Vox Media's Umair Irfan on the evolution of climate journalism in 2024
How the economics of risk, fossil fuels, and surging renewable power are changing climate narratives.
You don’t need us to tell you the 2024 presidential election is mere weeks away. But over the course of the campaign, clean energy and climate change have taken a back seat to social and economic issues. Still, with devastating hurricanes creating climate tragedies in the south, the issue is front of mind for people across the country.
That’s why we spoke with Umair Irfan, a climate staff writer at Vox, about how the climate narrative has evolved during the election cycle, and how it will continue to change into the next administration.
You've been covering the hurricanes in the South closely. Do you think these devastating storms impact the role of climate change in the election?
I don't think it's going to move the needle on its own. Acute disasters like these tend to draw attention to the disasters themselves. It takes a little bit of time before the big picture and context settle in. As a political discussion point, you tend to see disasters focused more on relief, being able to get aid in there, and some of the acute things like getting people back into their homes, recovery efforts, and some of the emergency management agencies.
Then day two is the step back of how prepared the disaster responders were, how well the forecasting came true, and so on. Then after some time, when the water sort of recedes a bit, you see the climate change context emerge in the popular discussion, if it emerges at all.
I mean generally when you have a lot of these back-to-back disasters, just the frequency of them sort of crowds out some of that contextual discussion. Even though these are events that are influenced by climate change, and it's definitely part of the conversation – it's hard to make that salient in any meaningful way, especially in a discussion like this.
So yes, during the [Vice Presidential] debate you heard the conversation about that, but a lot of the actual discussion around climate was more centered around the recovery and the response effort to it, which makes sense. I mean, that is the priority right now. There are people in harm's way that you want to help. Disasters generally don’t move the needle as far as the salience of climate change.
In the Vice Presidential debate, Governor Tim Walz talked about leading innovation, industry, and manufacturing to make the US a leader in clean energy. This has been a common theme in how both candidates discuss the climate. Has that framing surprised you?
Generally, the climate tends to be a front-burner issue absent other issues. So we have seen high levels of concern about climate change before. If you look at polling, the last time it was really high was back in 2007, right before the financial crisis.
Similarly, we saw a lot of discussion on climate change in the last election cycle back in 2019. You might remember when there were 20 Democratic candidates, each one had their climate plan and they went on CNN and talked about it for 12 hours in a huge town hall.
Since then, we had Covid and an economic collapse. Those issues tend to crowd out climate change as its own issue. The way that it seems to be discussed is specifically in this economic context. The conversation at the debate was basically, “How are we going to get energy?” Both parties have sort of converged on this idea that they want more domestic energy that includes fossil fuels, but increasingly it's going to be renewable energy and other clean energy sources.
The difference between the two parties is which lever you will press more. The subject also comes up through property insurance and risk management. Basically, how do we price long-term risks into the present? Where are the places that we can afford to rebuild? Where are places where we shouldn't declare off-limits? Where do we need to retreat from?
Those are going to become bigger and bigger political issues, but climate as its own environmental moral issue is something that doesn't move the needle because the people who are deeply concerned about it are already in the tank for Kamala Harris. This is not something that's going to persuade swing voters.
The main arguments related to climate change that do move the needle are things like jobs, economic growth, and development. So you're seeing the messaging converge on that. That's not too surprising. The messaging is sort of reverse-engineered from the polls. It makes sense from a political strategy standpoint.
The conversation at the debate was basically, “How are we going to get energy?” Both parties have sort of converged on this idea that they want more domestic energy that includes fossil fuels, but increasingly it's going to be renewable energy and other clean energy sources.
Is that why you think it’s been an afterthought of an issue in the race?
It could be a way to draw more daylight between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats could have leveraged that a little bit more effectively if they wanted to, but they're in an awkward spot for a couple of reasons. One is that the US is now producing record oil and gas and is exporting it a lot. That's a big part of their economic strategy.
So it's really hard to bang the drum about being a big climate leader when you're also putting out fossil fuels at a record level – and Democrats have been. President Joe Biden himself has bragged about low gas prices and tapping the strategic petroleum reserve. They know that low energy prices are a big critical issue for voters, and it does run into conflict with some of their environmental ambitions.
Again, the big way that they're trying to advance their environmental agenda is through industrial policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, and on-shoring jobs. They're not going to necessarily bring that up as a concern about global warming, climate justice, or average temperatures rising because it's not something that's going to motivate a whole lot of people. With the limited amount of attention you’re grappling with, you want to push the button that gets people motivated, and that tends to be the economic issues rather than environmental ones.
How does that affect your coverage of the race through a climate lens?
I tend to cover the science as it relates to climate change. I am thinking about the weird contours that this has created.
The US is making record oil and gas production under a Democratic president. Fracking is up. Kamala Harris did a big 180 on her position on fracking where she previously wanted to ban it. Then, one of Donald Trump's closest allies is the largest producer of electric vehicles. We're seeing some of the largest deployments of clean energy in Texas. They have the largest amount of wind and are installing more solar than any other state in the country. One of Donald Trump's big economic initiatives was putting tariffs on Chinese solar panels and trying to protect US industries.
You're seeing a situation where I think both parties are seeing an upside towards deploying clean energy, where it makes sense from an economic perspective, not an environmental one. Texas is not concerned about greenhouse gases.
It creates a sort of bipartisan space to move the ball forward on these kinds of things, but it’s hard because it's been divorced from the climate context. I'm looking for places where you see sort of this odd convergence or alliances.
For instance, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy is drafting a bill for a border adjustment carbon tax – basically, a tax that would be imposed on goods from other countries that have dirty power grids. This puts a tariff on Chinese goods, specifically. Democrats have proposed one as well. It’s a way to drive other countries to do more on climate change, and Republicans are finding an opportunity to do that.
At the same time, if you look at where Republicans are ideologically – Project 2025 and some of the things that they want to accomplish, like undoing all of the incentives for clean energy, removing any acknowledgment of climate change from government, and so forth. On the one hand, there's a lot of inertia baked into the economy shifting towards cleaner energy. Coal is declining on its own without too much of a shove from the government. To what extent can the politics reverse these trends? I'm just trying to game that out at this point. I’m trying to see how much the election will shape the outcome of the US's emissions and clean energy trajectory.
How do you think a Republican administration taking office impacts the narrative around climate change?
I think there's a radical difference between a generic replacement-level Republican administration and the Trump administration. But we also have a precedent for the Trump administration. We know what he did the last time he took office. The government was literally deleting the words climate change from government websites. People who were doing work related to climate change were getting fired.
So I think we might even see a more aggressive purge of people and personnel in government. The saying in DC is “personnel is policy,” so it's the people he's going to surround himself with. There are a lot of movement conservatives and idealogues who want a place in the next Trump administration, and they're going to be informing what he's doing.
One would expect there will be a lot of privatization of public resources. Things like publicly published weather data from NOAA. A lot of the incentives around clean energy like EV tax credits, the production tax credit, and the investment tax credit for wind and solar energy, will likely be cut from budget proposals. So I think Congress is going to be the other end of the equation that we have to pay attention to. There's still a lot you can do by executive order, and Trump might want to pull out of the Paris climate agreement again.
On the other hand, there's a lot of inertia in the US economy towards clean energy. Solar is the cheapest way to add new electricity to the grid. Coal is already losing ground. The Trump administration can't reverse those economic forces. So we're still going to likely see a shift towards decarbonization, but probably not anywhere near as fast as you would under an administration that is more about climate change. So we can ride the inertia downward, but again, it's not going to be fast enough for the US to meet its stated climate goals.
Solar is the cheapest way to add new electricity to the grid. Coal is already losing ground. The Trump administration can't reverse those economic forces.
How would those actions change your role as a climate reporter?
Having covered the first Trump administration, there was a lot more investigating and seeing who was making the decisions and on what basis. There was a lot of Kremlinology of the Trump administration and sort of trying to figure out who has the president's ear at any given time, given how fickle he is about certain things. I think there's going to be a lot more focus on things like – who's standing to benefit from this.
I think we're going to see a lot more transactional governance and policy. So you're going to be looking for people who profit from these decisions directly and see how they're going to be trying to shape policy.
I think Democrats have also been kind of coasting on good vibes. This presumption that they care about climate change while US oil and gas production is still going up is sort of an incongruence that you have to pay attention to, even in a Democratic administration. While the US is saying that it's going to curb its domestic greenhouse gases, it's also looking to export more fossil fuels. So it's trying to get other countries hooked on dirty energy sources while we're trying to decarbonize ourselves as part of its economic strategy. I think that there is some accountability to be done there.
In that respect, I think you have to keep your eyes open regardless, but more specifically with the Trump administration, I'm going to be paying attention to specific rollbacks. We've seen it happen before. I imagine we'll see a lot of executive orders there as far as flipping a lot of White House-level decisions back in the other direction, but the real X factor is going to be the balance of Congress and what kind of legislation makes it through.
So what does your job look like if Kamala Harris wins the election?
If Harris were to win, I'd be looking at a lot of the big-picture bets and some of the long-term investments that they're trying to make. Are they counting on the current technologies to carry us through the finish line or are they investing in breakthroughs? Are they going to put more money into fusion energy and carbon removal for instance, and try to hope for those to come through? Will the fossil fuel industry have a seat at the table and will they benefit from things like incentives for carbon removal? Is ExxonMobil going to be a player in this or not?
We’ve seen today that, politically, it's much easier to have incentives than disincentives. I’ll be paying attention to what we do to de-incentivize burning fossil fuels. Are we going to do anything supply-side to limit the production of oil and gas?
Biden did a pretty substantial 180 in this regard. He broke a campaign promise not to allow more drilling on federal lands and even authorized drilling in Alaska in some of the more and more environmentally fragile areas. This is a place where Democrats have broken some of their promises before, so it is worth keeping an eye on them and seeing if immediate economic considerations, worries about inflation, and bad PR around high gas prices are enough to shake them away from the long-term pursuit of decarbonization.
On some of those long shots, how do you as a reporter decipher what is real and what isn’t in the climate tech space?
I start from the goalpost and sort of work backward. We want to decarbonize the US and global economy by around the middle of the century. We want to make sure that our net output of greenhouse gases is close to zero, and we want to do that in the next 25 years or so.
From there, I'm looking at what technologies advance that goal. For instance, we are seeing that electric vehicles are displacing some of the growth in oil demand, but not necessarily pushing it downward at this point. So the question is then, “What will push overall oil and fossil fuel consumption decline in the next 25 years?” Will it be more EVs or do we need to be looking at things like more public transportation or redesigning cities that obviate the need for private transportation?
Some of the more difficult problems like aviation are still expecting economic growth as well. How do we meet that growing need while pushing our overall fossil fuel consumption downward? Those are the benchmarks that I'm looking at when I'm investigating technology.
You look at things like carbon dioxide removal, where we're pulling carbon straight from the air. How much energy and money does that cost? What is your current trajectory for cost decline and how soon can you get it? Once you have that, then you can see how much we should potentially be pressing on that as a lever for our decarbonization strategy versus something like solar, which is already cost-competitive but it's also hitting some limits as far as how much you can integrate onto the grid.
How do you think about misinformation when it comes to climate change?
I think some of the same framework for assessing clean energy also works for this.
When a company announces a climate goal, is it on an appropriate timeframe and are they moving at an appropriate pace while making an investment commensurate with that level of ambition? A lot of companies were claiming to be carbon-neutral, but they were buying carbon offsets as their main mechanism for doing that. Then you dig into the offsets and you find that most of them are garbage – that it's not something that leads to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
You see companies that are buying a lot more clean energy or credits, but their overall energy demand is growing, so they’re also buying a lot more fossil energy as well and it’s not leading to a net reduction in emissions.
A lot of the tech companies, even Microsoft, which has a pretty robust plan for decarbonization, are seeing their energy demands go up with the advent of AI and crypto. So they can say, “We're not burning coal in any factory,” but they're also drawing on more power from the grid and are forcing some of the older dirtier sources of energy to come back online or stay online longer than they would have otherwise.
Looking at the counterfactuals, like what would they be doing otherwise, is another good way to assess it. Is this change meaningful in a way that’s affecting their business model in a meaningful way? That's how I assess how serious fossil fuel companies are.
ExxonMobil says they’re investing in carbon capture. This is not something that they were forced to do. There isn't a price on carbon here in the US, but they're saying that this is something that we think that we're going to be needing more and more in the future, but is this an investment that's changing how they do business? Is this going to be an actual line of business or are they still looking to expand more oil and gas drilling at a pace faster than they can decarbonize?
That's how you can assess what is leading to a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions versus who’s hoping to coast on good vibes.
I’d assume it’s a similar process when you’re covering claims by both parties in the election.
You have to look at what's reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That's the nice thing about climate is that you do have a benchmark that you can always go back to and assess how well policy is working.
I think we have an information problem, period. The information in this space is so crowded that it's just really hard to get anything through. So going back to why climate isn’t more salient, it’s just that everything else is competing for attention. So there may be misinformation out there, but just any information related to the environment is going to struggle when the airwaves are so crowded with everything else.
Are there any climate stories that you’re really interested in right now?
I've got a piece in the works right now about how the insurance industry is grappling with growing risks over time and how it’s forcing them to readjust how they do business and come up with new models but also places where they just simply can't cope.
I’m looking at the bigger financial impacts of climate change, the long-term risks, and how the financial sector is pricing them in. I’m just seeing how those long-term risks are being brought to bear now, basically, are you paying a higher premium because of some future climate risk and how do people quantify that?
I'm also looking into some of the physical changes that we've seen. Especially with the extreme heat we saw the last two years, and how this is a lens into the future of the world. We're seeing mosquitoes moving further and further north because the climate is becoming more suitable for them in areas where it once wasn't. They're bringing a lot of vector-borne diseases with them. We've seen a big spike in dengue in the US. We saw malaria come back. I’m using these illnesses to gauge how the impacts of climate change are already starting to play out now. Then whether the lessons we learned over the last two years are going to become more relevant as average temperatures continue to rise going forward.
(Water) Cooler Talk
💬 Climate comms is heating up…
There were more comms consultants at this year's New York Climate Week than ever before, writes Tim McDonnell, Climate & Energy Editor at Semafor. In a recent article for his climate newsletter Net Zero, he observed that the urgency and complexity of the climate crisis is pushing comms professionals to become “more specialized and sophisticated on the issues.”
Now, comms teams need a firm grasp of the science behind climate topics, in order to navigate the shifting landscape of climate media and help clients tell their stories. A deeper understanding of technology and systems focused on decarbonization will help comms professionals avoid greenwashing and create stronger stories. But increasingly, these comms partners are also taking responsibility for their role in addressing the climate crisis. Climate comms teams need to understand how their work can help make these solutions into reality, whether that means building a reputation as a stickler for science or promising not to work with fossil fuel clients. (You’ll find LaunchSquad on this list! 👀)
🏛️ …but government climate comms needs a boost
It’s time for the public sector to invest in climate comms, write two former journalists and policy experts in an op-ed for Government Executive. The federal government spent nearly $15 billion on ads in the past decade, but has yet to create a public information campaign around climate at scale. To counteract multimillion dollar campaigns from fossil fuel giants, the authors suggest that the federal government invests in clear, effective climate messaging around emerging climate solutions. Their recommendations come backed by science: earlier this year, behavioral researchers found that using simple language to discuss climate change spurs greater feelings of urgency among Americans of all stripes.
👀 Seeing is believing
We've discussed before the importance of imagery in climate storytelling. Striking images were the focus of coverage about the historic deluge in North Africa last month. The flooding killed nearly two dozen people, and destroyed homes and vital infrastructure. The aftermath has captured global attention: glassy expanses of water surround sand dunes and palm trees, creating green-blue pools that seem to shimmer even in images from space. In contrast to the damage caused by the storms, these images appear almost serene.