During this year’s global election supercycle, as it was called, national elections were held in a record number of countries, accounting for roughly half the world’s population. This scenario made the prospects for a climate turnaround, or at least the beginnings of one, seem especially promising. The human race is growing increasingly concerned about climate change, and 2024 was a global opportunity to elect leaders who were serious about addressing the greatest threat we face as a species.
That’s not how it worked out.
“It’s quite clear that in most advanced economies the big loser of the elections has been climate,” Catherine Fieschi, an expert in European politics, told The Guardian last month.
This bitter pill was made more galling by the degree to which environmental issues generally — not just climate but also pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. — hardly registered in the run-up to our own elections. And yet when the environment was actually on the ballot in the form of initiatives that fostered conservation or climate resilience, it did very well.
One hindrance to urgent environmental action is the number of urgent issues on the table right now. Being seriously concerned about climate change and biodiversity loss doesn’t mean the environment is a voter’s primary concern. When every political issue of our day is a five-alarm fire, the slower-burning devastation of the natural world, even as it is visibly accelerating, is rarely at the center of public discourse.
You’ll find truly brilliant environmental reporting in The Times, of course. (If you don’t want to miss the latest, be sure to sign up for the Climate Forward newsletter and for David Wallace-Wells’s Opinion newsletter.) Other national outlets with vibrant coverage of the intersection of humans and the other-than-human world include The Washington Post, ProPublica and, especially, The Guardian.
But to get an even closer look at what’s happening at every level, you’ll need to choose a few environment-specific news sources to follow, too. These organizations are capturing local and regional news about climate and environmental justice that often flies under the national radar. Here’s a noncomprehensive list of my favorites:
Canary Media. This nonprofit focuses on the transition to renewable energy across the globe — and across industries like transportation and electrification. It provides not just news but also informed analysis of the effectiveness of green technology. Big bonus: In a seemingly endless barrage of bad news, this site often reports on encouraging developments in the effort to decarbonize. Who could fail to love a news source with headlines like “This Chart Will Cheer You Up”?
Inside Climate News. An award-winning nonprofit source of nonpartisan climate reporting with a growing list of local bureaus, Inside Climate News is very nearly a one-stop shop for climate journalism. Topics it covers through a climate lens include law and finance, conservation and biodiversity, weather and health, wildfires and drought, fracking and pipelines and a host of others. To make keeping up with its voluminous reporting convenient, ICN offers several newsletters that include links to its own reporting as well as to coverage by other news sources on subjects like climate politics, clean energy and environmental justice. You can also sign up to receive breaking news from its bureaus in specific states and regions.
Grist. Highlighting climate solutions and climate justice, Grist works “to show that a just and sustainable future is within reach.” Even as it provides much-needed encouraging news — Indigenous people defending their land and fighting for climate justice, for instance, or a new insurance model for flood-prone communities — this site’s reporting pulls no punches in revealing underreported bad news or efforts toward sustainability that just aren’t panning out.
Orion. Though it is not a publication for hard news reporting or the dissemination of breaking news, the large-format literary journal Orion is nevertheless a welcome resource for writing about the natural world. The quarterly publishes poems, short stories, narrative nonfiction, reviews, interviews and original art and photography — all without advertising — as a way to help readers strengthen their personal relationship with the beautiful, fragile natural world. It’s not too much to say that the writing in Orion is necessary in the same way that the poet William Carlos Williams argued poetry is necessary: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Substack. For more first-person writing, reporting and opinion, in most cases from a wonderfully progressive point of view, it’s worth checking out Substack’s most popular climate newsletters, especially David Roberts’s clean-energy newsletter and podcast “Volts,” the legendary climate activist Bill McKibben’s “The Crucial Years” and Emily Atkin’s unapologetically furious “Heated.”
Yale Climate Connections. A project of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication, this nonprofit news site focuses on climate news and personal actions that can lead to climate solutions. It also produces a brief radio program that airs each day on local stations around the country. Its sister site, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, is an important source of news about what people know about the climate, as well as their attitudes toward everything from climate politics and policy to climate impacts and potential solutions.
With corporations engaged in shameless greenwashing and the Trump administration poised for even more outrageous acts of environmental plunder and oil companies working relentlessly to undercut environmental awareness, nonprofit news sites devoted to the coverage of climate and biodiversity deserve our attention, and our dollars, now more than ever. Because the first way to fight back on behalf of the earth is to become informed. And the second way is to spread the word.
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