Disconnecting the Dots Still on Climate

Earlier this month there was the big announcement at the airport. The paper also had some climate stories.

Front page and interior, July 14th

Here are other climate headlines from just that week.

Extreme heat worldwide and here in US

Flooding in Northeast

The climate coverage has actually been persistent and much stronger this summer than in years past. Here are more recent stories, several of them. There is a real cumulative density of coverage.

Climate burdens military

Pervasive extreme weather

Sizzling record temperatures

And a couple of stories just today.

Today on reefs and warming

But they are mostly AP stories, and they're all national stories, not anything local. They don't make it to the paper's website, either.

To circle back up to the airport story, we have a real problem with connecting the big story of climate to local policy decisions. The climate story was buried on the interior, despite the "wildfire and heat" warnings story immediately adjacent to the airport story.

Earlier in July you will recall the burn and fireworks ban. But the City and media did not connect it to our climate crisis.

Front page earlier this month

Back in April, an interview on climate softened the problem, framing things with anodyne imagery. Look at the smiling child! "Climate change might actually be good..."

Mixed messaging back in April

The story goes on to critique that, saying "we're seeing that there's a lot of adverse impacts," but the framing is more ambivalent, ambiguous, and ultimately harmonizing than it should be.

On making connections

At the level of City policy, and we very much saw this on the airport, insulated defensively from any climate analysis, the Climate Action Plan still lacks provisions for novel situations. When there is something new not directly addressed in the Plan, what should we do? And if the current actions aren't doing enough, how do we ratchet action to the next level and iteration? The Climate Action Plan is just a discrete list of actions and hopes, a lot of hope, and still does not supply a framework for looking at all decisions and supply a plan for actually reaching emissions goals. Despite the chart's headline on "connections," part of a presentation to Council last week at their Work Session on the Policy Agenda, we aren't making connections.