inordinate amounts of power in the world. When those people are no longer in charge, things can change extremely quickly. unexpected, amazingly fast things. So we can have that. It's very difficult to predict the future.
Herb: OK. The question would be how many tipping points will have tipped before we get this new leadership. And maybe that's the question of the next century or so. As always, thanks to Peter and Paul for a provocative conversation about what I call the sort of great climate retreat. And with that, as always, we thank you very much, and we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez*gjd-f7FPk
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I'm pretty sure that when this video first came out, I tried to copy the transcript and it had been kaiboshed by Google, so if Herb did something to fix it, thank you or maybe AI fixed it after oh who knows. This morning when I saw this transcript was copy and pastable, I tried another video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaotZsbMsCs that is also full of important information, but I'm unable to copy and paste this transcript so I'm not sure if or how I'll get this information out.
Since I started Heating Planet blog Sept 2025, I've had one setback after another, from Facebook saying Joni could only post my links twice a day in one activist group and banning me from all Meta, to Trump's DEA blocking some words from being searchable; and now even Google who owns the blog, is making it harder for me to do this blog, So when the President says it's a hoax, it's a real challenge for journalists to get the story out. Now that all these qualified reporters have been fired from the Wapo, and other papers, why not form a climate advocacy PR firm and get this information out, did selfless activism die with my generation?
KE: The climate science Community needs public affairs officers, someone to write their press releases and get them published. Hire some journalists- there are plenty of us out of work right now.
