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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's day four of Climate Week NYC, time to coincide with world leaders gathering here for the annual UN General Assembly. Today, UN Secretary-General António Guterres is gathering heads of state for the Climate Ambition Summit. That's what he calls it, the Climate Ambition Summit. While there have been many meetings on the topic of climate change, this one will only be featuring countries that Secretary-General Guterres referred to as first movers and doers, ones he deems serious enough about climate change to be included in an Ambition Summit.

When he announced this global event last December and invited countries to participate, he said the barrier to entry would be high. Only countries who have demonstrated credible climate action would be invited to speak. Take a listen.

António Guterres: It will be a no-nonsense summit, no exceptions, no compromises, and there will be no room for backsliders, greenwashers, blame shifters, or repackaging of announcements of previous years.

Brian Lehrer: That's Secretary-General Guterres last December. We'll see how that Climate Ambition Summit turns out today. Here at The Brian Lehrer Show, we're doing a segment every day this week for Climate Week NYC in conjunction with Covering Climate Now, a media collaboration that includes this show and WNYC. Covering Climate Now also announced its 2023 journalism award winners, that's climate journalism winners. They recognize outstanding coverage of the climate emergency, as they call it, and its solutions.

Today, we're joined by another of the winners Manka Behl, senior correspondent at The Times of India. We'll talk to her about her climate reporting and get her take on some of these international climate headlines. Also joining us is Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review and chairman and co-founder of Covering Climate Now. Manka, welcome to WNYC, and congratulations on your award, and Kyle, welcome back.

Manka Behl: Thank you so much for having me here.

Kyle Pope: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Kyle, you want to start and tell us a little bit about why Manka's work was chosen in this year's Covering Climate Now journalism awards?

Kyle Pope: Oh, I'd be happy to. Manka is a great example of a journalist who sees the climate story as all-encompassing. She looks at as many ways as she can find to tell the story through the people who are most affected. What she demonstrates is that there isn't a story that isn't a climate story at this point. We did a piece earlier this week in which we called the Everything Story. It's the through line that runs through everything. She does pieces on pollution from energy companies and looks at how that affects everybody, looks at how it affects their health, their ability to make a living, their ability to farm. Everything about them is affected by what's going on here.

She really is a model for how to think about this. That's one of the things that we've been really trying to convince newsrooms of at Covering Climate Now is that stop thinking of climate as a siloed story, stop thinking of it as a story that is left to experts. Think of it as we thought about COVID, which is that everything-- If you remember at the time, everything was a COVID story. We need to shift our thinking and realize that everything is a climate story and Manka just does that expertly.

Brian Lehrer: Manka, last March, to give our listeners an example of your reporting, you wrote, "New Delhi is the world's most polluted capital city for the second consecutive year. Out of the 15 most polluted cities in Central and South Asia in 2021, 12 were in India." Now, that refers to old-fashioned ground-level pollution, not greenhouse gases. I wonder how you see the intersection between what we might call old-style pollution caused in large part by industrial practices and the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Do we have Manka? Do we have Kyle?

Kyle Pope: I'm here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Okay. Manka's line dropped off. We'll try to get her back, obviously. Can you talk about India a little bit? Because we certainly saw extreme heat in India this year. That was one of the extreme weather events stories of 2023 out of many extreme weather events stories in 2023 that I think has put climate change even more on the journalistic map around the world than it was so far. How are you monitoring the coverage of that at Covering Climate Now?

Kyle Pope: It's tough for me to talk too much about it because Manka is there and is like the expert. I think you're right. When we get questions about, how do we find climate stories? How do we think about climate stories? I always tell people just like, "Look out the window." Then in a way is what Manka is doing a lot of like, where can we see-- We've all been in this effort to get journalism to focus more on climate. We've all been, unfortunately, helped by these incredibly dramatic changes in what's happening outside. There's so much to do where she is.

India is also, unfortunately, an example of where the people feeling the biggest brunt of the changes in climate are the people who have the least resources to address it, which is happening all over the world, not just in India. That's why you really have to think of climate reporting as, it's really like looking at the intersection of climate and injustice, the climate and economic inequality, climate and healthcare disparities. All that is what Manka does, and all of that is dramatically in evidence in India, where she spends all of her time.

Brian Lehrer: I see that Columbia University will be hosting a climate journalism conference as this week goes on, tomorrow and Friday, called Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation. That's a Covering Climate Now initiative. What are the main themes?

Kyle Pope: It's funny, you were talking about what Secretary-General Guterres is doing at the UN. This is our version of that in the sense of we luckily and thankfully passed the point where there's a lot of denial in the media about what's happening with climate, but I still think there's a search for what are we going to do about this? How do we write about this in a way that will connect with people? How do we write about this in a way that isn't downbeat all the time? Which, frankly, is a concern that some newsrooms have. We're really looking at solutions here, we're looking at-- The conference, by the way, runs all day Thursday and then half day Friday.

There's a series of conversations and keynotes interspersed. This is directly in response to your question, Brian, is a series of many testimonials from newsrooms, who have figured out a way to make climate stories work for their audience. We'll hear from a range of people from all over the world who will just go and literally in three or four minutes just say, "Look, here's what we did. Here's how we did it. Here's how you can adapt this for your market." That's the idea is, let's all work together and share best practices. Let's share ideas for initiatives that people have or ways to--

One of the things that we're really focused on is, how can you reorient the staff that you have because we live in a very difficult time for journalism from a business point of view. Newsrooms don't have resources to staff up climate experts. What we're focused on is how can you take the existing staff you have and educate everybody and get everybody to think of themselves as a climate reporter no matter what their beat is. There's [unintelligible 00:09:10]. We're going to have a really interesting, I think, conversation about whether newsrooms should take fossil fuel advertising.

There's been a big debate about that. Especially, some of the DC-based newsletters take a lot of fossil fuel advertising. Some of the DC-based public affairs shows take a lot of fossil fuel advertising. There's a big debate about whether that is the right thing to do, and there are newsrooms that depend on that to keep the lights on. How do we square that? I think that's going to be a really interesting discussion. We're going to have a town hall discussion where we're going to just invite everybody to, again, bring these ideas in. It really is a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves working conference about how do we do this better. That's the goal.

Brian Lehrer: I think we have Manka Behl's line back. Manka Behl, a Covering Climate Now journalism award winner for 2023 from The Times of India in New York, in conjunction with Covering Climate Now's awards and Climate Week NYC and what's going on with the United Nations. Manka, I wonder if you could give our listeners from places other than India a sense of the climate headlines from India this year.

I was saying after you dropped off that of the many extreme weather events we've reported on in 2023, a year of a particularly large number of extreme weather events, certainly some of them were happening in India. If you had a climate headline or two from India in 2023, what might it be?

Manka Behl: Yes. Hi, Brian. India has been seeing the worst of the climate change impacts in 2022 and 2023. At the same time, a lot of Indian states were struggling with different climate crises. We had extreme floods and landslides in the Himalayas, whereas at the same time, the Central India was fighting with droughts and extreme heat waves. I think this was also the highest year when a lot of deaths were recorded because of these extreme events. Since the last 10 months, the headlines of climate stories have been the numbers of people who have lost their lives, their livelihoods.

Also, the pollution levels have been at an all-time high in places like New Delhi and Maharashtra and other states. What I would also like to tell you is that a lot of the news reports now are focusing on the irregularity in weather patterns. The number of rainy days have increased. The quantity of rainfall that we used to earlier get in, let's say, a hundred days, we're getting the same amount of rainfall now in 10 days. I think it's safe for me to say that climate reporting has increased in the last one year because of an increase in the extreme weather events.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, people are feeling it, and the news organizations reflect it. Manka, you interviewed UN Secretary-General Guterres, I see, back in 2020, and you asked him about whether newly emerging climate targets from Asian countries were more ambitious than those of developed countries, referring to the West and the United States, presumably. I want to play you a clip of one of the Republican presidential hopefuls here, the former UN ambassador under Donald Trump, Nikki Haley. When asked recently at the Republican debate if she believes that human-caused climate change is real, she gave this answer. Listen to how she targets India here.

Nikki Haley: Yes. Is climate change real? Yes, it is. If you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions. That's where our problem is. These green subsidies that Biden has put in, all he's done is help China. Because he doesn't understand all these electric vehicles that he's done what that does-- Half of the batteries for electric vehicles are made in China. That's not helping the environment. You're putting money in China's pocket and Biden did that.

First of all, I think we need to acknowledge the truth, which is these subsidies are not working. We also need to take on the international world and say, "Okay, India and China, you've got to stop polluting." That's when we'll start to deal with climate.

Brian Lehrer: Manka, put that in the context of your reporting or anyone else's reporting on India as you see it.

Manka Behl: Yes, Brian. What I feel is that there is no doubt about the fact that India has been one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. I think when it comes to shared responsibilities, it's not fair to put the honors on just one or two countries because we also have to look at historic emissions from the developed world. At every COP that I have been to, there has always been this debate of the developed world and against the developing nations.

What I think is that from an Indian perspective, India has its climate ambitions in place. India is on the right track when it comes to meeting its clean energy targets when it comes to installing solar energy, wind energy, and hydro energy. Also, I would like to add here is what India can do more to meet its climate ambitions is maybe start phasing down coal pollution because that continues to be a major contributor. I think when you compare India's NDC with other countries, the ambitions are quite high. India is on the right track, and it is doing its bit to meet the Paris Agreement targets.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a dilemma facing the Indian government over trying to modernize its economy as a so-called developing nation and bring people out of poverty that way versus being the world's most populous country that's contributing a lot to climate change and limiting that?

Manka Behl: Yes, absolutely. See, in India, the factors that are contributing to climate change the most are coal power plants and infrastructure development. India is in a phase where a lot of cities are undergoing this infrastructural development. All these factors that are contributing to climate change, they're also uplifting the economy of the country. They're providing employment to millions.

This dilemma, it exists in every state. I live in Central India, and I have been writing about one of the India's biggest coal-fired power plant and why the government should not grant the plant to expand its units. The same debate comes in that the people are opposing that it would be good for the economy, it would generate thousands and thousands of jobs, and thus, the power plant gets the permission, despite the fact that it is highly polluting and it is not meeting a single environmental norm.

Brian Lehrer: Kyle, I'll give you the last word in this segment for you at the Columbia Journalism Review and Covering Climate Now. It seems to me that climate journalism needs to go beyond demonstrating to readers and listeners and viewers that climate change is real. The science is so clear, and yet, I think journalism gets bogged down sometimes because the science deniers get a foothold and create a debate, even if it's a phony debate.

A lot of journalism gets focused on demonstrating that climate change is real or just covering these extreme weather events that are becoming more common when what we also need to do is focus on the responses in a nuanced and sophisticated way, like with the dilemma that Manka was just laying out in India, or what we were talking about in the previous segment, with the transition to EVs and government policies creating winners and losers on the way to what is ultimately probably a very necessary transition. That's a challenge for climate journalists as well. Right?

Kyle Pope: Yes, no, I think you make a really good point. I think we are shifting into a new moment where we're starting really to focus on the nuance and the complexity. I have a lot of sympathy for climate journalists in this country who for a long time have been so frustrated, one, by this kind of fake debate, but also by an inability to get their publications to run stories in a way that they thought was warranted. The question has always been, are we matching our resources to the scale of the story? For a very long time until, Brian, really, really recently, we haven't been able to say that we have.

Finally, we're getting there. I understand why until now there's been this, everybody just needs to pay attention. Now, we're shifting into a realm. We're really trying to explain-- These debates, again, they're super complex. They're fascinating and there are people of goodwill who are really trying to grapple with them. I do think that we're getting there now. What still frustrates me, if you look at any of these big climate stories in the US that you all have been covering and that we've all have been looking at, whether it's wildfires or whether it's heat, there still is a lack of appropriate response that links it to the broader shifts in climate.

Every time I go to a bookstore, even if I only go to the fiction part of a bookstore, the number of climate-related titles is enormous. Not to mention non-fiction. Same if you go on Netflix. Same even if you go to movies. My frustration remains that journalism is not there yet. The journalists' focus on this issue isn't up to what the scale of the story is. There are other parts of media that are doing a better job, and that's a failure on our part. That's what we really want to focus on.

Brian Lehrer: Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review and chairman and co-founder of Covering Climate Now. The Climate Changes Everything summit will take place tomorrow and Friday at Columbia University. In-person registration is closed, but people can still register for the live stream at coveringclimatenow.org. We thank Manka Behl, senior correspondent at The Times of India, and a winner now of a 2023 Covering Climate Now journalism award. Thank you so much for joining us on Climate Week NYC.

Manka Behl: Thank you, Brian, for having me.

Kyle Pope: Thanks, Brian.

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