There are “People Really Do Care About This Stuff”

By Gazette Staff

January 22, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

“Protecting the climate and protecting our democracy are inextricably linked,” veteran climate reporter and activist Bill McKibben said last week at a Covering Climate Now press briefing on climate journalism in 2026. US president Donald Trump “is in many ways operating as a political arm of the oil industry,” McKibben added, “and coming to grips with his authoritarian impulse is going to be crucial to ever getting any climate action.”

The struggle for democracy — in the streets of Minneapolis, Teheran, and beyond — is but one high-profile issue with a strong climate change connection. Internationally, Greenland, Venezuela, and Iran possess sizable amounts of oil whose burning could push Earth’s climate past catastrophic tipping points. In the US, the surging cost of electricity produced by coal and gas is shaping up as an issue in congressional elections this November that could either counter or reinforce Trump’s authoritarianism. Yet, climate change is still missing from most news coverage.

Greenland

McKibben cited Trump’s obsession with Greenland as a perfect example of a story in which climate change should be a critical aspect of the story but isn’t. While most Greenland coverage has focused on the geo-political and military implications of Trump’s aggression, McKibben said, “the actual strategic asset in play here is a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that, if it melts, will change the lives of every person on planet Earth” by raising sea levels catastrophically.

Meanwhile, developments in Africa contrast sharply with the US’s U-turn on climate action, Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based NGO Power Shift Africa, said during the briefing. Africa has become “one of the world’s most important laboratories for climate solutions,” Adow said, though the speed at which change is happening is “often missed” by journalists. (This Bloomberg Green article offers an excellent exception.) “Kenya now generates 95% of our electricity from renewables,” Adow added. “Solar capacity has expanded rapidly in countries such as South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt…. Solar mini-grids in rural Nigeria, Tanzania, and Senegal are bringing reliable electricity to [rural] communities that fossil fuel-based grids have failed to reach for decades.”

In Europe, too, there are urgent climate stories to tell. The EU’s imposition of climate tariffs on January 1, 2026, for example, is an “incredibly important” development, said Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey, whose own reporting showed that, under the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), “companies selling steel, cement, and other high-carbon goods into the EU will have to prove that they comply with low-carbon regulations or face fines.” The tariff is aimed at companies that might “shift their manufacture of those high-carbon goods or services to another [country] that has more lax regulation,” Harvey said, “so you don’t actually get any carbon saving.”

Noting that editors like stories about unexpected developments, McKibben highlighted “the dramatic reduction in the price of clean energy, which is shaking up all of our assumptions.”

With solar and wind now providing 90% of new generating capacity around the world, there’s nothing alternative about them anymore,

“With solar and wind now providing 90% of new generating capacity around the world,” McKibben said, “there’s nothing alternative about them anymore, and one of the stories [journalists] need to tell is that we’re breaking into a new paradigm.”

Our job as journalists, she added, is “to show them that there are constructive ways out of the mess, as well as presenting them with the reality of the mess.”