Key findings:
- There was a 45 percent drop in climate change coverage on the broadcast networks’ nightly news and Sunday morning political shows from 2017 to 2018 — from a total of 260 minutes in 2017 down to just 142 minutes in 2018.
- Nearly a third of the time that the networks spent covering climate change in 2018, or 46 minutes, came from a single episode of NBC’s Meet the Press on December 30 that was dedicated to discussion of climate change.
- NBC was the only network that aired more minutes of climate coverage in 2018 than in 2017 — an increase of 23 percent. CBS’ time spent on climate coverage fell 56 percent from 2017 to 2018, Fox News Sunday‘s fell by 75 percent, and ABC’s fell by 81 percent.
- People of color made up only 9 percent of those who were interviewed, featured, or quoted in the networks’ climate coverage, and women made up only 19 percent.
- None of the broadcast TV networks’ news reports on hurricanes Florence or Michael mentioned climate change. Only nine of their segments reporting on other weather disasters of 2018 mentioned that climate change exacerbates extreme weather.
- Almost three-quarters of 2018’s climate coverage occurred in the last three months of the year. Much of it focused on major climate science reports released by the United Nations and the U.S. government.
- The links between national security and climate change were discussed only once in 2018, in an NBC segment. ABC and CBS did not mention that climate change poses serious threats to national security.
- Solutions or actions offered in response to climate change were mentioned in only a fifth of climate segments aired on ABC, CBS, or NBC.
Horrifying.So unfair to deprive people on how to protect themselves and childr.Always Climate Crocks
A grotesque failure- but only to be expected, in a fully commercialized system driven by ‘eyes on screens’ and the interests of powerful, wealthy corporations which see no profit in delivering inconvenient facts to the audience.
Okay, all well and good. To be honest, “tactical framing” has been around for decades. That’s a gimme.
My question is this: Can someone please direct me (i.e., provide a link or two or three) to a simple – or even a mildly complicated – non-biased yet comprehensive explanation of what the New Green Deal actually is, one that a layman such as myself can understand? I’ve seen tons of articles, even read a few of them (all the way through!!), and still I’m not quite sure I get the complete gist of the thing.
Gracias.
start here
https://climatecrocks.com/2019/03/13/whats-in-the-green-new-deal/
Off topic but related, interesting article on the role of ocean circulation in climate and carbon cycle feed-backs determining ice-age periodicity and the shift from 100,000 to 41,000 year cycles by Hasenfratz et al dd 08 Mar 2019.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6431/1080/tab-pdf
Sorry: [Edit previous] Shift to 100,000 from 41,000 year cycles
Even if some people cannot visualize life at the end of the century, for the younger generation, under our present trajectory, surely they can understand how very short 10 years is. Better hope the media pick up and get their act together too.
Out of 5.2 million possible climate futures, carbon emissions must reach zero by 2030 in every country in the world if we are to stay at less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) by 2100 of warming, the target set by the United Nations to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, from rising seas to deadly heat waves.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/climate-change-model-warns-of-difficult-future/
We’ll actually need negative emissions, and on a huge scale, of the same order of magnitude as the fossil fuel industry has been for the last ~hundred years. Fortunately, this is doable. http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf
The energy system will need a complete makeover as well, of course. The percentage of world energy from fossil fuels is still over 80%, just as it was at the time of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, but that’s four fifths of a much bigger pie.
I think a big part of the problem is that the name “green new deal” is an instant turn off to a lot of people in your political environment.
If you called it something more appropriate that described what it actually does then it might get a lot more traction. An example that comes to mind is the “clean air act”. Pretty descriptive of what it was trying to achieve, and arguing against it meant you would be perceived as “pro-pollution”!
You’re talking about surrendering to the anti-nature framing that’s pervasive in the US. Call it anti-environmental, anti-ecological, whatever you want, it denies that we are an absolutely integral part of nature. It’s a never-ending 2-year old’s temper tantrum of will and refusal to do something just to refuse to do it–to demonstrate separateness. But we aren’t separate, and to act as if we are is to act nihilistically and destructively out of rage and hate.
People against the Green New Deal are anti-Green–an insane, ridiculous, psychotic, psychopathic thing to be. People against the New Deal are a small minority but have control of the vast majority of wealth, power and media, so can lie in particular ways (communism, coming for your hamburgers…) about whatever they want, and make at least the Republican base believe anything they want, no matter how absurd. For example: signs from the debate over Obama Care saying “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”, or the huge racist gap between the number of people supporting the Affordable Health Care Act and those supporting Obama Care (which IS the AHCA).
I’ve always talked about the need for a climate mobilization. But for better or worse, the name for that now is Green New Deal, and while I often still refer to a climate mobilization, I almost always also call it the Green New Deal.