There’s nothing like a near-record heat wave to make you feel like garbage.
That’s my first thought as I write this during the sweltering days before July 4, sitting in my un-cooled home office, with a slight headache and sweat forming on my brow before 10 a.m.
But stifling as it is, I’m lucky to be indoors rather than out in the direct heat, like so many workers must be. And I was already planning to devote this column to climate change—specifically, to how we talk and write about it. So at least this weather helps me make a point.
To state what should now be obvious, our planet is heating up. We’re to blame, and we must do a lot to avoid the worst outcomes, from reducing our fossil fuel use, to finding creative ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, to lessening the many harms. It’s a tall, tall order.
I know many readers of this newspaper get this, because when we surveyed you all in 2024, nearly two-thirds pointed to “Climate issues / Impacts of sea level rise” as an area where you’d like to see more and better coverage. It was the top-ranking answer, followed closely by “Environment / Land use / Sustainability.”
The timing of that survey was noteworthy, coming in the wake of the winter storms that killed four people across Maine and dealt more than $90 million in damage to public infrastructure alone.
I had a closeup view of the first deluge, just before Christmas, which pushed the Androscoggin River well over its banks in Bethel, where I was living. It closed all major roads into town and swamped a substation, knocking out power for days. This was soon followed by two more storms in January, which caused unprecedented flooding damage to Maine’s coastal and island communities.
At the time, I felt like we were reaching some sort of peak in our attention to climate change. Not only had a series of storms, droughts, wildfires, and near-record ocean temperatures felt like wakeup calls, but federal and state lawmakers had spent the previous few years approving huge sums of money for resilience and renewable energy projects.
The news media matched this, devoting more staff and funding to exploring causes, impacts, and solutions to the crisis. One example was Maine Public, where I worked from 2021 to 2023, a period that coincided with the station hiring a dedicated climate reporter and undertaking an ambitious series of climate stories across each of Maine’s 16 counties.
But now, a few years later, our attention has drifted.
It’s not for lack of awful weather. The recent heat wave sent more than 100 Mainers to the hospital, the western U.S. is facing another bad wildfire season, and a strong El Niño could push up global temperatures even more this year.
But the White House has recently gutted climate and science programs, and many Americans have checked out, perhaps because they’re struggling to buy groceries, or stressed about national politics, or distracted by something else.
Just as troubling, many news outlets seem to have matched this apathy. Global news coverage of climate change has fallen 38% since 2021, as the outlet Grist recently reported using data from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory.
So I’m making a resolution as the editor of this newspaper. The national mood may have shifted, for now, on climate change. But we’re going to keep covering it.
Going forward, I’m going to try follow some guidelines that I recently learned from the group Covering Climate Now, which is trying to beat back this decline: good climate coverage should localize the issues, highlight the human side of them, and point to the solutions.
That’s where you, good reader, can help. If you’ve been directly affected by climate change, or are actively working towards a solution, please get in touch.
Charles Eichacker is the editor of The Working Waterfront and Island Journal. He may be contacted at ceichacker@islandinstitute.org.
