As the World Burns
After the massive, record-shattering heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, and a large fire burning in the Gulf of Mexico, even the mainstream media have had to take notice and point out how badly things are going for our planet.
I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me a month ago that the Washington Post would have a headline — much less an article — saying that an extreme weather event wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for climate change.
It was so extreme and so widespread, so surreal and so deadly, that maybe they and mainstream media overall felt they had no choice but to cover it and quote scientists and meteorologists directly linking it to climate change.
Or maybe the frequency and severity of unusually bad weather is finally starting to wake up MSM editors and reporters that it’s time to stop covering for fossil fuel execs and corrupt politicians who try to act like it’s not or isn’t anything to be concerned about?
Image source showing how much above the average high the Pacific Northwest was on June 27.
Then we had a fire in the Gulf of Mexico. In the actual Gulf of Mexico, as in, in the water. This also was widely covered in the news and, at least in coverage I saw, reports mentioned the clear environmental angle — it was caused by the explosion of a pipeline.
Even CBS News, which starts this article basically letting Pemez (the company that’s responsible for the leak) do damage control, mentions that Pemez has a “history of major industrial accidents” and gave examples. Not great journalism, but at least better than usual with environmental disasters.
Will this and other recent environmental and climate news improve coverage of the impact of Big Oil and corporations more broadly on the short and long term health of our planet? That remains to be seen. But given how bad things have gotten, I sure as hell hope so.
And we — environmentalists, progressives, scientists — need to demand better from our politicians, so they actually do something to protect our planet, and demand more from our media so that it’s not shocking when coverage of human-caused natural disasters are covered half-way decently.
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