Environment & Energy

On the New York Times op-ed page we read that “attempts to punish the fossil fuel industry by limiting leases or permits for export facilities or blocking projects often backfire” so “advocates should support stable oil and gas production.” Matt Yglesias pleads with us to “support America’s oil and gas industry” as they drive planetary warming off the charts.

Anyway, don’t be so worried. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page says there’s no need to “freak out” about the climate crisis, repeating fossil fuel industry falsehoods to paint a rosy picture of the future. When they do acknowledge the crisis, they tell us that we can’t do anything anyway. Global warming is simply “the future we’re heading toward,” because “humanity has shown that it’s unwilling to impose the limits on economic activity that would be necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius,” and therefore all we can do is resign ourselves.

But the most powerful weapon of all is silence: simply not mentioning that any of this is happening. Or burying it in the back of the newspaper, as the New York Times infamously did with the Holocaust and now does with climate news. Or reporting it, but doing so only once it’s too late and the window for action has closed.

Helplessness, confusion, and anger have become the one common reality we all share precisely because we’ve been robbed of any unifying mass media depiction of anything remotely resembling reality. Americans are bombarded with dozens of micro-targeted narratives every day, tailored to their comfortable consumer profile but not their need to know in order to act. And nobody can be expected to navigate this moment without having even one functioning, widely-available, news outlet, a trusted source of information to replace the dozens of “legacy” outlets that have collapsed like a 100-foot-tall ice sculpture of Edward R. Murrow on a 92-degree January day.

The oligarchs aren’t even pretending they want to keep us informed anymore. They view functioning news as a threat—which it is, because if people understood how their futures are being wrecked to keep the rich rich, they’d be furious. The pitchforks might come out.