Environmental reporters in the South battle climate change misinformation—and their own newsrooms
A tower outside a local TV news station in Lake Charles, Louisiana, sits damaged from Hurricane Laura's winds in 2020. Photo by Rob Perillo.
By Sydney McGovern, Ava Borskey
BATON ROUGE, LA – As the threat of climate change grows each year, the American South is at a crossroads.
Record-high temperatures, severe storms and rising sea levels threaten the livelihood of those living on the Gulf Coast and could impose the equivalent of a 20% income tax on county-level income over the next few decades, a 2017 paper in Science Magazine found.
But in many regions most impacted by hurricanes and rising waters, fewer than 40% of residents believe that global warming will personally affect them. And in many Southern counties, half of the resident...