Pirate's Cove

Most people tune out when the media yammers on about ‘climate change’, think they care about the climate change movement hijacking a term like apartheid?

The Media Isn’t Ready to Cover Climate Apartheid

Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic foreshadow another global disaster, one that will not be eased by a vaccine or masks: the climate crisis. And like Covid-19, the calamities of climate change will not be experienced equally. The wealthy will escape the brunt of environmental destruction, while much of the world’s poor will be forced to migrate, fall ill, or die. The United Nations warned last year that the world is rushing toward “climate apartheid.”

Climate change will kill 250,000 people every year between 2030 and 2050 by malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress alone, and by 2050, it will displace 140 million people, according to predictions from a 2019 UN report.

In a climate apartheid world, said Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, “the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict, while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” A similar dynamic appeared in the early days of the pandemic, when many rich New Yorkers decamped to second homes and the sheltering-in-place middle class in the city paid others, mostly black, Asian, and Latino men, to deliver their meals.

So……elite leftist will leave everyone else to suffer? Huh.

The question for those of us left in the news business is: Are we prepared to cover a collective threat with such disproportionate impacts? If the coronavirus is a test for gauging the media’s readiness, the results are discouraging.

Go for it. I suggest the media, as much as The Nation is media, tell all their climate Comrades to give up their own use of fossil fuels, give up their big carbon footprints, and give all their money to Other People.

This may explain why the US media fixates on political infighting over the Green New Deal, but pays scant attention to the basics of global warming. This point of view assigns news value—and awards prizes—to narratives of misery in the wake of climate disasters, but neglects the systems of oppression that drive the devastation. It deems as newsworthy debates about whether almond or oat milk causes more environmental damage, but not the thousands of people living in a tent city in Puerto Rico following an earthquake.

Earthquakes are not caused by the climate crisis (scam). We’re done here. Nutjob cultists.