For a while on the day after Thanksgiving, while visiting offspring and grandchildren in Southern California, The Tracker thought a climate policy, Copenhagen-energizing piece of amazement had occurred. On page 1 of the Los Angeles Times I slapped down on a kitchen counter in Orange County was the headline China vows to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020. Under the bylines of reporters David Pierson in Beijing and Jim Tankersley at the DC Bureau the lede confidently and flatly said, “China vowed Thursday to cuts its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half over the next decade.” Common sense should have shouted inside my brain, Impossible! Instead I thought wow, that’s some change of course. A dek in the hed said, “China meets, beats U.S. on emission reduction goals.” Here is a wordfile that I kept that morning of the original LATimes piece.

Then thud. A check at other outlets found dramatically different news.

China did something newsworthy, but not that.  The Times’s original version is still on line but now it has a “For the Record” correction inserted in it . The paper ran a correction the next day in the printed issue.

This is one example of the intense nightmares that can befall people in the news business when they wake up. Pierson and Tankersley have been covering climate change and policy for quite awhile. They say they know -  and that seems utterly likely -  exactly what China’s government did and wrote it accordingly. Which is that it said it would reduce carbon intensity by 40 percent in the next decade. That may sound the same, but it is not the same, as emissions. It means that it will stretch the carbon it does burn, via efficiency improvement, to get a lot more bang for its yuan (or renminbi, but who calls Chinese currency by its right name?). Over the next ten years it hopes its economy outgrows the improved efficiency. Hence its emissions might go UP. Some say the goal is merely business as usual as new equipment goes in. The Bush administration was good at taking credit for the increased carbon intensity it promised merely by extending trend lines into the future.

In what only underscores the error, the LATimes ran on the front page with its initial version a little comparison info box, equating President Obama’s goal of decreasing US carbon emission 17 percent by 2020 unfavorably to China’s 40 percent vow. The story itself, deeper, reveals the two reporters do know the difference between carbon emissions and carbon intensity. Apparently editors tidied up the lede a bit, threw in a dramatic hed and that graphic illus, and poof, like that, millions of readers were led astray and two reporters turned the air (at a guess) a distinct shade of blue.

Lesson: Define clearly anything that might be misconstrued before filing copy. Send a memo. Anticipate what the copy desk or other editors – particularly the holiday crew – might make of it. Otherwise you might pick up the paper the next morning (or fire up the NYT app on the smart phone) and blow coffee all over the table upon seeing how your story got handled.

No sense doing a full wrap-up on the news as reported elsewhere, but here are two examples:

• Wall St. Journal – Jeffrey Ball, Shai Oster: China, US Square Off on Climate Proposals ; Ironically, the Journal had some corrections, appended to this copy, to make of its own.
• Times (UK) – Jane Macartney: China announced first greenhouse gas target ;

One can hardly forgive the Times’s error but gaffes like that do happen among good people. To stress that point, here is a sample, from the same edition, of the paper’s recent and excellent enviro-climate coverage.

• Edmund Sanders: Kenyans draw weapons over shrinking resources ; An enterprise story of pastoralists and farmers going at it it with AK-47s as rains fail. The lede: “Have the climate wars of Africa begun?” That’s plural – Sanders cites Darfur as number one, with Kenya’s spreading violence the second. The illus that accompanies the story is haunting. Saunders has visited this general topic previously and recently: Oct. 25: Fleeing drought in the Horn of Africa.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.