Climate News Is a Crime Beat, Not Just an “Emergency”

I’m all for the urgent new message from Covering Climate Now (CCNow), the media lobbying group: “the emergency is now” and news organizations need to cover the galloping crisis with increased urgency. (The front page of my hometown San Francisco Chronicle reports today that California’s drought has grown so severe that the looming fire season promises to be a nightmare.) The new message by CCNow (whose executive director is my friend Mark Hertsgaard) was signed by the Guardian, Scientific American, Al-Jazeera and other organizations (but glaringly not by big corporate outlets like the New York Times, CBS, CNN or the Wall Street Journal). I know that CCNow is focused heavily on getting these big news organizations to feel the heat. But I think that climate activists need to go beyond the red alert stage and push the media to start covering the climate meltdown as a crime beat.

Burn, baby, burn: Fossil fuel profiteers should be treated as terrorists

We need to start naming the men (almost always men) who are responsible for raising the planet’s temperature and wreaking deadly environmental havoc. Who are these energy industry CEOs, corporate propagandists and lobbyists, government officials, political leaders? Name them and cover them like the social pariahs they are. Every time these men block legislation to counter the climate emergency, every time they disseminate false information about the fossil fuel industry, every time they deny any connection between their catastrophic capitalism and the freak storms, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and unseasonably strange weather that increasingly bedevil the world… this is when the news media must tell the truth and treat these men as what they are. Criminals on a world-wide scale. Guilty of major crimes against nature and humanity.

ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods: This primary offender raked in over $16 million last year

Covering climate destruction and loss of life is no longer just a scientific story. It’s a crime beat. And until our society begins criminalizing these rapidly proliferating assaults, these powerful men will continue operating like ruthless gangsters. We need to lock them up, before we all burn in hell.

Bring out your dead: An Extinction Rebellion protest