Imminent climate crisis “Media needs to change” 250 organizations participate

Is the media properly communicating the reality of the climate crisis facing the world? We asked journalist Mark Hertzgard (62), the co-founder of the “Covering Climate Now” global warming campaign with participation of the Asahi Shimbun about the significance and awareness of the problem.

--What triggered the campaign?

It was in 1989 that I started to cover the global warming issue. Since then, I've been reporting around the world. As I had felt since the 90s, the US where I lived was delayed by 10 years compared to Europe and Japan. In particular, the US media was deeply influenced by advertising activities by the fossil fuel industry.

In doing so, I made two mistakes. It came to regard the science of climate change as an “opinion” instead of “facts” and to refrain from articles. When conducting interviews with scientists on TV and radio, interviews with non-scientists were conducted as an objection.

The direct trigger of this campaign was the report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published last October. The main point is that "greenhouse gas must be halved in the next 12 years". The scientist then issued a message that “the world economy needs to be transformed, including energy, agriculture, finance and transportation”.

But I felt that scientists had forgotten the key areas. That is the media. Without media changes, other areas will not change or will at least be delayed. For this reason, I hoped that this campaign would change the global warming report to be the most important and now the most important report.

-Certainly the problem of global warming was not mainstream inside the media.

Which are many environmental reporters ...