Choose Your Climate Adventure

Opening grafs to grab you.

Author

Brad Johnson
January 31, 2024

PRESENTED BY WHAT THE HONEYBEE SEES

The corruption and destruction of the fossil-fuel industry is grim, but journalists bring light to the many paths of this story every day. Choose your own adventure! Here’s how a story from Keerti Gopal about You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel begins:

On a balmy day in December, in Oblong, Illinois, I sat on a folding chair in a small, windowless room and watched a ’90s VHS tape about a high school student who couldn’t live without her petroleum products.

How Olivia Acland launches her piece on human trafficking and climate change:

Zainab – last name withheld – sits in a dimly lit office in the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown, plugs a number into her phone, and inhales sharply. A man picks up after two rings.

“I hear you are offering jobs in Lebanon,” the 29-year-old Sierra Leonean social worker tells him. “Life is so hard here, I want to get out. Can you help?”

How Rebecca John launches her blockbuster reporting that the fossil-fuel industry financed groundbreaking climate research in 1954:

In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. 

Of course, instead of picking just one story you can read all three. It’s worth it. As pioneering journalist Jon Franklin explained in 2004, as quoted in his recent New York Times obituary:

“The reason we read stories is because we have evolved a wish to understand the world around us. The way we do that best is through our own experiences, but if we read a good story it’s like living another person’s life without taking the risk or the time.”

KIDS THESE DAYS!

(Just-turned-21-years-old) Greta Thunberg joined protesters in England to protest the expansion of Farnborough Airport, a private-jet hub on the outskirts of London. Farnborough has applied to increase its annual flights from 50,000 to 70,000 a year. No word yet from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).

In the Wall Street Journal, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a real-life Scooby Doo villain, is very mad at the meddling kids. He announced he will block every one of President Joe Biden’s State and Energy Department nominees in retaliation for the president’s moratorium on new LNG export projects. Kennedy attacked “whichever TikTok influencer convinced the Biden administration to ban LNG permits.”

Here’s another pesky kid:

This morning, Carbon Mapper scientist Tia Scarpelli and Rocky Mountain Institute methane specialist Tom Frankiewicz nerded out at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on avoiding, detecting, and capturing methane pollution from landfills.

House Natural Resources subcommittees held two hearings on proposed legislation on Wednesday, one on federal lands bills and the other on overturning mining regulations.

Hearings on the Hill:

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and  @climatebrad.hillheat.comon BlueSky

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