Skye Curren, Editor-in-Chief
@esccourant
We are currently in the sixth mass extinction: the Anthropocene. An area the size of Belgium is on fire in Australia, and a million animals have died. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is underwater, and Indonesian officials are already focused on building a new capital. Year after year, Earth experiences the hottest year on record and continuing fresh water shortages. Earth currently has an extinction rate 1000x the background rate.
But if you walked into New Canaan High School, you wouldn’t know anything was amiss. Most students are uneducated on the issues of climate change, and teachers are limited on how much they can talk about climate change because the school’s concern around political opinion.
It’s not just the high school, either. The general populace remains woefully uneducated. While, according to the Washington Post, more than 3 in 4 adults accepts the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans, they are fuzzy on the details. 43% of adults and 57% of teenagers think that plastic pollution is a leading cause of climate change (while having a negative effect on the environment, it is by no means a leading cause). In addition, more than half of adults think that the sun getting hotter is a cause of climate change.
Furthermore, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, only 29 percent of adults said they were “very worried” about climate change.
This is in part caused by the media’s portrayal of climate change. It took three months for the Australian fires to gain any sort of international media coverage, and, according to the BBC, Australian News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch is restricting journalists coverage of the fires in relation to climate change. As stated by the Columbia Journalism Review, when the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published their most recent report on climate change in October of 2018, in which they asserted that we have 12 years to limit our emissions before we hit a tipping point, only 22 of the 50 biggest American newspapers reported on it.
America had a particular problem when it comes to climate change: the debate over its existence, despite the fact that climate scientists have reached an overwhelming consensus. When Greta Thunberg went on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, he asked her if there was a difference between climate change in the United States and her hometown of Sweden. She said yes, “Because here, it feels like it is being discussed as something you believe in or [do]not believe in. And where I come from, it’s more like, it’s a fact.”
So what’s the solution? It’s complicated. First and foremost, we need to end our own complacency in climate change. Talk to people about climate change, and make sure to educate yourself. Remember, individual climate impact is minimal, and the most important thing to do is to divest from fossil fuels and hold corporations and governments accountable. And the way the media talks about climate change needs to change. While there are many environmental journalists covering climate change, the way the media talks about and prioritizes climate change needs to change. We need to treat it as the emergency it is.
