Climate coverage is shrinking. We're expanding it.

I’m extremely excited to share something I’ve been working on for the last few months: A new weekly video podcast for HEATED. To make it happen, I’m teaming up with one of television’s most experienced climate journalists. She recently lost her job because a centibillionaire’s son took control of a major news network and decided that climate change reporting was “no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.” To him I say: Your loss is our gain. Meet our new producer in episode one, linked at the top of this newsletter and available on all your podcast apps and YouTube. (Subscribe to our channel!) Great question. For almost seven years now, HEATED has been a text-only operation—minus that one six-episode podcast mini series we did in 2020 on coronavirus. (Only OGs will remember). But most people don’t actually get their news by reading it. They get it by consuming it via social media, mostly in video form. And loads of people prefer listening to their news rather than reading it, so they can multitask while driving, cooking, or peddling on the bike. (It’s me. I’m loads of people). I’ve wanted to bring HEATED into the audio/visual space for a while, I just didn’t have the right person to help me. I needed someone who knows the climate beat inside and out, who understands video production, who gets my personality, and—crucially—who is super Type A. Now I have that person. Thank you, David Ellison. I’ve also been feeling lots of pressure from the climate news environment crumbling around me. This felt like the right moment to try and expand. Am I about to become a master of short-form TikTok get-ready-with-me climate explainers? Probably not. (Although never say never, I guess.) But I do believe journalists have a responsibility to meet audiences where they are, without dumbing down the reporting. So that’s what we’re going to try and do. I recommend listening to our introductory episode to find out! Did I mention it’s at the top of this newsletter? But basically, we’re going to investigate and explain the powerful, systemic forces driving inaction on climate change. We’re going to debunk polluter-funded propaganda; call out media complicity; and press people seeking power on what they’ll actually do about the crisis. And that’s just what we have planned for our first few episodes! We also want this to be a two-way street. So please let us know if there’s anyone in particular you’d like us to interview, or any subject you’d like to us to tackle. HEATED has always been 100 percent reader-funded. We’ve never had fossil fuel ads, corporate sponsors, or billionaire owners with “evolving priorities.” And we never will! Depending on how this whole thing goes, though, we might enter into the world of YouTube ad monetization. If that happens, we’ll do everything we can to ensure fossil fuel ads never grace our content. And if you want to avoid ads altogether, you can always just listen/watch on the newsletter. Really, though, this whole thing is going to depend on our community. For now, the podcast will be free while we gauge interest and grow the audience. But producing a high-quality video podcast takes real work: booking, research, editing, distribution, all that jazz. So if you value HEATED and want to see it reach more people in more formats—while remaining 100 percent independent—becoming a paid subscriber is what will make that possible. Emily Atkin: The billionaires who control our information systems do not want you informed about climate change. The last few years have seen major declines in climate change news coverage across the U.S. and abroad. We’ve seen entire climate reporting teams laid off or reassigned, big newspapers running fewer climate investigations, and climate all but disappearing from television coverage. One of the most concerning recent examples was at CBS News, which used to run some of the best climate coverage on network television. They were so good at not only covering the science of climate change, but critically looking at the polluters contributing to it and the politicians delaying action. But after David Ellison, the son of MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, bought the parent company Paramount Global last year and installed anti-woke opinion writer Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, he dismantled the network’s climate reporting team. The reason, Ellison said, was that he was “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.” I reported on the CBS News climate layoffs for my newsletter, Heated, back in October. And when I was talking to sources both inside and outside the newsroom about it, they kept bringing up one impacted member of the climate team, Tracy Wholf. Tracy Wholf was the senior climate producer at CBS News, and everyone told me that she was the heart of the CBS climate team. She was the one pushing for more accountability stories, educating the entire newsroom about climate science and making sure local CBS affiliates had the resources and confidence to cover climate. One newsroom source told me, “Without Tracy, there is no climate unit.” Covering Tracy’s firing honestly left me pretty frustrated because the fact is we simply cannot afford to lose more journalists like her. As climate change accelerates and polluters spend billions to delay action so they can profit, 2e need more reporters asking hard questions, following the money, and explaining the science in ways ordinary people can actually understand. But here’s the good news. Turns out my worry was short-lived, because a few weeks later, Tracy reached out to me and said: Tracy Wholf: Hey, Emily, have you ever thought of starting a podcast? Emily Atkin: This is Heated, a podcast dedicated to covering climate change, whether the billionaire-owned media class likes it or not. I’m your host, Emily Atkin. Tracy Wholf: And I’m her producer, Tracy Wholf. Emily Atkin: On this show, we’ll break down the most urgent and growing climate threats, shine a light on the powerful interests pushing delay, and challenge misinformation head on. Tracy Wholf: We’ll also feature conversations with scientists, policymakers, activists, and journalists working on the front lines of the climate story. Emily Atkin: Our goal is to provide you a truly independent, unbought source of information about climate change, pollution and environmental harms. Tracy Wholf: We have no corporate sponsors, no billionaire owners, and we take no nonprofit money. Our only source of revenue is you, our audience. Emily Atkin: Today’s episode is just a little table setter to introduce you to me and Tracy so you can learn a little more about our histories and decide whether we’re people you want to trust on this topic. So let’s get into it. Tracy, why don’t you tell the people a little about how you became a reporter? Like what made you want to do this job? Tracy Wholf: Well, it was definitely for the steady income and the work-life balance. Emily Atkin: For sure. Oy vey. Tracy Wholf: Hilariously, so journalism was actually a second career for me. I originally went to undergrad and was a theater major. And I spent the first 10 years of my adult life performing, which is also a roller coaster of unemployment and low paychecks. So I thought, hey, why not like go back to school, get my master’s in journalism and go into that? Emily Atkin: So you weren’t like, let’s go into finance. Tracy Wholf: No, I didn’t take that advice, right? But it was funny. My first job in journalism, I actually worked for Dan Rather on a show called Dan Rather Reports. I was covering the 2012 Republican primary down in Florida, and I had picked up the Orlando Sentinel newspaper on my way to like, Mitt Romney spaghetti dinner. hell yeah. And there was a story at the very bottom of the front page that said pythons, which are invasive species in the Everglades, were eating native mammals to the point of extinction. And it just kind of blew my mind. And so I took the newspaper back to my executive producer w…