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Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have recast himself as Russia's Al Gore. In October, at a conference in Venice organized by his World Political Forum, he implored the journalists present to do a better job of reporting on climate change. "We need people to know where we are, and where the world ends," he warned. Roughly translated: if the apocalypse is coming, give us the information we need to prevent it.
The journalists pushed back. We pointed out that it's tough to engage the public on climate change in the midst of the world financial crisis and that covering the story is complex and expensive. Flying a crew to Greenland to get pictures of melting glaciers costs more than $30,000, one Danish TV correspondent said. Meanwhile, drastic newsroom cuts have devastated science reporting and eliminated many foreign bureaus.
But the problem goes much deeper. In the most egregious cases, governments have suppressed all information about climate change, the environment, and natural disasters out of fear that it would threaten their political control. Take Burma, aka Myanmar. When Cyclone Nargis plowed into the heavily populated Irrawaddy Delta last May, Burma's military junta responded by banning all reporting on the disaster, including the publication of photos of the dead. Foreign journalists were barred from the country, although a few did manage to sneak in. The consequences of the cyclone were devastating. Villages in its path were unaware that it was bearing down and did not evacuate. A hundred and thirty thousand people died.
Government tactics vary from country to country. In China, where press freedom has in other respects expanded considerably in the past decade, the government continues to limit reporting on natural disasters and public health issues ranging from air pollution in Beijing to emissions from coal-fired power plants to contaminated food and disease outbreaks. In Brazil, corrupt officials, military commanders, and illegal loggers have threatened and harassed the handful of local reporters who have tried to draw attention to the deforestation of the Amazon. In Ethiopia, an ongoing drought-induced famine has affected more than 4.6 million people. Yet the government has discouraged reporters from covering the story, saying it's old news. "We don't need to beat the drum of hunger for Ethiopia every year," the country's health minister said in June, at the height of the crisis.
The Environmental Performance Index, a Yale University study that rates countries in terms of the effectiveness of their environmental policies, has found a clear correlation between lack of "voice," including press freedom, and poor environmental performance. In Mexico City, where I worked as a reporter in the 1990s, I saw firsthand how the government strategy of withholding information about air pollution induced passivity and indifference. "People aren't aware of a lot of environmental problems because there is no information," said Marc Levy, a Columbia University professor and one of the authors of the study. "It's out of sight, out of mind."
The suppression of inconvenient news about the environment may not be new, but climate change has raised the stakes for everyone. As Gorbachev said, we can't rise to the threat without timely and accurate information-about greenhouse gas emissions from China's coal-powered plants, the rate of loss of the world's tropical forests, the ways in which rising temperatures are leading to more powerful storms and new patterns of disease.
Gorbachev understands this as well as anyone. After all, he waited three weeks after the April 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to inform the Soviet public about the scope of the disaster, even as radiation spread across northern Europe. The consequences of the information blackout became Gorbachev's inspiration for glasnost, which eventually led to the collapse of Communism.
I couldn't escape the sense that the former Soviet leader takes a perverse pleasure in ascribing to capitalism a whole series of disasters, including the financial meltdown, the war in Iraq, and global warming. I agree that my colleagues can do a better job of covering climate change, but that can happen only if governments let them. On that point, it's hard to argue with Gorbachev: if there's one thing we need in the fight against global warming, it's global glasnost.
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