Media needs to tell truth about climate change

by Mackenzie Cole, Missoula

As someone who grew up in Montana getting into the woods with my family to camp, ride horses, hike, and ski, it has been getting harder every year to envision a future where folks will get to do that. People talk about wildfire season these days as if it has always been here. But that season used to just mean we had to be careful with our campfires. Now, it’s a given we will have months of thick smoke and we feel lucky to get by with just a couple of weeks of dangerous levels of ash in the air. That didn’t used to be the case even 20 years ago. I also feel for people who are losing their lives and livelihoods to extreme weather, all the animals that have been impacted from livestock to wildlife. These changes are already effecting our communities here in Montana, and in the coming years more of our towns will be facing drought, increasingly intense fires, and decimating weather extremes.

Reading this paper and the coverage around the state, I realized that most news stories show no connection between them and their main cause: fossil fuels. It recalls articles from 80s that reported on lung cancer rates without discussing tobacco use. This is dangerous. Many people continue to be duped by the billions of dollars spent on PR by the fossil fuel industry in order to obscure that link. But we rely on news organizations to get to the facts: longer, hotter, and deadlier summers are caused and perpetuated by the disastrous coal, oil, and gas projects – and the fossil fuel industry.

The science is clear – the longer we allow coal, oil, and gas companies to dig and burn, the worse fires, droughts, and extreme weather will be. People are dying, property is lost, even as these companies reap record profits. With every fraction of a degree of warming, we’ll suffer more extreme heat, droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. But the fossil fuel industry continues to ignore these alerts and undermine our chances for a safer future. Emissions keep rising. We all know this is causing global heating, and resulting in extreme weather events, yet they keep digging, burning, and profiting, with zero accountability.

Climate impacts – like the recent heatwaves and wildfires – disproportionately affect people and communities who are already marginalized and disadvantaged. People who did the least to cause the climate crisis suffer the worst from its impacts – they lose livelihoods, hope, and worse: their lives – while oil companies continue to hit record profits. This is wrong on so many levels.

Local, regional, and national media have an important role to play – and a moral obligation to tell the whole truth. It’s time to make one thing about extreme weather very clear: it’s not a “crisis” that just happens to us – it’s a crime, and the fossil fuel industry is the criminal. And saying it once isn’t enough. Media has an important job to do to turn the tide of public opinion, and help the world avoid the worst of the climate impacts.

We are depending on you to tell the truth about the climate crisis. And keep telling it until we have real accountability.