LA fires are Watch Duty app's CNN moment
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Few might remember how CNN’s reputation was forged during the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis. Until Ted Turner’s Cable News Network launched in June of that year, few people outside of journalists even considered watching 24-hour news.
But the holding of American hostages, which lasted 444 days until outgoing President Jimmy Carter was able to secure their release on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981, was measured by Americans day to day, hour to hour. For the nascent news channel, it was the perfect story to keep Americans coming back.
A similar thing is happening right now to a small California non-profit. Watch Duty was launched three years ago by tech entrepreneur John Clarke Mills and dedicated to covering wildfires from a “just-the-facts” point of view. Callaway Climate Insights wrote about Watch Duty last year, after meeting Mills at a conference.
At the time, it had about 1.5 million downloads and about 150 volunteers, who acted as reporters covering the breadth and scope of wildfires from the point of view of firefighters, using radio frequencies to give the public access to unprecedented new information about where fires are and where they are going.
Since the LA fires blew up last week, Watch Duty has received more than twice that amount of traffic and has become the priority service app for anybody tracking the fires, from fire crews and first responders to homeowners wanting to know how close the flames are to their houses.
Watch Duty is no CNN, and Mills says his team — now about 200 — are not journalists. They simply report facts, with a mission to save lives and property. The reporters work with their sources to get news out, not to deliver viral headlines or conform to party agendas.
Still, coming at a time when most media has veered badly off course into partisan politics, muckraking, and knee-bending to authoritarian power, to see this new form of service journalism develop is refreshing. Journalism constantly refreshes itself, and we indeed seem at an inflection point right now as public trust plummets and as new climate challenges present opportunities to get back to basics.
I monitored the fires myself over the past week from a narcotic-induced haze after knee surgery, and I found that Watch Duty dominated my phone screen. While broadcast news showed me fire porn of burned neighborhoods and burning hills, the app told me what type of planes firefighters were using to douse the flames, what the containment levels were, and what wind conditions were doing to flight patterns and fire direction shifts. In short, the same news the firefighters were using.
In time, I expect other news organizations to spring up around climate disasters, as this type of service is anything but commodity news. It is vital breaking news — service journalism — designed to educate and warn people on the fly, hopefully in time to save their lives.
Don’t forget to contact me directly if you have suggestions or ideas at dcallaway@callawayclimateinsights.com.
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Thursday’s subscriber insights
Banks’ retreat from climate groups spreads to ESG executive roles
. . . . The rapid retreat of major financial institutions from global net-zero clubs over the past month in the face of an incoming Trump Administration and Republican scrutiny over environmental, social and governance practices is now spreading to senior ESG roles.
Barclays reported this week that its Group Head of Sustainability, Laura Barlow will be stepping down after three years and become a senior advisor to the company. Wall Street is a nomadic business, and executives change jobs all the time. But we expect this is the first of what will be many internal climate retrenchments among global banks in coming weeks as the finance industry and other industries rethink their commitments to social efforts such as ESG and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an exclusive group of global banks that sprung up after the Glasgow climate summit of 2021 to fight to decarbonize their businesses and those of their clients, has faded into a volunteer organization over the last six weeks as some of the largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase JPM 0.00%↑ and Morgan Stanley MS 0.00%↑ defected. And last week, BlackRock BLK 0.00%↑ exited the Net Zero Asset Manager’s initiative, a similar climate club, leading it to fold up operations.
It only makes sense that such a retrenchment will soon spread to high paid climate roles in banks and other companies, which were hurriedly added three or four years ago in the ESG frenzy on Wall Street. How it will work with the stated intent of banks to continue their decarbonization efforts in the Trump era is anybody’s guess. . . .
Editor’s picks: Climate change reports from 2006 to 2024; plus, Trump tags consultant for new task force
Watch the video: 60 Minutes presents a marathon of its most important reports on climate change. It begins in 2006, with Scott Pelley’s report on the evidence of global warming in the arctic and from that same year, his report on government scientists working on environmental issues who didn’t believe the truth was being told about dangers of global warming. The video also includes, from 2016, Sharyn Alfonsi’s visit to Greenland to see the effects of climate change and sea level rise on glaciers. Bill Whitaker’s 2018 report on what firefighters saw as a deadly wildfire destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif. In addition to more on deadly U.S. wildfires, Holly Williams reports on massive fires in Australia. From 2021, there’s Lesley Stahl’s story about climate change's effects on wine regions of the world, from 2023, Pelley’s interview with scientists who say the planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, and more.
Trump tags consultant to lead environmental task force
The author of a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero,” has been named by the president-elect to lead an environmental advisory group, The Independent reports. Ed Russo has worked as environmental consultant for Trump’s businesses, according to published reports. Donald Trump said in a post to his Truth Social platform, “Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Russo is the CEO and co-founder of RussKap Water, based in North Miami Beach, which uses so-called atmospheric water generators to create drinking water from the humidity in the air. Trump also posted that his “Environmental Advisory Task Force … will advise my Administration on initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER.”
Latest findings: New research, studies and projects
Adapting to climate change
The mounting costs of anthropogenic climate change reveal that adaptation will be essential to human well-being in coming decades, write the authors of this National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled Adaptation to Climate Change. At the same time, the literature on the economics of adaptation offers relatively little guidance for emerging policy, they say in the abstract. The authors review the existing literature, focusing on how it can better inform adaptation policy design and implementation: “A simple conceptual model of adaptation decision-making describes two core adaptation channels that we link to two streams of adaptation literature, which have emerged largely in parallel. We outline how insights from these literatures can be used for adaptation policy evaluation, highlight key limitations of and opportunities for public intervention in private adaptation markets, and provide guidance for future work.” Authors: Tamma Carleton, University of Chicago; Esther Duflo, MIT Department of Economics; Abdul Latif Jameel, Poverty Action Lab, NBER, CEPR and Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development; Kelsey Jack, University of California, Berkeley; and Guglielmo Zappalà, University of California, Berkeley.
More of the latest research:
Solar Geoengineering: Trials, Innovation, Investments and the Need for Governance
Can the circular economy save the climate? A review of the national to global evidence
Words to live by . . . .
“Finland is officially the world’s happiest country. It is also 75 percent forest. I believe these facts are related” — Matt Haig, author and journalist.
Tks Jefferson. Enjoying your great stuff too.
Good column Dave! Hope you’re recovering well!