Magical thinking vs the laws of physics — why science journalism can’t save us from climate collapse (Part 1)

Journalism needs its reporting beats. It keeps the daily news cycle tidy: the politics reporter, the economics desk, the health writer, the current affairs person, sport, the entertainment slot.

But there are two downfalls to this, seen recently at the World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) which took place on African soil for the first time last December.

One: the journalistic beat means we report in silos.

Two: we rank these beats by importance, with politics, economics and even sport arguably being the apex beats. The environment beat – a subset of the science beat – is often the nice-to-have, the charity case that gets the newsroom leftovers after the apex beats have taken the lion’s share of column inches and newsroom budgets.

There were plenty of issues on the WCSJ programme that fall into the traditional environment beat.

What was missing, though, was a recognition that the underlying problem that’s driving all our traditional environmental issues is the current global economic model. It isn’t just science journalists who fail to join the dots. Journalists across all beats haven’t made the connection, and they haven’t for decades.

This means we’re failing at our singular mandate as the Fourth Estate: that of informing the public discourse with evidence-based, vetted ideas to support a healthy democracy.

Magical thinking vs the laws of physics

Climate collapse, biodiversity loss, acidifying oceans, industrial-scale farming taking chunks out of Amazonian rainforests, collapsing fish stocks, spreading desertification, an unequal disaster response after extreme weather events – these are all the symptoms of a diseased economic system that is at odds with the very evidence-based consensus that science journalists prefer to work with.

We’re reporting on the symptoms of the diseases, but not on the disease itself.

The disease, in this case, is an economic system that cashes in on profit, but externalises the cost of the damage caused by extraction and pollution.

It’s an economic system that’s based on magical thinking: that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

Science journalism isn’t reporting this. Indeed, few journalistic beats are. We’re reporting on those who play by the rules of the economic game, we aren’t challenging the rules of the game itself.

We need to align our economics with the laws of physics but that’ll only happen when we internalise the full cost of something. Hashtag: true cost accounting.

Take a bottle of Coke. Its final price tag should include not just the materials used to make the plastic bottle and its carbonated, sugary contents. It should also include the cost of the damage caused by the carbon pollution resulting from growing, harvesting and processing the sugar, or the cost of moulding the single-use plastic bottle that’ll deliver the beverage for a one-off hit of dopamine and then get discarded into the environment where it will never break down and rejoin the nutrient cycle.

The price tag of that bottle of Coke should include the cost of treating the health fallout resulting from years of exposure to the sugary drink: treatment for someone’s diabetic erectile dysfunction, gangrenous toe or lost eyesight.

With those costs internalised by the economic reframing, the bottle of Coke and its short-lived dopamine hit become unaffordable.

It’s no secret: we can’t have infinite growth

We have known for half a century that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. When the Club of Rome released its Limits to Growth report in 1972, based on modelling by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they made it clear: if we continued with our industrial-scale consumption and pollution, we’d find ourselves smashing through planetary boundaries round about now.

Sure enough, here we are: blasting past the 1.5°C increase in global average temperature that would have kept us inside a climate safe zone. Worse still, we’re set for a 3°C rise at our current rate of carbon pollution. If this were a person, a fever of 1.5°C above the healthy normal body temperature of 37°C would have us reaching for medical treatment; a fever of 3°C above that would mean convulsions and a trip to the ER.

Yet most journalism merely reports on how to treat the seizures. It doesn’t report on how to rid the body of the infection itself.

Reporting on this society-wide issue isn’t just something that should be left to the financial reporters. Every one of us should be drawing it into our reporting, regardless of the beat. Again, this isn’t about aligning with an economic ideology. It’s about aligning with the laws of physics.

Physics is catching up with us, and showing us with each new extreme weather shock that it has no truck with magical thinking. We’ve turned the heat up under the kettle, and now the water’s coming to a boil. Put another way: we don’t have to believe in gravity; gravity still has a hold on us. Science journalists should be the first to point this out. DM

Leonie Joubert is on a multi-year mobile journalism project that’s investigating how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism.