Willow is not just an “environmentalist” concern
Climate activists protest the Willow Project in front of the White House on January 10, 2023. Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
HEATED analyzed 30 national news stories about the Willow project and found that 75 percent framed its importance as primarily political.
by Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin
The Biden administration on Monday announced that it is approving the largest-ever proposed oil drilling project on U.S. public lands, in a direct repudiation of research warning that new fossil fuel development must cease to preserve a safe climate.
The Interior Department approved ConocoPhillips Alaska's Willow project, located in one of the fastest-warming regions of the world. If completed, this project would produce the equivalent of an estimated 263 million tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years. This is about the same as building 20 new gas plants and running them for the same time period; burning 8.8 billion pounds of coal every year for 30 years; or adding 1.7 million cars to the road.
Willow’s approval thus represents a significant threat to the global climate. According to the world’s top scientific authority on climate change, the IPCC, the world needs to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 to stabilize at safe levels of warming. Achieving that goal requires governments to stop approving new oil, gas and coal projects, according to the International Energy Agency.
The Biden administration’s approval of Willow also represents a major violation of Biden’s campaign pledge to put the world on track to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. It also violates the spirit of the Paris agreement, which calls for nations to pursue efforts to prevent more than 1.5°C of global warming.
In sum, the approval of Willow is a major story about the safety of all life on Earth, and the failure of one of the world’s most powerful leaders to protect the planet’s future.
Most of the national media, however, did not take this approach when telling the story of Willow on Monday.
How the national media has covered Willow
We were first alerted to a potential problem with national media coverage of Willow when we saw this tweet thread by Genevienve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence, an advocacy group seeking to increase climate coverage in news media.
In the thread, which has more than 700 retweets as of publication, Guenther complained that most early news coverage of Biden’s decision seemed to present the central conflict as political, rather than planetary.
As an example, Guenther highlighted the Bloomberg story that broke the news of Willow’s approval. Bloomberg’s story, she noted, attributed the project’s climate consequences to “environmental activists.” It also did not mention the IPCC’s warnings about the necessity of net zero by 2050; the IEA’s warnings against new fossil fuel infrastructure; or the pledges contained in the Paris agreement.
This is something that happens a lot with big climate stories. To avoid the perception of bias, news outlets sometimes choose to highlight the political implications of a climate fight, rather than the actual climate implications.
This choice can be legitimate, particularly if the publication is primarily politics-focused. But we know from experience that this choice is sometimes made because the political battle is more dramatic and easier to understand. And when it’s made too often by too many publications, it risks creating a news environment where readers understand the political importance of big climate fights, but not the actual importance for the planet they live on.
So we decided to take a deeper look into Guenther’s claims to see if these choices are actually chronic. Here’s what we found.
HEATED analyzed 30 national breaking news stories about the Willow project’s approval on Monday. We found that the majority—75 percent—framed the project’s importance primarily as political battle with environmentalists, as opposed to a planetary concern.