By by Kevin Killough | Just The News
Ahead of the Easter weekend, multiple media outlets reported that chocolate prices are soaring, and according to the coverage, the main culprit driving the inflating costs is climate change.
Across multiple platforms, the reports followed a similar message, using similar language to describe the problem and its causes — and the reports all came out the same week.
“Easter egg prices soar as cocoa crops are hit by climate crisis and exploitation,” the Guardian reported on Good Friday. The article blames the shortage of cocoa, which is used to make chocolate, on rising prices of fertilizers, deforestation, illegal mining practices and “extreme weather events.”
The article doesn’t provide any details on these alleged events, but it does mention El Niño, which is a warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It causes changes in weather patterns during the cycle. This cycle was recorded long before carbon dioxide emissions were a factor in the atmosphere.
An National Public Radio segment, which also ran on Good Friday, interviewed its business correspondent, who said “farmers there [in the Ivory Coast and Ghana] have been facing extreme weather, changing climate patterns, which have just decimated crop harvests.” NPR provided no data or sourcing for the environmental claims.
Writing in The Conversation, reporter Jack Marley’s headline suggests that climate change “may” be the culprit, and he then goes on to write that “food production globally is facing an increasingly hostile climate.”
While African cocoa farmers in 2023 may have had a bad year, crop data doesn’t show any downward trends in African yields. Between 2007 and 2022, cocoa yields actually went up. This is true for many crops in many regions across the world, including rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. This data is easy to find, but not a single article on rising chocolate prices in any of these media outlets mentioned this mitigating data.
Marley didn’t respond to questions if he was aware of this data or if he ever sought it out.
Shaping a uniform narrative
The Guardian, NPR and The Conversation are among the hundreds of media outlets associated with or listed as partners with an organization called Covering Climate Now (CCN), which encourages reporters to insert “climate crisis” narratives into all their stories.
Covering Climate Now boasts partnerships with hundreds of major media outlets across the world. According to CCN, its partners have a combined audience of 2 billion people – one-fourth of the globe’s population — in 57 countries.
The group provides advice to reporters on all beats to not only insert a “climate crisis” narrative into every beat, but also how to cover the topic. This includes telling journalists not to platform what it calls “denialists,” which includes anyone who “ridicules” climate activists or suggests that climate change is not producing a global emergency.
The site is full of tips on what language to use, how to write headlines and suggested stories for journalists to cover, all in line with an anti-fossil message. It suggests avoiding “fake experts.” To determine the value of experts a reporter might interview, CCN points them to the activist website DeSmog, which demonizes anyone, even those on the left, who in any way dispute the “climate crisis” narrative.
The Covering Climate Now section on solutions to what it says is an indisputable crisis leaves no room for fossil fuel use, even though experts say that rapidly eliminating them is not only unrealistic, it would necessitate the collapse of civilization. Read Full Article >
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