We are still expecting a trial. And the press, like the plaintiffs, is still thinking it might be soon. The planning is delayed but not over. Thus the usual jockeying for position in the courtroom carries on.
Members of the press had already complained about the lack of priority seating at the would-be trial in October, worried about arriving with the public at 6:30 a.m., standing in line for seats, and never being able to leave without yielding valuable courtroom real estate. So early on, Judge Aiken made a decision: since this would not be a jury trial, she would seat the press in the jury box.
Fitting, in ways, for the media to sit broadside attorneys for a president who had called them “the enemy of the American people,” cried “fake news” at unflattering facts, made network affiliation a popularity contest, and under whose leadership both physical attacks against journalists and attacks against press freedom had ballooned.
The relationship between the American press and the White House had rarely been worse. But then, the relationship between the American press and the public had also rarely been worse, barely rebounding since public trust in media hit the all-time low of 32 percent in 2016. Entertainment and news divisions at television networks had been battling each other for decades, and by the first decade of the twenty-first century, entertainment had clearly won. News now spilled from a television universe in which journalists were flanked by pundits, and predictable audiences gravitated toward the loudest of them. Corporate hawks secured a stranglehold not on talent but on numbers: predictable audiences meant predictable ad rates, which secured predictable cash flows. As seasoned, qualified news anchors became surrounded by personalities, the nation counted on these people for fun as well as facts. The networks, meanwhile, blurred the lines.
Now, ask a climate denier why they don’t believe in climate change, and what you’ll get is talking points from Fox & Friends. That’s our fault, in the fourth estate. We can blame Trump for being Trump, past presidents for their inaction, and politicians and pundits for politicizing climate change. But as members of the press, we also have to blame ourselves for fueling debates about climate science rather than conveying the facts. The seed of denial was planted by propagandists. But it was the media that legitimized it and overlooked the outcomes inaction would spell for youth.
———
Xiuhtezcatl has been uniquely entwined with this problem. He grew up in the middle of it, most of his years spent with a camera pointed at him. Before he was sporting the fancy Adidas, had his own billboards and a couple of albums, too, he was just a small person making heartfelt speeches, sometimes to large crowds, an anomaly as activists go.
He would say in his book, We Rise, that he heard this call to protect the planet early on in life. That as an Indigenous person, he had always felt a connection to this duty through the ceremonies and dances of his Mexica people, and through the stories his father sang to him when he was a child. He says the tale of his ancestors, the story of the Aztec Nation that came before him, is the story that carries him forward. He sees his life as part of a longer chain and sees himself as one person in a long line of people who fight for the earth. He wrote that his long hair, a life lived in ceremony and danced through deserts, frequently remind him of this role. So too his name, chosen by his grandfather and other elders based on a study of the Mexica calendar. It means, in rough translation, “blue turquoise mirror,” a reflection of the sky and stars. His middle name, Tonatiuh, references the sun, his shine.
Xiuhtezcatl would grow up to be a media savant. After roughly a decade and a half on the other side of the interview, he is as qualified as anyone to talk about the stories the media missed while it was ceding airtime to pundits, somewhat deaf to the rising concerns of youth.
I am eager to ask him what this was like, but it takes me about a year to get an interview with him, to persist to the front of the line. By the time I get him on the phone, we are in a post-Greta world and Xiuhtezcatl is commanding a hefty speaking fee for crowds, his activist career having segued into hip-hop notoriety and fashion modeling. He’s working on a third album, has just collaborated on a single with Jaden Smith (actor Will Smith’s son), and recently wrapped up a grueling national tour. He’s nineteen when we talk, and this road for him has been long.
A year after An Inconvenient Truth mainstreamed the climate conversation, when George W. Bush was still president, Xiuhtezcatl was a seven-year-old who literally ran fire all the way from the Mexican border to Hopiland in Arizona in a prayer ceremony aimed at “strengthening our commitment to protecting the sacred elements that give us life.” He described in his book how he saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary The 11th Hour then, and how it affected him horribly. The love of nature he’d inherited from his father’s people began to mix with his mother’s activism. Tamara Roske was the co-founder and director of Earth Guardians then, which began as an alternative high school in Maui and is today an international conservation organization focused on youth leadership. Xiuhtezcatl became the organization’s youth director, led direct action campaigns to challenge pesticide use and the spreading of coal ash in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and helped to build an international network of youth activists in the fight against climate change. When he was fifteen, he became only the second person not affiliated with government to ever address the General Assembly of the United Nations, something he did in three languages—English, his native Spanish, and his ancestors’ Nahuatl.
As the climate coverage swirled around him and his own advocacy took flight, Xiuhtezcatl says he was tokenized but not seen.
“When I was younger, I think media outlets were more like, ‘Well, this is confusing, why is this little kid out here doing this work?’” He got the sense that journalists didn’t know what to do with him but chose to report on him anyway because he was something out of the ordinary, a novelty. They quoted his words, his urgency, his résumé, but missed the story of what his presence in the climate fight meant, how many young people shared his concerns. So while the media paid attention to him, Xiuhtezcatl remained someone whose story was not always clear, even while his ubiquity slowly became a fact of the environmental times. The larger story of youth activism was also similarly overlooked, left behind the curtain of official things that journalists paid attention to. This massive generation that would stand up with Xiuhtezcatl by the spring of 2019, they didn’t wake up to this cause overnight. Their ascendance was happening all along, a thing unseen.
To understand this media blind spot, consider that to be a journalist is to be a slave to your editor and the publication she rides in on. And it’s important to know that most editors do not get that way by spending years on the science beat. Writer Ross Gelbspan described it this way, in his book Boiling Point: “The career path to the top at news outlets normally lies in following the track of political reporting. Top editors tend to see all issues through a political lens.” They work their way up as political correspondents, most starting out covering local or state policy and climbing to higher levels of government with increasingly complex problems to solve. Their bread and butter are issues that are subject to debate. They speak a language of points and counterpoints. About the right way to tax a thing. About whether one type of road striping works better than another. All of it is a matter of at least some subjectivity, of opinion, and to become too confident in a particular side is to lose one’s objectivity, to be mentally flaccid, to have lost it.
These were easy claims, then, to make against the science journalists for whom facts about climate change were not in dispute. Covering global warming was a lot like covering a fire or a car crash—there was little arguing about events that had taken place, and unless there were mysteries, of timing, of inches, of lives still in the balance, there was little in dispute. But for as long as there were people insisting on another set of facts, on debate and opposing views, the instinct to balance those viewpoints would be exploited full tilt.
And there were, indeed, people insisting on another set of facts. Since the first Bush presidency, with its deep ties to the oil industry, fossil fuel companies had been setting a grassroots backfire despite mounting evidence that burning fossil fuels would lead to a planetary crisis, as intellectual and environmental observers continued to sound the alarm. Rather than adapt, the industry began seeding dozens of little think tanks. The Heartland Institute. The Cornwall Alliance.
Where formerly there was a basic set of agreed-upon facts, if disagreement about solutions, suddenly “there’s a crazy quilt of right-wing mouthpieces that all come really out of the oil industry. And they’re saying crazy things like ‘the moral case for fossil fuels . . .,’” says historian Bill Kovarik. “In the old days, these things were hashed out at the treetops level. . . . You didn’t have people who didn’t know the first thing about science trying to argue that the radiant force of equations was wrong or that Michael Mann’s hockey stick was flawed in ways that they couldn’t even begin to describe but they just heard that somebody else said it was flawed.”
By 2000, when the second Bush presidency was under way, the United States had begun to break with international allies by turning away from the climate reality, growing publicly skeptical about evidence of warming. George W. Bush appointed a cabinet with close ties to the fossil fuel industry and adopted disinformation as an official strategy. Information about climate change was also edited out of an EPA report. And a campaign promise to cap coal emissions was reversed. Instead, the next energy plan called for more oil exploration and thousands of new energy plants, many of them coal. And then the ouster of the IPCC chair happened at the request of ExxonMobil in a bid to replace him with a climate skeptic.
This was the year Xiuhtezcatl was born—at the dawn of the age of official denial. And the emerging polarization that became a backdrop to his personal story—a presidential administration aligned with corporate astroturfing, banishing science—was a tightrope walk for the press too.
“The nature of journalism is that we were all trained to get multiple sides of the story and so we did our best to be balanced, and that was kind of the standard at the time,” says Jim Detjen, the former director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He used to be a reporter and an editor. “If you were working at a mainstream paper there was, I think, a lot of attention to the balance because you were criticized by people from the oil industry or fossil fuel industry for your coverage.”
Detjen knew how intense this pressure could get. He’d reported on Three Mile Island for the Philadelphia Inquirer after its partial reactor meltdown, the one that caused a radiation leak near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and became the worst nuclear disaster in US history. Detjen and another reporter wrote a series in the early eighties critiquing the fourteen-year cleanup. At the time, the utility in charge of this mess had a sophisticated public relations office tasked with making it smell like roses. They took out two-page ads in the Sunday paper roughly calling Detjen’s reporting a hatchet job, then held press conferences denouncing him and threatened lawsuits. Climate change coverage was attended by these same accoutrements, but everywhere and daily. There seemed little limit to the resources the fossil fuel industry could apply to leaning on newspapers as newspapers took the lead in covering the environment. Phone calls to top editors. Meetings some reporters suspected they were not privy to. These things were the stick.
The carrot looked more like this: “I remember getting a videotape in the mail . . . that was all about climate change, and then the focus was: climate change is going to be wonderful!” Detjen says. It claimed climate change would cause plants to grow faster. And that more carbon dioxide was a good thing, practically converting the planet into a utopian biodome. When he began teaching at Michigan State, Detjen used this video to teach student journalists what kind of propaganda they were up against.
To ask reporters from the era, many editors did well to swat away these carrots, but they had a harder time with the sticks. With the phone calls and the meetings. The industry reps crying foul and charging reporters with the cardinal sin of having lost objectivity. Reporters were always, in the end, just employees of the institutions they worked for. They did their best to play by the rules. To be cautious about what things were fact, what was still in debate. Scientists did not help much. They were busy being scientists instead of standing up to correct things. And the meteorologists the public relied on to talk about the weather, many of them were among the skeptics.
This instinct to be fair and balanced, it’s not a bad thing. “Skepticism is one of the greatest virtues in a reporter. The most important thing a reporter can ask is ‘How do you know that?’” says Joe Davis, who covered environment and energy for Congressional Quarterly through the early days of climate denial. “That’s all well and good, but the purveyors of disinformation know that that is part of a journalist’s ethic and they use it and manipulate it.”
Not a few of these journalists talked among themselves then about whether this was the right way to cover climate change. Several had founded the Society of Environmental Journalists so reporters tasked with covering global warming and other environmental matters could help each other do the job. They talked, not infrequently, about whether balance was appropriate when it came to scientific fact. About whether they should be more strident in crushing this idea of debate. But they also wanted to keep their jobs. Climate change was still, as Gelbspan would describe it, “ghettoized as a sub-beat of environmental reporters” rather than integrated into coverage of policy, politics, business, and the other issues that seemed to matter more. No one wanted a personal story like that of Phil Shabecoff, the former reporter for the New York Times.
“I have no direct evidence of why I was taken off the environmental beat. I was told my coverage was too alarmist,” Shabecoff says of his 1999 departure from the paper after twelve years covering the environment.
In his tenure at the paper, Shabecoff had moved the Times’s coverage of global warming from the back of the paper to the front. He’d heard complaints from industry sources along the way. And he would play the balance game, he would report both sides. But every time the other side was in the employ of the fossil fuel industry, he reported that too; noted where they drew their paychecks.
“I had been supported by the top editors of the paper . . . but there were new editors at the time. And the national news editor had spent most of her career in business news.” He surmises industry reps had reached top editors with their complaints, but he could never be sure. “I was taken off the beat because my stories about climate change, loss of species, and toxification of the environment were considered too alarmist. In retrospect, I wish I had been more alarmist.”
He left the paper and founded Greenwire, making him one of the first journalists to build new media—a new water cooler—for an issue that was being pushed, aggressively and at great ethical expense, to the fringes of the national conversation.
———
I’ll let Xiuhtezcatl describe how all this looks to someone born in the middle of it, and how it appeared to him throughout his activist life: “It didn’t feel like we were taken super seriously. There was excitement around young people being involved, but again it was much less than there is now,” he says. Journalists didn’t dig deep on the urgency of climate action for youth, didn’t ask why the youth voice was rising, didn’t report on what those rising voices were saying about intergenerational equity in a world on a relentless consumptive bent, pushing ecology to an extreme.
Since then, “there’s been a massive shift.” Social media raised the voice of the affected generation finally, Xiuhtezcatl says. And it became the chief organizing tool of young leaders across a spectrum of social issues: climate justice, gun violence, Black Lives Matter. All used social media to transform the way their stories were being told. This changed the way people perceive youth leadership in America. In the world. Suddenly reporters tuned in. And media organizations began taking note as youth calls to address the climate crisis rang out with increasing urgency.
“Because of social, young people have been able to crash the narrative more on our own without depending on mainstream media,” Xiuhtezcatl says. Editors would agree, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) writing that social media allowed youth activists to begin driving the news, initiating actions and protests that called media to the cause. They wrote op-eds, produced videos for YouTube, Vice, and Vox, and posted and responded to climate news with enough fervor to keep the conversation spinning around the clock. Teen Vogue editor Lucy Diavolo would summarize, telling CJR, “Social media has altered the landscape of authority.” Even still, press coverage remains fuzzy on why youth can claim this authority—if not disbelieving, then at times failing to acknowledge the degree to which the next generation’s inheritance is spoiled.
To speak these truths, any way he can, is more in line with the way Xiuhtezcatl grew up. With empowered siblings and fellow activists who also fought for the earth, other children who ran fire across desert, who climbed to mesas. Kids who danced prayers until they could not. For them, their identities were invisible in all kinds of ways. And their media identity remains somewhat indistinct. Google Xiuhtezcatl and you’ll find featured snippets of his Wikipedia entry; channel recommendations for YouTube, Spotify, Pandora; links to his Twitter, Instagram, his Facebook. It’s the digital life of a person who lives loudly online but whose presence the mainstream press still struggles to understand.
“They just have failed so much in the last ten years at really capturing the energy and the essence of what stories need to be shared” about the youth movement, Xiuhtezcatl says.
Now, he says, it’s like there is a media woke quota. Every progressive channel is loading youth perspective and voice, angling for relevance with that growing demographic of people who are following and clicking and sharing. But it’s still somehow striking the wrong note for him. Whether it’s one-minute videos where people talk about social change in “a simplistic, idealistic way” or the Greta note that will soon emerge. We all know this note by now. It’s the one in which the history of the youth climate movement has been scrubbed clean, where all active youth were inspired by Greta, replaced by Greta.
“There’s been a whole, very revealing truth of how the media really selects their figures that they elevate and they put on platforms and, you know, yeah. Much respect and love for everything that Greta has done,” Xiuhtezcatl says. “But it’s much easier for the media to highlight a young, privileged, white Swedish girl than it is to talk about the young water protectors that are fighting pipelines in South Dakota or the many, many young leaders of color that have been on the front lines of this work for generations who have inherited these struggles. We’re still trying really hard to kind of push through the barriers that we have at every level of the work that we do. From the political climate to the lack of representation in the media.”
He is in Southern California recording his next album, so he is outside when we have this conversation on the phone. There is a backdrop of singing birds on his end of the call, and I can tell that he is walking, or at least pacing, because the reception has a kind of rhythmic dip. Xiuhtezcatl has just held two events with Greta. But what he is saying is that for all the humility Greta has in the face of her newfound fame, and for all the respect that he has for her, the iconography of Greta has taught him that he is never going to be as sympathetic as a white girl. For as far as the press could come in its coverage of the climate crisis, and of this movement, it has not come farther than lionizing a person who has the right looks to take the youth climate conversation mainstream. It erases him and a lot of other young people like him, whose American story perhaps has something more critical to say.
This possibility of erasure is an ominous prospect for Juliana, too, a profoundly important court case that has yet to see trial.
News coverage of Juliana has charted a similar path, as did coverage of the state-level cases in which Xiuhtezcatl was also a plaintiff. In 2011, what media attention lawsuits garnered was mostly about the novelty of the legal strategy, stories about audacity, about wackiness. By 2015, when the federal Juliana case was filed, the narrative about the wacky legal claims shifted to something like the backstory of a publicity stunt. In 2016, after the election of Trump, the Juliana story was clickbait. The administration’s efforts to roll back environmental protections only fanned that fire. At its corporatized, underfunded, institutional heart, the news industry could not resist the lure of kids vs. Trump, even if they had filed their case against Obama.
Xiuhtezcatl doesn’t blame any person when he talks about these kinds of failures. It’s hard to imagine what he sounds like angry anyway. For as much as he likes to call out politicians, media trends, the deep-pocketed philanthropists who are fueling the rise of young white activism while inequities magnify in the Indigenous community, he is always going to be that guy who, two minutes later, can tell you to have a beautiful day and sound as sincere as when he was critiquing the media’s woke quota. He is strident but unflappable, eloquent but not enraged. Sometimes I think that if everyone learned to speak like him, in such a smooth cadence but with conviction, probably we could all get a lot more done. But the kinds of issues he speaks to? Of debate vs. fact, of fad and fashion, of the fickleness of the donor dollar? He thinks they are rarely the fault of the people on the ground.
“When we come up with barriers and challenges within an industry as a whole, or the media, the news, it’s not always going to be on the journalists that things are so broken and messed up. We’re operating on a very corrupt system as a whole,” he says. Image maintenance is, after all, something corporations spend millions on. “Everything from advertisements to making sure that the right story is depicted of them so that there’s still enough misinformation, miseducation, lack of awareness from the greater public so that operations can continue as usual and they can continue to exploit as many people and as much of our communities’ natural resources as possible.” And indeed, social scientist Robert Brulle uncovered $558 million in direct foundation grants to climate disinformation efforts between 2003 and 2010, about three-quarters of it untraceable dark money. He also found that spending on lobbying by the fossil fuel industry topped $2 billion between 2000 and 2016—in other words, the first sixteen years of Xiuhtezcatl’s life, most of them while he was deeply involved in climate activism.
Thus Xiuhtezcatl has seen this world of disinformation and fact bending up close and from a young age. By the time he was fourteen, he was getting threats from the oil and gas industry and there were months when his mother wouldn’t let him walk home from school alone because she was afraid someone would hurt him. These conditions—our society with its levers pulled—haven’t changed much. Not yet. As his work on coal ash and renewable energy gave way to fighting the fracking industry, to pushing ballot initiatives to increase the distance between fracking wells and homes and rivers and upholding the right of communities to vote for moratoriums on fracking, Xiuhtezcatl saw that Colorado’s governor and various other office holders were also in the way. “We were up against everybody. Not just Republicans and Fox News. It was our own local media outlets who all of a sudden were saying they can’t comment on this shit because it’s too polarized.”
Isn’t this what’s wrong with the articles about Greta, after all? As Xiuhtezcatl points out, they’re not talking about corporate corruption, about money in politics, the foundational roots of capitalism. In other words, they’re not talking about the core of what we’re experiencing as Americans. Their authors want to do good. They want to highlight popular stories, not be alarmist. But they are frequently unable to really educate people about what is most wrong: that industry is deeply entangled with the leadership of our country and that this union is catalyzing the climate breakdown that could spell the end of us all.
In the history of the media’s coverage of this issue, the diehards who have done this work are themselves marginalized and too few.
———
Now that we can see the effects of climate change—see the seas rising, the floods and storms and fires worsening, observe the melting polar ice caps and nations vying for the next best routes to ship cargo through places that were once ice—much public discussion about climate change has been cordoned off at its own water cooler, carried out by media outlets dedicated to the topic, like Greenwire. Punditry has risen with the obviousness of worsening weather, and it has filled the space where meaningful discussion once lay. One need only decamp to their favorite media venue for the confirmation bias they seek.
Meanwhile, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, all these networks feature theoretical smart guys and gals who are really in the employ of the fossil fuel industry, there to shill a message that’s concealed by a few layers of think tanks and fancy degrees. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Murdock publications, all have featured these types of voices. Even discerning publications publish unwitting industry op-eds when authors pose as ordinary people who also happen to be in the paid employ of the fossil fuel industry.
This has happened before in America. Makers of “trouble-free” asbestos, chemical companies, and flame retardant manufacturers all have a message to sell you. Now the drug companies. And, of course, tobacco.
Curious why people believe such things, or believe some things and not others, science historian Naomi Oreskes pulled ten years of science literature on global climate change to explore which parts of the climate “debate” were actually still in debate. She didn’t find any. But when she published an article about the scientific consensus on climate change in 2004, she was attacked by people who called her a communist and clamored for her to be fired. Ever the researcher, she wanted to know who they were, so she researched some more. What she found were similar attacks on other scientists who had worked on acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer. And Oreskes also found the attackers were often the same. She coauthored the book Merchants of Doubt with Erik M. Conway soon after, outlining the history of these characters and their industry hopping. The work was later featured in a film by the same name.
She told the filmmakers, “All of this is a political debate about the role of government,” pointing to scientists Fred Singer and Fred Seitz, two of the people who led the propaganda charge after leaving positions of prominence in the scientific community to work for Big Tobacco—Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. They were no longer scientists at all, but ideologues. And worse, people who’d spent their working years making weapons during the Cold War, who felt the threat of communism so strongly that they spent their later years attacking issues that called for government action.
Which is how scientists came to be saying that climate change was good for the planet between clips of tobacco ads claiming “Luckies make you healthy!” This in movie theaters across America, once Merchants of Doubt became a film. But it’s important to remember that these were not climate scientists. They were scientists who held themselves out as experts in a field they had never worked in.
They and their cohort would surface again and again, on the eve of climate action, to insert their artificial “debate.” In 1995, Oreskes found, just before the IPCC released its second climate assessment, scientist Ben Santer, who authored a key chapter, was attacked by such propagandists. In 1997, just before Kyoto, an absurd document called the Oregon Petition surfaced, purported to have been signed by more than thirty thousand scientists who did not believe in climate change when, in fact, no one knew who many of the signers actually were and some clearly were not scientists, claiming to be, for example, the Spice Girls and Michael J. Fox. In 2009, when Copenhagen was nearing an agreement, Climategate became a term many people knew but did not understand. It was not real, Oreskes told the cameras. Point being: any delay of action on climate change is, in essence, a derailment, particularly where international cooperation had been building. In other words, success for goons.
The press legitimized these fakes and pundits. James Hoggan, who would later write the book Climate Cover-Up, told interviewer Silver Donald Cameron on the Canadian show The Green Interview that few people ever see the social science on behalf of oil and coal companies. Or understand the massive public relations budgets that go into crafting terms like “clean coal” and getting people to use these phrases until even Obama is using them. It is a trick of heartstrings. The same PR tactics that are used to get people to buy things they don’t need. They are tricks intended to trigger emotion and impulse. In other words, the triggers that usually drive people.
Hoggan founded DeSmog, a website “clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science,” which today runs the DeSmog Climate Disinformation Research Database, listing and profiling the individuals and organizations whose job it is to impugn the credentials, morality, or public image of credible climate scientists and their work. Among the 668 individuals and organizations in the database are names many of us now know. Like Steve Bannon, the former executive chair of that masquerade of a news service Breitbart, who briefly served as a strategist and counselor to Trump. And dozens of organizations like the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, all funded by the fossil fuel industry and its wealthy donors, like the Koch brothers. All have been researched and verified to have been misleading the public and stalling action on global warming.
Google them, and you will find their op-eds in many a mainstream media outlet. Propped up, platformed, ready to inform you of whatever nonsense you have been missing.
———
This lack of institutional oversight has consequences. It’s not hard to see that climate change has all the makings of the next major public health crisis. But what’s worth remembering is that it also has all the hallmarks of previous public health crises. Like tobacco, climate change is an obvious public health threat that’s being buried by a behemoth industry that has long spent its way out of problems. And like tobacco, that burial is attended by politicians entrenched in corporate-to-Capitol culture, who conceal science, issue poker-faced denials, and threaten litigation or other harms to hamstring critics and the press.
Many of us in this nation already know where this strategy leads. My family, like a lot of American families, had a front row seat.
I was fourteen when C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general who aggressively and somewhat roguishly advised Americans to quit smoking, was a regular on television, having just released his report on nicotine addiction. This means I was a teenager when my father screamed somewhat regularly at the television. He would be diagnosed with terminal lung cancer within fifteen years. Not C. Everett Koop, of course, who died at ninety-six because he had the good sense to follow his own advice. But my father, who surprised everyone, even himself, by living for twelve years with small-cell lung cancer, surviving on what seemed, at times, to be pure irascibility.
During this decade-plus reboot, there was acknowledgment that C. Everett Koop had been right about smoking. But in the early days of Koop’s tenure, when Koop would appear on the nightly news with his roughly annual reports about how smoking was bad for you, there were times when my father would leap from his recliner and shout, over the length of his own extended arm, about the degree of misinformation C. Everett Koop was putting out about smoking. Koop was a renegade in this way. A Reagan-era appointee who popularized his role as surgeon general by upending the status quo on tobacco.
Though he’d been expected to toe the line, be a good boy about our good ol’ boys in the cancer-stick industry, he issued eight reports during his tenure, many of them bombshells that included such details as how nicotine is as addictive as cocaine or heroin and that secondhand smoke is bad for you too. Thanks to Koop, smoking declined by 29 percent during his tenure, and the norm of the smoking section became as socially ridiculous as it had always seemed. These were the days when we had smoking sections on airplanes. And yet in a few short years, restaurants would begin banning smoking, and whole towns would soon follow, with some places even halting smoking within a few feet of the door to a building.
None of this was very popular at the time. The first of the restaurants to whisk up the ashtrays were boycotted and groused about by the cigarette-smoking patrons who decamped to the nearest places that still had ashtrays, then got nostalgic about how they liked it better there anyway and didn’t know why they’d ever left. There were letters to the editor and a brief but absurdly misguided outcry for smokers’ rights. And then we changed. All of us. People who intended to breathe healthily ruled the day in the end, while the smokers went home to their recliners to yell at their televisions.
Throughout this time, Koop was as hated as a public official has ever been. Yet he wrote the playbook on delivering disappointing news to an unwelcoming public. In other words, on how to uphold public health for people who were being endangered by the insidious marriage of corporate greed and political cowardice through no fault of their own. If he’d worked for Trump today, he would have been fired—or strong-armed into resignation, whichever came first. Controversy serves at the behest of the Commander in Brief now, who can dispense with appointees in fewer than 280 characters. Like poor old Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, fired on Twitter. But who can feel bad for Tillerson, former Exxon CEO, who perhaps lucked out in avoiding the charge of a State Department soon to revolt. Intelligence chief Dan Coats was perhaps more sympathetic. Or maybe acting secretary of defense Patrick Shanahan. Or White House counsel Donald McGahn. All left the administration via Twitter. Maybe they saw it coming. Maybe those really were announcements . . .
Meanwhile, you might wonder, as I do, where is the US surgeon general on climate change, anyway? Some are present and accounted for. Like Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who tried to rally the public around the threat of climate change in 2015 and 2016 under Obama. And the two surgeons general—David Satcher and Richard Carmona, appointed by Clinton and Bush respectively—who gallantly coauthored a pro-Juliana op-ed in the New York Times and later an amicus brief.
But they don’t have the same effect because no one is surprised by what they say. All were appointees of the last presidents to believe in climate change or their reports were tamped down—as Carmona claims his were—and scuttled. Thus they are not renegades or boat rockers, whistleblowers or cage rattlers. They are rank-and-file types, doing what’s expected or trying, anyway. Koop’s special sauce was more that he was a lot like Trump. He was a master of surprise, of audacity and gall. It just so happened that he had a purpose beyond only that.
Which brings us to the docile Jerome Adams, appointed to the Trump administration in 2017, a pick by Vice President Mike Pence and a well-mannered Indiana sort who has also not rocked this boat. He has done good things: made the opioid epidemic his primary duty, for example, along with mental illness. But he hasn’t rallied the nation around Earth’s warming atmosphere, the melting ice that is making the seas rise, the floods and storms that are only getting worse, or the forests that might contain this damage but instead are going up in flames. In my world, these are the things that make it increasingly difficult to stay off opioids and keep my mental health together, no kidding. But maybe that’s just me.
Good thing for Xiuhtezcatl, to remind me that I have spent too much time listening to the wrong conversation. Because the story of the young, despite the harms they face, is always a story of hope.
“We can’t be that dire,” he says. “I think the fact that young people have been left out of this conversation for so long, that’s why there’s still these flaws in how the media is telling stories around the climate crisis and the climate movement.” If they listened to the young, he says, they’d hear clarity about solutions, hear optimism, and leave behind the hopelessness and the despair that are trademarks of this conversation’s past.
Young people, Xiuhtezcatl says, “cannot afford to lose hope and to be apathetic and disconnected from this issue, because it is so urgent for us.” Not in a hundred years. In the next five. In California in the fires. In the Gulf experiencing the direct effects of flooding and worsening storms. In northern communities under thaw.
He believes the fight needs everyone, every skill, and that even if not everyone can be an activist, every person can show up in simple ways. For him, he has immersed himself in hip-hop as a way of crossing into communities that would not otherwise have this conversation. He raps in “Boombox Warfare” about the legacy of resistance, the speed of the planet’s warming an analogy for his own rise. This to the unlikely accompaniment of marimbas, of violins.
“If you look at history, artists have pioneered and been the voices of these movements,” he says. Bob Marley. Tupac Shakur. John Lennon. If the fight needs musicians, too, Xiuhtezcatl has decided that will be him. And the other place he wants to fight is in the courts.
“Let them take their time,” he says. “I have a relatively interesting amount of optimism when it comes to the courts acting on behalf of our climate and our future, just because of the rulings we’ve had in the past and how much we’ve just defied people’s belief in what was possible.”
Props to him. And for all the optimism of the young. After climate change begins trending, it changes public opinion for good. In 2016, only 47 percent of Americans believed in climate change. By June 2019, 70 percent want the United States to take aggressive action, with a majority calling for a full transition to clean energy within the coming decade.
Instead of the language I learned, a medical dialect of PET scans and percentages, of bronchoscopies and chemotherapy, pulmonology, nephrectomy, liver and bladder resections, they have another tongue. A call to action. A language of chance, of hope and opportunity:
#saveourplanet
#climatechangeisreal
#climatecrisis
#climateemergency
#extinctionrebellion