The Scoop and Media Hustle of My Life: Coal Knew, Too

Three months ago, a colleague stumbled onto a potentially newsworthy climate change artifact, completely outside of his field of research, and he happened to tell me about it in passing. I set out to find out more, and it turns out that it’s the first evidence that the coal industry knew about climate change – in 1966 – decades before climate denial. Writing and landing “Coal Knew, Too” was a painful and messy process, and even with a big scoop, it was still full of rejections. One outlet rejected it on the basis that “there is just too much news.” It’s a valid point. There’s a lot of freaking news.

I was very excited to finally get the attention of an editor at HuffPost (who also happens to teach journalism at my alma mater – UNC-Chapel Hill). She was tough and pushed me way outside of my comfort zone into more investigative territory. But that also meant I had to dig even deeper into the abyss that is the climate crisis until my head and my heart hurt from too much.

I really get why people have to look away from climate change. When you begin to understand some of the cold, hard facts and sobering predictions at a deeper level, knowing that babies alive today might live long enough to see the cataclysmic effects of warming play out through famine and water shortages, all while having to share even less land, it quickly becomes too much to process and you can start to shut down. Or if the weather is nice, it honestly just feels too surreal. Even worse, for those prone to depression, it can lead to a downward spiral. If they are children and young adults, then what?

So I don’t want to transfer my own fears, but I’m also not bringing any false hope. I drew my strength from the awesomeness of the people in the climate justice movement who are leaning way, way in. Ultimately, people need to know the truth, but it’s still up to them to do something with it. One person has already told me that they “respect my opinion,” but they disagree with me. It’s perplexing because this is not an opinion piece. These are facts, not spin. There is a process for obtaining facts and checking and checking and checking again. There are many people vetting at many different stages of the process. We are not fiction writers.

The fact that this just happened to be published on the sixth anniversary of birthing a real live baby, just further serves to remind me of the many labors we go through to bring something forth into the world. I honestly felt like this story had a mind and a will of its own—that it wanted to be found—and somehow all of the players were in the right place at the right time to make it real.