I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth. His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.
Here’s his foundational post explaining how he focuses his work and why culture and the industries around it - including Disneyland - matter as much as energy systems and the industries around them:
We explored a heap of issues, including why he moved from the Times to Substack (freedom!):
He talked about his Times coverage of the 2022 “Glaring Absence” study by the The Media Impact Project at USC’s Norman Lear Center of climate and related references in Hollywood productions:
They analyzed 37,000 scripts of TV shows and films for the second half of the twenty tens, which was quite ambitious. And they found that only 2.8 percent of scripts included any mention of climate change, and they didn’t just look at climate change. They had a list of, I think, three dozen different climate keywords. They had greenhouse gas, sea level, clean energy, fossil fuel…
The moral of the story, even with three dozen different keywords, only 2.8 percent said anything about climate change or anything related. They said that they found the mention of the word dog 13 times as often as all 35 climate keywords put together.
There is much more, so dive in and please share this post.
And do subscribe to Climate Colored Goggles and consider chipping in.
At my stage of life, Sustain What is more a labor of love than a monetary project. Sammy Roth’s newsletter is his foundational source of income and young journalists need all the support they can get. I created a subscribe button for him here:
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.
