Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, our climate story of the week, here on our first show of the week. NPR news has just established a full-time climate desk. I've been looking at the stories they've been doing so far, and I see a very interesting pattern that I think is going to be great for climate coverage. We'll talk about that and more now with Neela Banerjee, NPR's Deputy Climate Editor. Neela, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on launching an explicit climate desk at the network.
Neela Banerjee: Oh, thanks for having me.
Brian: NPR has obviously been doing lots of climate coverage. You were helping to lead this before the creation of the desk, which took effect on October 1st, but you now have an official climate desk. What's changing, and what's the advantage of doing it this way?
Neela: That's a really good question and something we've been thinking about. I think what we're doing is we're building on the really excellent work that NPR's been doing on climate for a long time now, which was very much rooted in the science. Science is at the heart of everything that we do. I think what you're going to see more of is an expansion and greater ambition in the science coverage that we're doing, but in a way that really ties it back to people's lives so that studies, events don't feel remote, but there's a connection made to what's happening in your life, in your backyard.
The other things that creating a desk allows us to do is to build more staff, so you're going to see more staff working on issues of accountability. Governments, cities, corporations promise a lot of things or don't do things, so the question is, how is that going to affect our lives and our futures? What could be trusted? Then we are, right now, in the process of hopefully hiring a reporter who's going to cover solutions.
I think a lot of Americans, and, certainly, we journalists, hear about ideas for addressing both emissions but also how to adapt to a hotter planet. I think a lot of our audience, and we as journalists too, are wondering what's real and what's not. I think NPR's going to help you understand that and make our way forward. Hopefully, my real goal, to add to all this in the future, is that we will also be hiring a reporter in the future to look at climate and its effect on human health and public health more broadly. Those are some of the things that having a desk allows us to do is really beef up and cover all the different ways that climate change is affecting our lives.
Brian: Without us having coordinated this, you and I, I don't believe, have ever spoken before. You jumped right into that pattern of NPR climate reporting that I teased in the intro that I've been noticing, and that, I think, is really great. To say it explicitly, it's that I see, on the NPR climate stories page, that you're really focusing on the science more than the politics, which we have to cover the politics too, but I think it's a great public service to do so much actual science reporting.
For the sake of our listeners, I'm just going to read some of the recent stories list as it appears. The most recent one was, "Western wildfires are making far away storms more dangerous." Then you had, "Mississippi River basin adapts as climate change brings extreme rain and flooding." You have, "Scientists are using microphones to measure how fast glaciers are melting."
That's fascinating to us as audio people, right, scientists using microphones to measure how fast glaciers are melting? Then I'll go on. "Animal populations shrank an average of 69% over the last century, a report says." And, "Water batteries could store solar and wind power for when it's needed." Water batteries. That's just an example. I think that scientists-- I don't know. Journalists, they're not always so well-trained in science, let's say. I don't know that many journalists who are science majors in college, for example. The fact that you're aggregating a number of people who can really do those kinds of stories, I think, is a great public service.
Neela: I appreciate it. There's a few things about that. The science is just so interesting right now in climate change for a number of reasons. Like that story that you mentioned about wildfire, if people haven't had a chance to listen to it or look at it, it was about how big wildfires in California in 2018, actually, scientists show that there's a link between them and really intense storms that occurred in the Midwest and in the Rocky Mountain states. It's because of particles that wildfires emit, and then moisture condenses around those particles, and it makes storms more intense, more damaging.
The great thing about the story, the way Lauren Sommer, the reporter did it, is that it's not just like, "Oh, look at this nifty tie," but it's also-- What she was trying to say is that climate change, when it's occurring in your neck of the woods, doesn't stay in your neck of the woods. Science is showing us all of these interconnections, and it's up to us as journalists to be the translators for that. Reporters like Lauren, like Rebecca Hersher at the network, like many reporters at the member stations, are so good at doing that.
Brian: I also see, from the press release about the creation of the climate desk, that NPR will coordinate training for journalists at NPR stations around the country and convene an annual national symposium on climate change for public media as well as scientists in industry and policymakers and community advocates. I don't know if you are personally involved in that part of the planning, but do you have a sense that local journalists around the country could use explicit training in covering climate issues? I mentioned that, of course, most journalists were not science majors in college. Do you know what the network is planning in terms of training reporters?
Neela: Oh, absolutely. There is a great hunger among journalists, I would say, at every level, from overseas, domestically, at networks, at member stations, to become more conversant in various aspects of climate change because they feel it in their communities, they feel it on a personal level that they want to report on this. Trainings occur all the time, but I think the thing that NPR would bring to it is trainings that are specific to public media and to the particular coverage that we deliver, that's both audio and digital and podcasts. That's one thing.
The other thing, too, that's happening is that the climate desk already works closely with member stations, and we want to expand that and strengthen it because there's also recognition by us and by funders that a lot of for-profit media in smaller towns has just vanished. They just could not stay open, or they've gotten so small, that they just struggle to cover what's happening. This is a place where non-profit media, public media, can fill the gap. Part of the expansion of our desk includes bringing funding positions at member stations and trying to find member stations that already don't have a lot of coverage, but could really use the help in developing their climate chops and climate reporting.
Brian: That's so great that you're doing that. Before you go, I saw that you tweeted out a Bloomberg News story the other day. It was about how many countries are reaching a renewable energy tipping point, meaning majority renewable, with the US, apparently, on the way too. What's this tipping point, and maybe an example country or two?
Neela: Tipping points are, and I think we all see this in our communities, it's like something is small, and you see dots here and there. Then all of a sudden, it gets a momentum of its own, and it actually becomes a factor in our lives. Bloomberg did a really good analysis of different kinds of clean energy and where they are in adoption in the world, but also in the US. The good news is that, that in the US, just a few years ago, about a decade ago, only 5% of our renewables, our energy, rather, came from renewables. This past year, it's gone up to 20%.
If this trend continues, according to their analysis, half of US electricity will come from wind and solar in another decade. All of this is encouraging news. There are other countries that are leaders in adoption of specific technologies, like Australia adopting rooftop solar, Denmark being a leader on wind, and things like that. I think this gives people a sense of a path forward if we can take that path forward. There are still a lot of barriers to it, not the least of which is, in fact, pushback on the political side, and that's something that we're going to be covering too at NPR.
Brian: The very last thing. I was happy to see, at the top of your Twitter feed, you were promoting the fact that NPR is hiring its first-ever climate solutions reporter. We can do so much doom and gloom by looking at the scientific models on climate, and we have to report that, but there are also a lot of people working on solutions out there, as exemplified by what you were just describing, moving towards this tipping point for renewable energy creating most of our electricity. Just give me this vision for what an NPR climate solutions reporter would do, and then we're out of time.
Neela: [chuckles] All right. A climate solutions reporter would do a few things. It would be everything from answering your basic questions, like, say, you're like, "I live in an apartment building, and I want to compost. How could I do that?" I think we would walk you through something very basic and then [unintelligible 00:10:52], to looking at stuff that gets touted, like, how would floating wind turbines work? Is that a thing? Can it work? To looking at, like I was talking about, barriers that we're running into because one thing we will say is that if climate denial originally focused on casting doubt on climate science, now the attacks are against the solutions, like renewable energy and EVs. We're going to have an accountability part to it, too. This is not a Pollyanna approach to things. It's more like our reporters are going to be a proxy for you and going to help you figure out what's real and what's not, and what's standing in the way.
Brian: Neela Banerjee is NPR's Deputy Climate Editor. Congratulations on the network creating an official climate desk as of October 1st. Let's figure out some ways to work together.
Neela: It'd be great. Thank you
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