THE COLUMN: 'Emergency! Everybody to Get from Planet'

Now that the annual scarifying convention of pampered hypocrites known as "Cop28" is underway in the superbly artificial, petroleum-built capital of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai -- and even as the wheels are coming off the entire "green" "climate change" boy-who-cried-wolf scam -- it's time to raise a little-noticed red flag as the confluence of journalism and partisan stenographic propaganda grows ever tighter: the activists masquerading as "journalists" are all in on the scam:

In late September, with hundreds of journalists watching, Covering Climate Now co-founder Mark Hertsgaard began a two-day media conference with a call to arms. Climate change, he told attendees at Columbia Journalism School, isn't just a "problem" or "crisis." It's an emergency—one that requires breathless, around-the-clock coverage. Think COVID, Hertsgaard said, except it's the planet that's sick.

It wouldn't be a racket without the Fake Irish War Hero.

Except that Covid was complete crap and everybody knows it...

It’s an interesting comparison. During COVID, the press, at the direction of various "experts," ruthlessly policed its own coverage. The possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, now considered the most likely scenario for its emergence, was roundly derided as a conspiracy theory. Those who questioned the utility of paper masks and the costs of remote learning were scorned. 

For most people, this isn’t a story of journalistic triumph. For Hertsgaard, a journalist and the author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, it is a template, and he now spends his time telling other journalists exactly how to cover global warming. Some might say that is not very journalistic, but nobody seems to be complaining.

Why would they complain? Among the magnificent wreckage wrought by the internet, the journalistic establishment and its publications are among the chief victims. (Hold your cheers; this is not entirely a good thing.) Daily newspapers are vanishing at a headlong rate, which has transformed news junkies into their own echo-chamber editors, deriving their information now from increasingly monomaniacal sources that reinforce instead of challenge their pre-held beliefs. This is one principal reason why, for example, all news has something to do with Donald J. Trump and, incidentally, is almost entirely about the 2024 election. 

Even news that's not overtly political nevertheless has a political subtext; everything does these days. Do you still wear a mask, donate to Black Lives Matter, celebrate Hamas' murderous sneak attack on Israel, and swear by "global warming"? If you do, you're a Democrat and you're going to vote for Joe Biden or Your Name Here (D) come hell or high water; if not, not. You likely view everything through a "progressive" lens and where once you might have amused yourself with reading the bridge column or the gardening tips or the recipes or even the little "brites," as we used to call them -- short items intended to elicit a small smile or a mild chuckle -- such bagatelles are no longer in your X or TikTok or Instagram feeds. Life is far too serious now for such trivial pursuits. 

What it's really all about.

"Journalists," however, have already gone that extra mile and are now proudly and unabashedly in the leftist corner. Every story they now cover must and damn well is fit into a "progressive" mold in the furtherance of the Narrative, which is entirely political. It's the natural end-point of a profession whose "glamour" side was always to be found in the White House, and becoming a White House Correspondent was the pinnacle of a journalistic career. As the saying went, Washington was Hollywood for ugly people, and getting your puss on Meet the Press was like winning an Oscar. Why, folks out there in radioland actually recognize you on the street!

Covering Climate Now presses media organizations to "make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom." Its partners include top TV networks and print publications, such as ABC and CBS News, MSNBC, Time, HuffPost, and Vox, and its money comes from the nation's wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Rockefeller Family Fund and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Today, the journalists are the activists, and the conference itself reflected the blurred line between climate journalism and climate activism. Covering Climate Now's conference... journalists from the nation’s most prominent outlets, from NBC to CBS to Time. Those journalists—such as CBS national environmental correspondent David Schechter and Time senior correspondent Justin Worland—echoed Hertsgaard's rallying cry, portraying climate change as a do-or-die issue that transcends industry norms and standard practices.

So now journalists have something that's always atop their Christmas wish lists: a crisis. They missed out on WWIII, Korea, Vietnam and, most of them, the Cold War -- but those were messy affairs. A guy could hurt on a battlefield, or at least get his hair mussed. But a deadly, science-fiction-level extinction event with absolutely no visible manifestations and no serious threat to either your health or your lifestyle (like Covid, but better!)... what more could you want? Sure, the "science" doesn't add up, but when you're a drone working for a wire service, what difference, at this point, does it make:

The world is heading for considerably less warming than projected a decade ago, but that good news is overwhelmed by much more pain from current climate change than scientists anticipated, experts said. That’s just one of a set of seemingly contradictory conditions facing climate negotiators who this week gather in Dubai for marathon United Nations talks that include a first-ever assessment of how well the world is doing in its battle against global warming. It’s also a conference where one of the central topics will be whether fossil fuels should be phased out, but it will be run by the CEO of an oil company.

Even though emissions of heat-trapping gases are still rising every year, they’re rising more slowly than projected from 2000 to 2015. Before the Paris deal, scientists at Climate Action Tracker and the United Nations Environment Programme were projecting about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial levels based on how much carbon dioxide countries were spewing and what they planned to do about it. 

That 3.5 “is totally out of the picture. It will not happen,” said NewClimate Institute scientist Niklas Hohne, who works on Climate Action Tracker. “Our number is 2.7 (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit). It could be even lower with pledges and with net zero targets.”

“So things aren’t as bad as they could have been or as we worried they might be 20 years ago, but they’re still far from where we need to be,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads scientists who annual track world emissions in the Global Carbon Project.

The usual suspects.

Of course they are. That's the whole point. The "crisis" can never be ameliorated. Fossil fuels and the humans who used them may be "killing the planet" but that won't stop John Kerry, Al Gore & Co. from flying all the way to one of the capitals of the Middle East oil industry and enjoying its lavish hospitality along with a frisson of fear. Because being totally wrong means never having to say you're sorry -- and in any case, there will soon enough be another terminal event on the horizon.

So here's a news flash, news hounds. We are not going to buy electric cars, eat bugs, confine ourselves to studio apartments, stop eating burgers, stop flying commercially, stop heating our homes with the cheapest and best available source for our location, or stop having children. We are not going to watch Disney movies, or mutilate our kids to "affirm" the fantasies of the mentally ill. We will not give up our second amendment rights to let you prey on us. We will not stop attending traditional Latin Catholic masses no matter what the once-Irish-Catholic FBI thinks. We will not be subject to your bullying or your blackmail. We will not give in, and we will not give up.

In the well chosen and inspiriting words of Elon Musk: GFY. And take your "climate crisis" with you.