Thou shalt not bum out thine climate audience

On the perils of anti-dread climate journalism

Climate journalism is caught in a strange dilemma, forever tiptoing around its audience's feelings. On the one hand, climate journalists want to be “on the side of science,” pushing back against the denialism that still predominates in this space. On the other hand, the climate news is so bad that just reporting the science straight is sure to alienate the audience, pushing it into the kind of fatalism and inaction that climate journalists —themselves mostly climate activists, that’s why they took the gig— see it as their duty to prevent.

This isn’t an easy tension to navigate. The way Western media usually deal with it is by omitting facts they think readers would find demoralizing, and therefore demobilizing. The imperative behind much climate journalism is to foster climate action, to influence readers into changing their behavior in some way: to recycle more, to vote greener, to rethink their energy habits, to do something. The imperative not to bum the audience out is this form of journalism’s northstar. Not for nothing is NPR’s flagship podcast called the “Anti-Dread Climate Podcast”, your go-to source for tips on how you can raise a low-impact kid.

The overuse of the word “you” is the tell here. Anti-dread is about the imperative to put the listener in the driver’s seat, to do whatever it takes to protect her sense of agency. In the end, anti-dread climate journalism signs a check to the listener that’s going to bounce upon contact with reality.

It’s this kind of journalism that has warped audiences’ intuitive sense of what the climate crisis is about. Anti-dread reporting silences key facts that are central to the climate crisis. Facts that, inevitably, invoke dread. Facts like this one, from a just-released International Energy Agency report:

Over the next three years, India will add electricity demand roughly equivalent to the current consumption of the United Kingdom. While renewables are set to meet almost half of this demand growth, one-third is expected to come from rising coal-fired generation.

This is a fact. And it’s dreadful. It is not a secret. But it is not reported. It is in nobody’s interest to highlight it.

Once you fully grasp how fast emissions are growing in the developing world, dread is inevitable. Dread is the correct psychological response to a situation where the things that affect you are not determined by decisions you make. Powerlessness is dreadful. And, today, those of us who live in rich countries are powerless to affect the future trajectory climate change.

Because climate change is not about you.

This, I think, it’s the ultimate climate taboo: the thing everyone needs to understand and nobody wants to say.

We are commited to eliding dreadful facts that are, nonetheless, central to the climate crisis. But a public conversation that elides the most basic features of a problem can’t have a sane conversation about it.

Which is one reason why our climate conversation is so very far from sane. It’s so warped, it can’t take account of the most basic facts on the ground. The discourse gets lost in trivialities about the climate impact of video-games, say, or in idiotic little controversies about the number of private jets that fly to the Super Bowl. What passes for climate discourse today. It’s not so much wrong as monumentally beside the point.

As of 2024 we in the developed world have no control over what comes next, because the marginal unit of GHG emited is almost always emitted outside our borders. The future of the climate has exactly nothing to do with what gamers or swifties do.

But silencing basic facts warps the climate debate beyond recognition. It obscures the actual forces driving the emergency and leaves us worse prepared to cope with it.

It’s up to us to find the seriousness of purpose to face up to the reality of our situation, and to discuss it openly. That’s what a democracy is for.