“Not very long ago,” Wallace-Wells wrote, some scientists believed that emissions “could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures.” Now a two-to-three-degree range was more likely, “thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.” The sea change culminated last October, in the form of the New York Times Magazine’s annual climate issue, which featured comic-book-style depictions of “The New World” that climate change would create, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha and annotated by David Wallace-Wells. The happiest warrior of them all, the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, weighed in with a column titled “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.” With global solar power capacity anticipated to nearly triple in five years, a breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion, and advancements in battery storage, Kristof wrote that we were experiencing a “revolution of renewables”: “Progress is possible when we put our shoulder to it,” he concluded. “Anyone who reads my stories knows I’m biased toward climate solutions, and my reporting flows from that,” Roth wrote.
More recently, the Post debuted Climate Coach, an advice column “about the environmental choices we face in our daily lives.” In the Los Angeles Times, the energy reporter Sammy Roth embraced the can-do turn in climate coverage.
Last May the Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee announced an expansion of the paper’s Climate Solutions vertical, an initiative designed to highlight people and organizations “offering hope for the future” while at the same time “empowering readers to understand how they can make a difference.” To date, the section has run stories on the effort to ban plastic utensils and a Milwaukee-based reward program for informants of illegal dumping. In the media, writers and editors have also been uncasing their instruments. “We need those saxophonists that are going to do whatever the hell they feel like they want to do.” Someone else over here is beating drums,” Toney told Weil. It looked like perseverance.Įach participant was contributing to what the activist Heather McTeer Toney called a “jazz sense of chaos” response to a warming world. A man stood and watched for hours, a sleeping toddler on his shoulder. A woman sold shrimp and grits out of hotel pans. In rapturous terms, she described the scene under a highway overpass in New Orleans:įlagboy Giz rapped about gentrification in his Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indian headdress. But her mood lifted during a rally marking the seventeenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Weil catalogued the usual depredations of her beat: fleeing a Marin County meditation retreat after wildfires fouled the air, crying about the gloomy future in the serenity of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story about how everyday people ought to contend with the crisis. In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment,” Solnit nevertheless concluded, “It is possible to do. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming-we’re already experiencing them-but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse . . .
“Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021.
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