Page 194 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

188 A. RUSBRIDGER AND B. BREVINI

rations operate is damaging the environment. “Keep it in the ground”
marks one of the boldest advocacy campaigns ever launched by a media
institution and one of the greatest legacies for The Guardian. What
triggered the decision to embark on such a campaign?
AR: I had just decided to stop editing… I thought, “What am I going to
regret when I don’t have a paper?” And I think one of things that I thought
was, had I done enough while I had the megaphone, as it were, to do
everything I could on climate change? It wasn’t that we’d done a bad job.
We’d had more environmental reporters than any other paper certainly,
probably most papers in the world, and we had our own environmental
website. But somehow nothing that any of us was doing seemed commen-
surate with the nature of the problem. So I just sat down and thought, “What
can I do before I go that would have some kind of impact? A real impact?”

BB: Can you tell our readers in detail what has the campaign entailed
in terms of coverage, the number of articles, the timeline and targets?
AR: We set to work in January and I left at the end of the May so it was
quite concentrated… five months from conception to end. We packed
quite a lot into those five months and it began with me getting together
about thirty correspondents and editors, going much more broadly than
those who had just been working on the environment. So it included
people who worked on economics, security, and home affairs and immi-
gration, and all kinds of people for whom climate change had been mar-
ginal to that subject. We didn’t go into it thinking this is going to be a
campaign… It sort of grew out of a couple of conversations to begin with
and it was quite a complicated campaign… We decided we would target
the good guys rather than the bad guys because we thought that was more
likely to have an effect. We talked to people who do campaigning for a
living and they said, “This is an incredibly complicated thing to explain in
terms of how campaigns normally work.” But that was the origin of it.
BB: Then there was a conversation with 350 Degrees, I imagine?
AR: Yeah, well I’d met with Bill McKibben of 350.org in Stockholm the
previous November and he was the one who said, “Look, you’re doing it
all wrong. We know the science now. The point is that this has now gone
beyond science and we’re only going to solve this if we tackle politics and
the economics, so you have to broaden the range of people who are
actually writing about this stuff.”