By Paul Homewood
I have been tracking Covering Climate Now for some time now.
They were set up to influence journalism worldwide, in order to push the alarmist agenda by, basically, telling lies:
Covering Climate Now supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences.
Co-founded in 2019 by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation magazine in association with the Guardian and WNYC, CCNow invites journalists everywhere to transform how our profession covers the defining story of our time. Unless news outlets around the world dramatically improve and expand their climate coverage, there simply will not be the public awareness and political will needed to tackle the crisis.
With hundreds of partner news outlets from over 60 countries reaching billions of people, CCNow helps journalists produce more informative and appealing coverage of the climate crisis and its potential solutions.
As the climate crisis accelerates and the journalism landscape rapidly evolves, we invite all journalists and newsrooms worldwide — newsletters as well as newspapers, social media as well as television, independent investigative sites as well as a reader-funded non-profits — to join the Covering Climate Now community and help your fellow journalists produce exceptional work that engages audiences, holds power to account, and inspires change.
To learn more about the establishment of CCNow, see these pieces by our co-founders, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope: “A New Beginning for Climate” and “The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns.” For media inquiries and to see news coverage about CCNow, visit our media page. Check out our FAQs here, and donate to support CCNow’s mission.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/about/
This is their latest missive:
The Violence of Climate Change
Climate change often manifests as violence, and violence often amplifies climate change. Recent weeks have illustrated both sides of this grim coin. Amped by super-hot sea water, Hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted death and destruction across the southeastern US. On the other side of the world, the massive amounts of oil burned by tanks, planes, and other equipment in wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and central Africa released yet more heat-trapping pollution.
Helping audiences understand the connections between climate change and war poses challenges for journalists. When hurricanes or missiles are killing people or demolishing houses today, describing those horrors understandably seems more urgent than explaining their underlying causes and ramifications.
On October 7, Ukraine bombed a major Russian oil terminal in Crimea, unleashing towering black plumes of carbon-dense smoke. Israel expanded its war from Gaza into Lebanon and reportedly pondered a strike on Iran’s vast oil fields. Sudan’s military bombed a market in Khartoum, adding 23 fatalities to a war that has killed tens of thousands. Rebel attacks continued in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where years of conflict have displaced a staggering 8 or more million people.
In May, a Covering Climate Now press briefing explained that modern war carries an immense, though often hidden, carbon footprint. Neta C. Crawford, a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, highlighted the role of direct emissions, such as the carbon dioxide released by the Russian oil terminal bombing. Indirect emissions, such as the loss of carbon sinks when forests or wetlands are destroyed, also matter. “War causes climate change more than the other way around,” Crawford said.
Destruction of urban areas causes both direct and indirect emissions. Rawan Damen, the director general of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, urged news organizations to make clear how the war in Gaza not only kills men, women, and children but also “uproot[s] the trees, the greenhouses, the farms… the whole ecosystem of the place is being lost in front of our eyes.” The reconstruction of areas destroyed by war is another source of emissions, which panelist Ellie Kinney of the Conflict and Environment Observatory added, makes green recovery plans critical.
Nevertheless, war’s role as a driver of climate change is obscured by a gaping loophole in international governance. As Chelsea Harvey reported in Politico’s E&E News following the CCNow press briefing, “Nations participating in the Paris climate agreement are not required by the United Nations to report the carbon emissions from their armies and aircraft or warships and weapons.” The US military, with hundreds of overseas bases and a budget larger than the military budgets of the next nine countries combined, is the world’s single largest annual carbon emitter, Crawford calculates.
Journalism alone cannot stop either war or climate change. But our reporting can make clear how these two instruments of violence reinforce one another and, perhaps, how they might be defused.
https://mailchi.mp/coveringclimatenow/the-violence-of-climate-change?e=26b08cfb8d
In short, they could not give a toss about all of the deaths and suffering in these wars. Their only real concern is carbon emissions!
What scum!