Frank Sesno, who runs the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and has been a longtime presence on CNN, anchored the Reliable Sources show on Sunday and invited me and Philippe Cousteau to discuss what the show described as “the media’s global warming fail.”
Here’s our recorded chat, with one transcribed excerpt below (thanks to Ruth Merino, a Facebook follower):
Frank Sesno:
If the New York Times called you up today and said come on in here and orchestrate, be the architect of our [climate change] coverage and we’ll give you 20 reporters to do it, what would you have them do, what would you have any news organization do that they’re not doing now?
Andy Revkin:
Well, I’d focus on what would actually matter, which is energy innovation, as you and I have both targeted in the past. You can’t get there from here with our existing energy menu. And when you look at those social science numbers you know what people think and worry about and what people get resistant to, there are a lot of libertarians who really are very concerned about energy efficiency. They’re on my blog Dot Earth all the time. And so if you have an area of enterprise and initiatives, where you know you have a lot of commonality across divergent ideologies, then I would focus there.
I squeezed in this final thought:
The other thing: vulnerability. There’s enormous implicit vulnerability — here in tornado zones [for example] and in the places like the Philippines that can be addressed right now.
I’ll try to complete the transcript when I have time.
The deadly tornado outbreak in the Midwest yesterday makes this final point particularly germane. Relevant reading: “ A Survival Plan for America’s Tornado Danger Zone”