Pipelines of Exclusion on the Climate Change Beat

Climate and environment reporters of color don't have the same privileges as white reporters. Who gets to tell this story, and how will it shape the future?

In the fall of 2019, fossil fuel giant Shell was thinking about the youth. The internal think tank of the world’s ninth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases organized a conference in London to understand how rising generations relate to global decarbonization goals, and invited experts from across the globe to weigh in, including Malcolm Harris, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry and the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials.Shell offered Harris £2,000 for his presence, which he declined. But Harris did ask if he needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement to attend. “When they said no, I saw an opportunity to report on the oil company, undercover while in plain sight, without technically lying to anyone,” Harris wrote for New York Magazine. 

Harris’s (c)overt exposé revealed Shell’s unvarnished and lucrative plans for Earth’s turbulent future: wring as much profit as possible from oil and gas for as long as it can, despite promises to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Conference attendees, for example, proposed co-opting youth movements and acquiring renewable energy companies.

“Climate protesters are just another market reality, one that can be profitable when apprehended correctly, even for a big, old oil and gas firm,” Harris concluded.

In an interview with Study Hall, Malcolm Harris said that the consulting industry’s standard practices made the Shell workshop particularly fertile ground for an exposé. “The kind of work [Shell] hired me for is so lucrative and easy — thousands of dollars and a trip to Europe for maybe a day or two of low-stakes work — that they can assume almost no one would screw up the opportunity to keep doing that,” he said. 

As a reporter, Harris straddled the line between deception and favorable posturing to upend the corporate realm’s tacit contracts. In his article, one finds the legacy of another white journalist: Ida Tarbell who, between 1902 and 1904, exposed the monopolistic machinations of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.’s Standard Oil Company. She leveraged existing connections to the industry, especially her father who worked in oil and gas, to muckrake via white-collar politesse. 

During an interview with Tarbell, Henry H. Rogers, an executive at Standard Oil and her father’s former colleague, assumed that Tarbell intended to write a flattering piece. He shared key internal documents that proved Standard Oil’s collusion with railway companies in addition to other antitrust activities. Tarbell’s 19-part series rallied the public against Standard Oil, resulting in its court-ordered split into 34 smaller corporations.

From Tarbell’s turn-of-the-century reporting to Harris’ semi-undercover testimony, a niche subgenre of environmental reporting feeds off oil bigwigs who misjudge reporters’ intentions to the public’s benefit. Most journalists belonging to this vocational lineage are white. Racialized and gendered stereotypes — Harris as a curious empiricist but harmless conference attendee, Tarbell as womanly and deferential — placate otherwise fulsome and tight-lipped execs. For white reporters in this field, like Harris and Tarbell, other people’s assumptions about them become information, and potentially, political action. 

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Much like the dying climate it covers, environmental journalism is less than pristine. Through his popular dispatches from the perceived terra nullius of the Western “frontier” for publications like the New York Tribune, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, conservationist John Muir solidified a certain style of nature writing that has long been influential. In recent years, the Sierra Club, the conservationist giant founded by Muir, has acknowledged the impact of Muir’s white-supremacist, settler-colonial beliefs on mainstream environmentalism. 

“The whole outlook of settler conservation is based on the myth of empty wilderness, which is… historically false,” said Brian Oaster, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who covers Native affairs and the environment at High Country News. “It’s based on genocide.” To Oaster, settler colonialism influences most environmental reporting by positioning nature and humans as separate; Oaster traces contemporary environmental issues and attendant journalistic pitfalls to that dichotomous view. 

There are unwritten social contracts in journalism that stem from colonialism, says Yessenia Funes, climate editor at Atmos Magazine. The colonial history that has shaped many American universities also continues through people of color being denied access to elite colleges, and thus to prestigious media jobs and powerful connections. This pipeline of exclusion pushes environmental journalists of color toward smaller outlets, and complicates access to resources and scoops. Environmental journalism therefore remains a predominantly white beat, and restricts itself to locales ostensibly “untouched by people,” which, Funes observes, denies Indigenous histories and practices. “Environmental journalism continues to feel those ripple effects,” she said.

Funes, who is Latina and from Queens, New York, has submitted several unsuccessful interview requests with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the representative for her district. Funes thinks journalists without big-name news affiliations or significant Twitter followings are much easier to ignore, even by politicians who owe their time to constituents. 

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Environmental journalism is known for certain tropes: melting glaciers, greenhouse gases, noodling scientists, babbling bureaucrats. In a review of the New Yorker’s climate reporting anthology for The Baffler, freelance environmental journalist Jake Bittle noted that travelogue-style dispatches portray U.S. reporters crossing the globe to reckon with climate change in relatively distant places like Chad or Antarctica. U.S. readers are left to conclude that climate change will affect others “somewhere else,” but not them — at least not yet. However, in an interview with Study Hall, Bittle, who is white, said that last summer’s extreme weather, like Hurricane Ida and the Pacific Northwest’s Heat Dome, drove home that “the book’s already due to the library,” and that climate change affects everybody. (New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick seems to agree, announcing that “the effects of climate change are already here, and they’re catastrophic.”)

Mainstream environmental journalism has begun to acknowledge the proximate effects of climate change more explicitly. But reporters on the environmental justice beat have done so for decades, revealing the uneven impacts of climate change on local communities. Their stories range from investigations of climate change on incarcerated people to profiles of teen climate organizers. Born of the environmental justice social movement, which demands equal distribution of environmental impacts, information, resources, and legal access, this genre of reporting highlights the chasm between those political imperatives and current realities. 

“Environmental justice as a concept, whether that’s academic or as a social movement, has always had to prove itself,” said freelance environmental reporter Amal Ahmed, who published a profile of the environmental justice movement’s Black founder, Dr. Robert Bullard, last year. Ahmed noted that many newsrooms have been slow to graduate from standard environmental reporting tropes and accept environmental justice reporting, despite the presence of environmental justice issues across beats and regions. “It’s an environmental issue when you’re talking about where people live, how they live, what they’re breathing, and what they live next to,” she said.

Atmos’ Funes argues that climate realities may have compelled mainstream media outlets to devote more resources to environmental justice reporting, though she believes the beat’s increased recognition is primarily the success of organizing by figures like Bullard and his associates.

While journalism writ large has a white supremacy problem, Funes sees particularly high stakes within environmental journalism. “The climate crisis and ecological crises that humanity faces are the most urgent issues we face, and they’re going to make everything that already sucks about this place we call Earth worse,” she said. Funes thinks underreported stories like victories against polluters as well as Indigenous agitation are “crucial to shifting humanity’s perception and relationship to the earth — that to me feels like the story of our lifetime.” 

Environmental justice reporting centers human stories over old-school discussions of landscapes or climate models. To Adam Mahoney, an environmental justice journalist at Grist, that commitment is racialized and classed. Environmental justice “tends to impact the people who have been neglected the most and the people who society doesn’t care about,” Mahoney said. “And in turn, most mainstream publications don’t care about those people as well.” 

Mahoney, who is Black, switched to environmental justice issues after covering police and prisons. He grew up in Wilmington, California, a frontline environmental justice community and a majority-Latinx municipality. Wilmington also has the largest concentration of oil refineries in the state. Mahoney said that his community didn’t know that proximity to such polluting infrastructure harmed them, though he understood that racism affected every aspect of life. 

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of researching to realize that the folks who are most deeply impacted by climate are the folks that are racialized and oppressed based on their racial identity,” Mahoney said. “You literally just cannot separate race from climate inequalities.” He cited the fact that Black people in the U.S. are 75% more likely to live next to a polluting industry than white people, and mentioned the growing number of Central-American people who face dangerous and exploitative conditions as they migrate north to escape climate change. 

Personal significance, existing connections, as well as global trends sensitize him to community needs and wants, Mahoney said, producing work that expands awareness of local realities across the United States. During Hurricane Ida, Mahoney covered the experiences of Louisiana’s 50,000 incarcerated residents through the storm and its aftermath. He similarly reported on the experiences of people without housing in Portland during the Pacific Northwest’s Heat Dome. Since pivoting to the environmental justice beat, Mahoney has received several story scoops from concerned readers across the country. “People are reading these stories and realizing how [these issues] might also be going on in their own communities,” he said.

Getting a tip from people affected by climate inequalities is very different from the by-invitation-only reporting of Harris’s and Tarbell’s — that is, dispatches from the underbelly of fossil fuel giants. The latter strategy is “sexy,” Oaster at High Country News acknowledges. “Instead of… trying to distance ourselves from our privileges, we should be using them,” they said. “If you can get in the room with a bunch of executives when they’ve let their guard down because you look like one of them and you speak their language, then you can draw a lot out of those conversations that other people can’t get to — and we need that.”

But Mahoney thinks such reporting can reward heroics and white saviorism. “Everyone should have a role in combating this crisis, but I don’t think that message necessitates white people being at the center,” he said. “We don’t need white intervention to fix things rather than a stepping back.” 

To Ahmed, who is South Asian but primarily reports from Black and Latinx communities, white reporters may have to think more critically about their position within U.S. race and class dynamics before continuing their work: an ongoing process that Ahmed commits to herself. “There might be more work for them to do starting as a white person, maybe, but I don’t think it’s impossible,” she said. Anecdotally, Ahmed also sensed that interlocutors of color are often more comfortable speaking to her rather than a white reporter. 

James Stout, a white British reporter who covers fascism from California, said that he seeks to avoid reinscribing British colonial history through extractive journalistic practices, opting instead to express solidarity or compassion with potential sources. “I got here through generations and people stealing shit from non-white people,” he said. “If I ever have to do anything more, that’s totally fine.” For Backpacker Magazine, Stout proved that Patagonia, the outdoor goods company that postures itself as ecologically and liberally minded, secretly supplied the U.S. military — which emits as many greenhouse gases as 140 countries combined — with gear through a shadow corporation; the equipment also landed on a third-party website that openly outfits a neo-Nazi battalion in Ukraine. 

“A lot of people talked to me for that story, just supposing that I would approach it in a sort of flag-waving fashion,” Stout said, “I think a lot of the folks who had spoken to me for that article felt like that article was a betrayal.” By rejecting the valorization of the American military, he believes corporate sources may have perceived him as a class or race traitor: One source said he had “disrespected the troops.”

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Regardless of a reporter’s tactics or social location, the material effects of journalism pitted against fossil fuel behemoths and other greenwashing giants can often be hard to gauge. When asked what work of his felt most impactful, Mahoney cited his data-driven coverage of COVID vaccine inequity in Chicago, and similar reporting on unclaimed homelessness funding from FEMA. He expressed frustration that politicians seemed to respond more readily to data-driven journalism over qualitative testimony like the local reporting he promotes. 

Freelance reporter Bittle related similar thoughts. He reported with journalist Naveena Sadasivam on a petrochemical plant in Norco, Louisiana, which emitted a thick black smog in the wake of Hurricane Ida, violating air pollution regulations. The plant continued to emit smoke despite media pressure. The refinery is owned by Shell. 

Shell appeared equally unfazed by Malcolm Harris’s New York Magazine piece, despite the sting of the ruse. “Obviously there have been no state investigations or such as a result of my reporting,” Harris told Study Hall. “Greenwashing isn’t a crime, it’s a business strategy with a lot of support from the powers that be.” (His article was also bumped off the cover of New York Magazine to make room for coverage of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s ill-fated run for U.S. president, which Harris believes dulled the article’s reception.) 

Shell declined to comment to Study Hall. A spokesperson said the company had “nothing to add on this one.”

Even in the case of Standard Oil, Tarbell’s historic work successfully shattered the fossil fuel monopoly into smaller pieces, but those splinters grew into profitable giants themselves. Descendants of that antitrust ruling include Chevron and ExxonMobil. 

Reporting by Inside Climate News reveals that ExxonMobil knew the effects of climate change almost 50 years ago and decided to do nothing about it. 

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According to Funes, the climate editor at Atmos, while white journalists can cover environmental issues with a sensitive eye and support diversifying newsrooms, journalism’s problems don’t boil down to journalists alone. 

Many editors continue to run with outdated environmental reporting, especially when reporters can’t find quantitative data to support what they’ve seen. During a stint as a staff reporter, Ahmed, the freelance journalist, had an editor invite her to embrace both-sides-ism and consider how polluting industries create jobs. At other times the media skew is more obvious: When General Electric acquired NBC in 1986, for instance, General Electric’s chair, Jack Welch, told Today Show weather reporter Willard Scott to mention GE light bulbs on air. 

“The business model of journalism has to change if it’s going to support information sharing that is trustworthy and that’s sustainable,” said Mekdela Maskal, engagement editor at Covering Climate Now. Working with more than 450 newsrooms, the organization hopes to drive a public response to climate change through informative and compelling reporting. With successful models like the Texas Tribune and The City in New York, Maskal believes that news organizations serving local community needs receive more reliable subscription income, alleviating the editorial pressure of ad money. 

Maskal named white supremacy “the water that everything floats on.” By changing the social contract between publications and their readership, local reporting can help readers understand their particular ecological crises, the specific preparations they need to take, as well as the local politicians and industries they need to pressure, Maskal argues. Syndicated, national publication structures alone ”can’t possibly serve all of these localities in their climate information needs,” she said, especially given the diverse crises of different local environments. 

Oaster at High Country News thinks that environmental journalism, and environmental efforts in general, will amount to very little if they don’t result in the return of land to Indigenous people. “The Land Back movement… actually becoming an implemented reality is probably going to be critical to our ability to survive climate change,” they said. Without it, supposedly “green” solutions like lithium-ion batteries and electric cars will only reincarnate extractive colonialism. 

But journalism can also be edifying beyond a professional level, Oaster said, when a journalist and source are being themselves. When interviewing Indigenous sources, Oaster often perceives a mutual connection and responsibility that rarely exists in white source-reporter relationships. “We’re having almost a puppet conversation through the professional kind of white voice where we talk about professional things, but then we also sometimes let that down and go to our hearts and our hearts come out,” they said, mentioning twenty-minute interviews that can stretch into three-hour conversations. “We end up talking about how much we love our people and how much we love the land and why we get up and do these jobs every day.”

Oaster, who is trans, said they can pass for a white man when interviewing on the phone. When they are unsure how a journalistic source would relate to their transness or Indigenous background, Oaster occasionally matches their tone and language to “foster a sense of goodwill and openness.” Oaster shared that being less visibly trans or Indigenous can make them safer in certain reporting environments. “That’s something I’m very aware of in life in general,” they said, “and that does spill over into reporting.” 

Texas-based journalist Ahmed, reporting from a state with a far-right government, avoids burnout by limiting her expectations of how — or whether — political actors will respond to her reporting, let alone to ecological realities. Rather, as shorelines rise and communities disappear, environmental reporting will add the erased to the historical record, and take seriously what once existed. 

But that doesn’t mean abandoning the places we’re from. If environmental journalism assumes an increasingly alarmist tone (flee here!) without also naming the need to fight, then people will swing from nescience to overwhelm. Like other environmental justice reporters, Ahmed wants to continue spotlighting people who believe in their hometowns and who mobilize against the systems harming them. 

“Most of the folks I talk to don’t see themselves as victims,” she said. “So what’s the excuse for the rest of us to give up?” 

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