What If Climate Media Stopped Being Extractive?

Hi there, Amy here. I don't know about you but I started this year feeling absolutely exhausted. I took a longer break than I usually do at the end of last year, and yet here I am at the end of January absolutely wrung out. Done in.

Seems a perfectly reasonable response to a world dominated by news of genocide and civil war to sometimes feel too tired and too sad to do much of anything. Or even to celebrate big wins, like the move the Biden administration made this week to pause approvals on all new LNG export terminals and require a thorough climate impact report for each, without a lot of cynical footnotes marching through my brain: it's temporary, we don't know where it will lead exactly; it's conveniently timed with both an election year and the ICJ ruling calling South Africa's claim that Israel, backed by the US, is committing genocide against Palestinians "plausible"; and this is the same DoE that opened the floodgates to LNG expansion in the first place, the same president who keeps an LNG booster as one of his top advisors (Hochstein) and has long surrounded himself with proponents of the stuff. I find it difficult to appreciate small wins when the world is on fire and children are being bombed, despite the fact that I know fine well it's important and it keeps people going, and also I hate to be the sort of person who rains on anyone else's parade.

This feeling I have, this Eeyore approach to good news, the desire to work from bed for the foreseeable future, is also the sort of burnout that's become extremely common in both media and climate, where we're consistently told either that we should feel lucky to have a job at all (media) or that we should sacrifice our well-being for the good of the cause (climate). I only have a job because I've worked my ass off for decades and sacrificed stability to create one for myself, and others, first of all, there's been very little luck involved. And we all know that burned out zombies don't make good truth-tellers or activists or movement-builders, yet this dumb idea persists.

Partly it's my own fault, too. I'm curious and passionate, so I say yes to too many things. I also spent many years being really broke. I'm not talking "having to tap into savings" broke, I'm talking passing bad checks to scam groceries, getting my car repossessed, learning how to make lentils stretch a million different ways. It wasn't long ago enough for me to ever feel comfortable saying no to a paycheck. But I'm also not great with authority so I opted years ago to work for myself, which always means working a little more. And because I want every dollar we bring in to map to more reporting, I also do all the admin stuff myself.

It's also partly driven by the increasingly extractive, transactional nature of a lot of both climate folks and journalists--trying to collaborate with people who are actually competing with you for attention, ideas, money, credit and so forth is such a massive drain. So anyway, I'm tired and fed up. And then I remembered that the last time I felt this way, I actually wrote about it and then just let that essay sit on my desktop for a while. So I dusted it off for today's newsletter. I hope you like it! And I hope you get time this month to:

• rest
• get inspired
• think about how climate connects to all the other injustices in the world (for me, this helps with getting angry and thus motivated :)
• do something for someone with no expectation of anything in return

There’s a pervasive line of thinking amongst some climate folks that goes roughly: Who cares if I’m an asshole, we’re in a war! Or, more gently: if I’m using the same tactics as my enemy to achieve better ends, that makes the tactics good, actually.

It’s possible there was a time that I also thought trying not to be an asshole was a waste of time, but I don’t remember one. My attraction to the climate accountability beat has always been about fairness, a righteous sense of indignation, standing up for the little guy.

But there was definitely a time when I thought “Well, the climate movement is just a group of people, and in any group of people there will be assholes, why should this group be any different?” I’ll tell you why: because we’re in a fucking war!

And it’s a war of many things, but at least as much as all the other things, it’s a war of imagination and, oh god I’m gonna say it: moral clarity. It’s a war of hearts and minds, folks, that’s something industry propagandists have known for a very long time, and you don’t win hearts OR minds by being an asshole. How many times can I use the word “asshole” in this post? A lot of times!

Point being: it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the climate movement to behave less extractively than other groups.** I’d even go so far as to say it is incumbent upon those in the climate space to model what less extractive intrapersonal behavior looks like. I know, woah. And I include climate journalists in that. Particularly during this time where media is being upended—bought up by private equity and sold off for parts, or acquired by magnanimous billionaires and then gutted a few years later—why are we competing with each other for scraps when we could be banding together and showing everyone what real community, real collaboration looks like?

I’ve been working as a climate reporter for more than 20 years, but it’s only been in the last six or so that I’ve mingled overly much with the movers and shakers of either the climate movement or the media industry. I was never important enough and then I made something that people liked, something that framed the climate story differently but in that way where people went “god DUH why haven’t we been talking about it this way forever?! Climate is a true-crime story.” And so I became a target for extraction. People copied my work, fundraised off it, developed film treatments on it...all without ever even speaking to me. It was particularly galling because I had tried very hard to credit the people whose work had inspired me.

For the first season of Drilled, I wanted to draw attention to and build upon the excellent ‘Exxon Knew” reporting conducted by reporters at Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Columbia Journalism School. I scoured the documents they’d published, came up with a list of former Exxon Research & Development employees and consultants who were still alive, and set about interviewing them. Some were new sources, some had been interviewed by other reporters but told me things they hadn’t shared publicly yet. I went looking for new documents and historical records too, and I reached out to the reporters themselves seeking interviews. Two never answered, two told me their boss wouldn’t allow it, and one, Lisa Song (now at ProPublica), agreed to talk to me. In our conversation, Song told me she’d come onto the project at Inside Climate News when it was already underway and didn’t feel super comfortable being the only voice if the two lead reporters, Neela Bannerjee and David Hasemeyer couldn’t speak with me. In the absence of those journalists’ voices, I wanted to make sure to credit them appropriately, to note throughout the series where various documents had come from and whose work had created this new evidence for lawyers to run with. Once the podcast came out, I was quick to correct anyone who attributed the Exxon Knew documents to me, and direct them to the original reporting.

I still worry that I didn’t do enough, that it’s too easy for people to falsely credit me with research I didn’t do. In subsequent work, both in print and audio, I’ve made an even more concerted effort to be hyper aware of preceding work, and credit it appropriately. I’m sure I still mess up, but I spend an awful lot of time thinking about giving credit where it’s due. Which is why, when I saw documentaries released that were remarkably similar to my own work, both in framing and content, when I saw a BBC journalist crediting herself with a scoop I knew I’d reported two years prior, and written about several times since, when I heard from a source that a docuseries director had said, falsely, that I was consulting on her project, in order to gain access to this source, I was pissed. I’m still pretty pissed. 

But I’m more concerned about the way that increasingly common extractive practices, both in climate journalism and in the climate movement more broadly, conflict with a key goal we're all supposedly working towards: to expose the ills of extractive practices and highlight the need to do things differently. At conference after conference, I was seeing people plagiarizing each other, taking credit for each other’s work, backstabbing, competing for money, and it all had me wondering... how the hell are you going to stop extractivism while being extractive? 

Dr. Robert Brulle, a longtime climate researcher (and a source I’ve gone to multiple times over the years), has also had his work featured frequently in both press reports and documentaries, including the BBC production Big Oil Vs. the World, without credit. “I provided tons of material to her [BBC producer Jane McMullen] and even wrote the definitive peer reviewed article on the Global Climate Coalition, and no acknowledgement at all,” he fumed on Twitter when the series was released. And later to me: “I spent days getting her material and explaining the history to her. This is really unethical exploitation.”

Weeks later, Dr. Brulle wondered if perhaps the individualized nature of some industries—particularly journalism and documentary filmmaking—has lent itself to extractive practices. I wondered if the same issue wasn’t also at play amongst individuals and organizations competing for the same grant funders’ attention. “Ideally, the ethics of the academic community would apply,” Brulle said. “While academia is intensively competitive, creating knowledge is recognized as a collaborative enterprise that builds on the work that came before you.”

In academic papers, that means full disclosure of all materials, along with full citations of the work that helped inform your research, and full acknowledgement of the contributions of others. “Understanding climate obstruction efforts is a collaborative enterprise,” Brulle said. “Uncovering and exposing how vested interests have been able to stop meaningful climate action for decades is a long term collective effort. We need to work together to build our understanding of how this effort works and how we can possibly counter it. Certainly individuals should get credit for their contributions. But failing to acknowledge that this is a cumulative effort and taking credit for others contributions, while it might serve short term individual interests, works to undermine the creation and maintenance of a collaborative and cooperative community of journalists, documentary filmmakers, independent researchers and academics.”

Writer and academic Yasmin Nair notes that even with the very clear rules around attribution in academia, what she calls “soft plagiarism” abounds. “Soft plagiarism is when you take a concept or an analysis or framing or source material, structural arrangements, and re-do it in your own words,” she explains. “It happens a lot in academia, and in journalism, and in publishing more broadly, and it can usually be avoided by the very simple, collegial act of acknowledgement.”

Plagiarism, soft or otherwise, has become something of a hallmark of the so-called “knowledge economy,” and, as the writer Jonathan Katz pointed out when he discovered a podcast episode lifted almost entirely from his book, Gangsters of Capitalism, podcasts are part of the problem too. “As the appetite for podcasts balloons, listener (and advertiser) demand far exceeds the number of ethical journalists, documentarians, and other nonfiction specialists available to even talk about their own reporting, let alone do original work,” he wrote in his newsletter The Racket.

Social media has also kicked this practice into overdrive. “A lot of people have been saying this for a while, especially women of color,” Nair says. “There are people on social media who are these gigantic whales just going through and sweeping up a bunch of stuff and presenting it as their own. Social media enables soft plagiarism so easily.”

Other extractive practices are common in journalism as well, some so much so that we even have terminology for them: parachute journalism anyone? As a local reporter in Texas, a big part of Amal Ahmed’s work is building relationships with sources. “Generally local reporters care about the community they’re living in and that’s what we lose when local papers are being decimated, but the New York Times is still out there winning awards,” she says. “What matters to me is do the people who live here read it and did they learn from it? To me that’s more meaningful.”

She’s particularly salty about The New York Times because they soft plagiarized a story she wrote as a fellow at the Texas Observer. “I stumbled on this story in 2019. A lot of these grassroots environmental justice groups had formed post-Harvey,” she explains. “Some local reporters covered it, and then I tried to tie it back to larger systems and patterns and put together this piece that went beyond Harvey to look at decades-old issues. It was super interesting to me, but I assumed five other people would read it because it was pretty wonky.”

She was surprised to see more outlets picking the story up, and then a year later a friend saw a New York Times piece that reminded them of Ahmed’s story. “I went into it thinking ‘oh it’s great that this grassroots group is getting attention!’” she says. “Then I read it and it was like okay there’s just no way this guy didn’t just re-tread what I did. It was the same documents, same sources, same nut graf.”

And yet, Ahmed said that story still managed to entirely miss the mark when it came to articulating the stakes of environmental justice. That’s the other big problem: when people extract sources and framing but don’t come at a story with the same depth of knowledge, they almost always get the story wrong. 

Ahmed said that for her, simple acknowledgement isn’t enough. “Do something I didn’t do instead of just rehashing! Challenge yourself to go further,” she says. “If you see someone has already done something, do something different, answer another question.”

If those of us with the most extensive knowledge of the negative impacts of extraction were to consciously try to rid our personal and work lives of extractive practices—what would that look like? A spirit of collaboration, acknowledging the work of others, progressing the work forward rather than repeating the same story over and over, taking a collaborative view rather than focusing solely on individual achievement and competition…It sounds a lot like the sort of thinking required to deal with the climate crisis. 

** In the interest of giving credit where it’s due: the first person who got me thinking about this sort of thing as being extractive, in the same way that energy and mining companies are extractive, was Larissa Ikeda. 

This Week on the Podcast

In June 2022, Michel Forst became the first UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders. In that role he has spent the past year visiting various countries and speaking out about the increasingly onerous laws and aggressive tactics being used against climate protestors. Today he released a statement on the UK, saying he is "extremely worried" about "the increasingly severe crackdowns on environmental defenders in the United Kingdom, including in relation to the exercise of the right to peaceful protest."

In this week's Drilled podcast episode, our France reporter Anna Pujol-Mazzini talks to Forst about his new position, what it means, and what power he has to do something about the creeping crackdown on climate protest. Listen wherever you get your podcasts...or right here (a written version is also available on our website)

This Week's Climate Must-Reads

• A Collection of Environmental Reporting on Israel's War on Gaza (Alleen Brown for EcoFiles) - Our senior series editor, the great investigative journalist Alleen Brown, runs the newsletter EcoFiles, where she's compiled this great list of all the stories that have connected what's happening in Gaza to climate and environmental issues.
• (ICYMI) Why Colombia's President Is Determined to Ditch the Country's Oil Wealth (Justin Worland for TIME) - A super interesting profile of Colombian President Gustavo Petro who is doing what we've all been told for decades is impossible: charting a path away from oil wealth.
• Joe Biden halts permits for LNG projects under climate campaign pressure (Aime Williams, Myles McCormick, and Alice Hancock for the FT) - There was actually lots of great coverage on this move by the Biden admin but I generally find the FT's take on such things to be the most comprehensive (this is a gift link, so you shouldn't hit a paywall!).
• [report] "'We’re Dying Here’: The Fight for Life in a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone" (Antonia Juhasz, Human Rights Watch) - Antonia worked as an investigative journalist for years, writing several books and longform features on how the oil industry works all over the globe, before heading to Human Rights Watch last year to research and write comprehensive reports like this one. If it's always bothered you that we casually refer to a place where lots of people live in the U.S. as "Cancer Alley" (and it should!) this is not to be missed, especially on the heels of the court decision to foist the massive Formosa plastics complex on this community.
• Buying Home and Auto Insurance Is Becoming Impossible (Jean Eaglesham for The Wall Street Journal) - Extreme weather events have prompted the insurance industry to jack up prices in some areas and pull out of others altogether. This is a really great deep dive into the intersection of the climate crisis and insurance.

Bonus:

• Not a story, but this Twitter thread from RadioLab co-host Latif Nasser is both a fun journey and a really great way to show the public how reporting works.