CLIMATE ACTION RADIO SHOW
FEBRUARY 27TH 2023
Produced by Vivien Langford
PRESS BRIEFING THE CLIMATE STORY IN 2023.
This is an edited version of the webinar from COVERING CLIMATE NOW
Press Briefing | The Climate Story in 2023 — Covering Climate Now
Thanks to :
Mark Hertsgaard - American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now. author of seven non-fiction books, including Earth Odyssey (1998) and Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011).
Dr Saleemul Huq - International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Bill Mc Kibben - Author and Co Founder of 350.org. and Who we are - Third Act
From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution | The New Yorker
Dr Marcia Rocha - Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris
Did you know that the average household in the United States has a new “bank account” of $8,000 to spend on clean energy, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act?
Or that irreversible tipping points, notably in the Amazon rainforest, are approaching much faster than scientists had expected? And that 2023 will bring much more extreme weather, as El Niño turbo-charges climate change?
Or that the world is making surprising progress on loss and damage compensation to the highly vulnerable countries bearing the brunt of climate impacts? Or that positive tipping points offer reasons for hope?
These are some of the takeaways from Covering Climate Now press briefing, “The Climate Story in 2023.” Three leading climate experts addressed journalists from around the world:
Below are highlights from the event.
McKibben reports that The nonprofit "Rewiring America" has calculated that, “in essence, the IRA creates an $8,000 bank account for every American household” to buy things like heat pumps, window retrofits, and electric vehicles.
McKibben also shared that climate activists this year plan to increase pressure on banks financing fossil fuel companies, starting with a day of protests on March 21. This will be March 27th in Melbourne
Don't NAB our future: March from NAB Headquarters - Move Beyond Coal
and online Digital storm targeting NAB bank decision makers online - Move Beyond Coal
March 19th Heading for Extinction (and what to do about it). Online talk, 19 March 2023 - Action Network
In Brazil, local deforestation and global warming are “driving the Amazon to a … self-perpetuating drying cycle,” said Rocha. “Almost 70% of the Amazon is … eating itself. It’s effectively dying much more than growing.” Dr Marcia Rocha added that “The good news is that effective policy” could reverse this trend before the world’s biggest rainforest reaches an irreversible tipping point. Deforestation fell by 70% from the early 2000’s until 2016, she noted, before surging under then-president Jair Bolsonaro. The newly elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, vows to halt deforestation. That is a tall order but central to global climate survival, making it a story that journalists everywhere should follow.
Rocha also urged journalists to cover new thinking on “positive tipping points” — developments that drive self-reinforcing progress towards rapid decarbonization. For example, in Norway public policies have made electric cars cheaper than gas ones, leading more consumers to purchase them; now, over half of the country’s new car sales are electric.
Pointing to the devastating floods in California, Dr Saleemul Huq said that climate loss and damage is “a global phenomenon … happening every day somewhere in the world,” Journalists, wherever they live, should “watch your weather channels and connect it to climate change.” Huq also responded to climate scientist James Hansen’s new forecast that average global temperature in 2024 will hit (at least temporarily) the 1.5-degrees-Celsius limit stipulated in the Paris Agreement. Nevertheless, it remains essential to limit the overshoot of 1.5 degrees C, said Huq, which means that countries “must stop using fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
A bright spot: The $9 billion that international donors pledged on Monday to help Pakistan recover from last summer’s epic floods “is a very significant amount of support” that bodes well for future climate compensation to vulnerable countries, said Huq, who helped negotiate the loss and damage agreement at COP27. Negotiations over loss and damage continue, and Huq advised that journalists wishing to cover them should “follow the UNFCCC Glasgow dialogue on loss and damage” taking place in Bonn, Germany, from June 7 to 11, to prepare for COP28 next November.
Climate Action Collective
