Climate journalism enters the solutions era
In the summer of 2018,
Esquire summed up the US media’s climate mood board with a feature on traumatized climate scientists, titled, “When the End of Civilization is Your Day Job.” That summer, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration reported another astounding leap in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and its acting head—a Trump appointee—reportedly floated purging the word “climate” from the agency’s mission statement. Climate news was frightening, and often frighteningly absurd.
So when
Mothers of Invention, a climate podcast, premiered that summer, it sounded like a broadcast from an alternate, better reality. In it, Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first female president and former United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, and her co-host Maeve Higgins, an Irish comedian and writer, interviewed women and girls, largely from the global south and indigenous communities, who were tackling the climate crisis with brave, ingenious work. Their lens: climate justice. Between Robinson’s pragmatism and Higgins’ cheeky lightness, a sense of “we’ve got this” permeated each episode.