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ROANOKE, VA. - The annual fete and feast known to environmental reporters as the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference this year offered some 800-plus attendees a diverse menu of climate change, coal, energy, and related morsels.

The October 15-19 field trips, roundtables, panels, and keynotes dealt extensively with the promises and challenges of coal mining, primarily through mountaintop removal, and of coal combustion in a carbon-constrained economy many see as inevitable in coming years.

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With the mainstream commercial media companies eliminating many hundreds of journalists’ jobs, new ventures such as the nonprofit Pro Publica, the New York-based investigative reporting organization, are trying to pick up some of the slack.

Now comes something really different: A for-profit energy corporation is starting an online video channel as “a brand-new media source,” to be staffed with people who formerly worked in conventional broadcast journalism and who will report on the very subjects the company is involved with.

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For 28 years, Canadian writer Ed Struzik has skied, dogsledded, snowmobiled, helicoptered, canoed, and ridden icebreakers as part of his writings about the Arctic. Since long before most journalists paid the northern territories much heed, Struzik has covered the change brewing in these empty lands as his beat.

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Some of the beats most likely to provide the best platforms for newspaper coverage of climate change are doing worse than other news categories in the increasingly competitive newsroom - garnering less space as newspapers continue grappling with endemic economic woes.

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War-related metaphors are now common in the rhetoric of climate change activism. We need a “Manhattan Project” for clean energy, a “Marshall Plan” for green action.

Or maybe, we need just plain war. Think of Al Gore’s first ad in his $300 million Alliance for Climate Protection TV campaign, which flashed images of the Normandy invasion. “We didn’t wait for someone else” to fight, it read.

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“This was not a debate or argument, but a chance to ask questions.”

That’s how veteran WDIV-TV, Detroit, meteorologist Paul Gross summed-up a recent American Meteorological Society four-day Denver, Co., conference bringing TV weathercasters and climate scientists together for information sharing.

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All three staff meteorologists at KLTV, the ABC affiliate broadcasting to the Tyler-Longview-Jacksonville area of Northeast Texas, joined forces last November to deliver an on-air rebuttal of the idea that humans are changing the earth’s climate.

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ABC News is planning a two-hour special this coming September depicting how top scientists, economists, and historians see the world in the year 2100.

“Experts say that unless we act now, the ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, resource depletion, and climate change could destabilize the world with catastrophic results,” says ABC News’ Earth 2100 website (emphasis in original).

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Cap-and-trade policies entered the environmental reporting lexicon in the early 1990s, when the United States established them as a strategy for reducing acid rain emissions. Now cap-and-trade is part of the national dialogue again, this time as a proposed strategy to slow climate change.

For reporters experienced or not, writing about such an abstract policy - it sounds more like the stock market than anything else - makes it necessary to review what it means and what it tries to accomplish.

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