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Amy Harder on Climate and Energy Reporting · Columbia Energy Exchange

• 0:00
  Amy Harder: I would say for a while there we really were actively debating whether or not climate change is real, should we do something. I think that has really changed and we're really not debating if climate change is here and if we should do something, we're debating how bad of a problem it is. As a journalist, I don't want to say we're along for the ride because we have a more active role than that, but it's our job to help the public dissect what's happening. It's not our job to tell the world what to do.
• 0:01
  Bill Loveless: The national conversation around climate change is shifting. There's more focus on energy affordability and energy demand, and the role that artificial intelligence plays as both a climate problem and a potential solution. Likewise, there's been a shift in how the media covers these issues. Research shows that news coverage of climate has declined in recent years, as have the number of local newsrooms. Yet surveys indicate that news consumers want more coverage of climate change, and as the director of the Energy Journals and Fellows program here at the Center on Global Energy Policy, I can attest to the fact that journalists want to deepen their understanding of energy and climate and improve coverage of these critical topics.
• 0:02
  So what's the state of energy and climate journalism? How have shrinking newsrooms eroding trust in news institutions and the rise of AI impacted the speed? And what are the most powerful levers, energy and climate reporters can use right now to reach wider audiences and cover the energy transition thoroughly and with integrity?
• 0:03
  This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Bill Loveless. Today on the show, Amy Harder.
• 0:04
  Amy is the national energy correspondent for Axios and has been covering energy and climate for more than 15 years. She was among the first reporters to join Axios after its launch in 2017, but from 2021 until earlier this year, she was founding executive editor of Cipher News, backed by Breakthrough Energy, a network of clean energy organizations. She began her career at National Journal and then worked for The Wall Street Journal. Amy and I talked about the biggest challenges reporters face when it comes to explaining complex energy issues and how she reports on new technology while parsing progress from PR spin. We discuss news business models and the gaps in coverage, and we talked about how AI is reshaping the energy industry while also raising all sorts of questions about the practice of journalism. Here's our conversation.
• 0:05
  Amy Harder welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.
• 0:06
  Amy Harder (02:56): Wonderful to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
• 0:07
  Bill Loveless (02:59): Well, congratulations on your latest adventures in energy and climate journalism, both at Axios where you've returned and at the University of Chicago's New Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, where you've launched a podcast called Shocked. nWelcome to the podcast world.
• 0:08
  Amy Harder (03:18): Yes, thank you, Bill. It's been a lot of fun joining some new folks and some old hunts, and even though I am familiar with a lot of the folks I'm working with, again, the topics are really changing, so never a dull moment
• 0:09
  Bill Loveless (03:34): And certainly we'll talk about that. And while you're mentioning people you've worked with before, I can't help but mention another journalist among those journalists I have high regard for. And that's Ben Gman, whom you've teamed up with again at Axios, another standout energy reporter.
• 0:10
  Amy Harder (03:51): Yes, Ben is a wonderful, he's been, he's great to work with and I've talked about it as getting the band back together. Our editor, Chuck as well, who I've worked with back at my days at National Journal. So it is wonderful to see, and in fact, in some ways my role at U Chicago for the Shocked podcast, which is great and a good compliment to this kind of interview podcast. That one is more narrative storytelling podcast. I used to work with them as well back in the day. I was a fellow for them in the 2018/19 years. So yeah, it's a lot of what I called it when I had this transition announcement back in September. As I said, it was a new beginning and a homecoming, and it really does feel like a little bit of both.
• 0:11
  Bill Loveless (04:37): But you have a lot of experience to base all of this on in your work at these several news organizations. You've seen changes in the media over the last decade or so, including the decline among newspapers and radio stations, as well as the emergence of new kinds of news outlets that are trying to keep pace with public demands for news. Generally speaking, how have you seen the news media change?
• 0:12
  Amy Harder (05:02): Well, I would divide that into a couple of different ways. The first one is at a macro level, not even looking at energy climate specifically and just generally, and you laid it out well, local journalism is really struggling. I think national and global journalism is also, I think it's a very tumultuous time in our industry, and I think it's taken me approximately four minutes to bring up AI on artificial intelligence and the world that that's having on all of us as humans. I think it's already starting to have a big impact, and I think it will only go more intensely from here. We can dive into that more later, but I think it's raising a lot of questions of how we conduct ourselves as journalists and humans really, because we're able to outsource so much into a machine. What do we retain as humans really, not to be too meta about it too fast, but that's something that's been on my mind a lot.
• 0:13
  (06:03): So I think AI is one big way, one big thing that's affecting all industries, but particularly journalism where writing is what we do for a living. And then I would say an energy climate in particular, it's been my final column for, let me back up a minute. My final column for Cipher News, which was a news outlet that I led, which was supported by Breakthrough Energy. We unfortunately had to shut down earlier this year due to some funding changes. And my final column was about the pendulum of human society, and particularly the pendulum of energy and climate. And I think it really swung pretty far in one direction right after COVID to have this fervor about energy and climate. And I think that brought a lot of interest to the beat. And in fact, Cipher was part of the pendulum swing, if I want to be totally honest and humble about it.
• 0:14
  (06:59): And now that pendulum is swinging back and AI to come back to that is also affecting the conversation because my beat now here at Axios, it's not in my title. For example, I'm an energy and climate reporter, but it is part of my beat, and that is if I wasn't doing AI maybe I would be doing more climate. Although for the record, just today when we recorded this, I did a big story on climate change. So to be clear, it's not an either or, but there's only so much time and energy to go around, no pun intended about the energy. So I do think that the energy and climate space of journalism has waxed and waned a bit as well, but there's still a lot of strong journalists out there. Our team is very impressive. Heatmap as good work. Bloomberg has an incredible team, but there have been changes and challenges,
• 0:15
  Bill Loveless (07:54): Certainly has been. And looking back, I mean energy and climate change have been prominent issues for the past 20 years or so because of the US fracking revolution, heightened concerns over climate change, advances in renewables and new geopolitical risks associated with energy among many other things. How has coverage of energy policy and climate change evolved since you started reporting on it?
• 0:16
  Amy Harder (08:19): Oh my goodness, it's evolved so much, and you're catching me at a pretty reflective stage because I've been into this new old job as I like to call it for about a month and a half, and boy, am I on a steep learning curve for AI. I attended this gathering where we went deep on AI for a couple of hours and I felt like I had stumbled into an advanced physics class and was completely lost.
• 0:17
  (08:47): And on the one hand, that can be kind of overwhelming and a little confusing, but on the other hand, it's really exciting. And I say all this to say that as journalists we're taught to learn, we're getting paid to learn, which is amazing. That's a pretty unusual type of job where you get paid to learn something new and then explain it to people. And along all those things you mentioned from fracking to geopolitics to renewables, we learn about all of that, and we kind of go a little bit with where the stream goes of the topics. And so when I first started, it was the dawn of the oil and gas boom and fracking. That's why I traveled to North Dakota and Colorado and even California to talk about the growth in fracking and horizontal drilling and the impacts both economic and environmental that increased oil and gas activity had on communities.
• 0:18
  (09:43): And then President Trump won the first time. And that's kind of when I sort of in response to corporations as well, doubling down on climate change, I sort of emphasized my coverage in that area more. And then came the job at Cipher, supported by Breakthrough. That was really a big step in that direction of really getting into the weeds of new climate technologies. And I learned so much that I'm now taking with me, and now we're onto a new adventure, which is AI. And it's not necessarily the case that you sort of like a stream that picks up sediments along the way. Everything I've learned over the last 15 years helps inform where I'm at today. And those days talking to communities, and one that pops to my mind is Greeley, Colorado, where there was a drilling proposal to be three or 400 feet from an elementary school. Today the debate is data centers being in neighborhoods who don't want it. So there's so many lessons learned, and I just love how it's such a broad beat that you never get bored. And ultimately, I want to like what I do for a living.
• 0:19
  Bill Loveless (10:54): By the way, the description you gave of journalism was the one I use all the time, and I really continue to do so. And that is you're paid to learn, to tell stories, to sit in the front row and put your hand up and ask questions and relate what you learned later. I still think it's a fascinating profession for that reason. But on AI, you raise some interesting points there. I mean, on the one hand, it's a topic you're covering intensely these days, as are energy journalists everywhere. On the other hand, it's a phenomenon that has impact on our own profession in terms of how we do the work. So you're learning about a technology that also impacts the very way you work, right?
• 0:20
  Amy Harder (11:36): Oh, yeah. It is so bizarre, and I'll be honest, I know I'm not the only one for what I'm about to say. I also ask AI in this case, ChatGPT. I ask ChatGPT about a story I'm working on about AI, and I feel weird and somehow wrong. And so I should say, to be clear, I don't ask ChatGPT to write stories for me, but I do ask it to do some research and I want to double check things. And of course, I double check the facts that it gives me. But it's weird. It’s this bizarre mental effort where I have to make sure that I keep control of my own brain function. And in fact, one thing I've just started to do, and I don't know what I'm going to do with it as a reporting tool, but as I'm talking with people in this industry, at the end of my interviews, I ask them, what do you use AI for and what concerns do you have as a human? And I'm not going to spoil it now, but I've asked two people. So again, very early in my reporting, and it's fascinating what I'm hearing, and I think there's something to be said for really examining this.
• 0:21
  Bill Loveless (12:49): Well, what concerns do you have as a journalist about AI? I mean, obviously it can enhance your work and as you say, you can use it for some research. There's nothing wrong with that, but on the other hand, what risks are associated with AI for you, the reporter?
• 0:22
  Amy Harder (13:07): Yeah. Well, I think there's many different layers to answering that question. I think the first most obvious is do we need to employ journalists when we can just have AI write stories? Of course. I personally believe we need journalists, and so does the leadership of Axios. And I should say that Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, the founders of Axios are very bullish on AI and they're also very bullish on strong journalism. There is a way to do both. I think, again, at a high level, to what degree do certain jobs go away and journalism because AI can do it. So that's sort of the most obvious one. And then I would say there's two more. As a journalist, I think there's, just intellectually speaking, it's very easy to want to outsource things as much as possible to save you time. I think it's all about time. We never have enough time, and in the similar way that we don't, when we have a math problem, we don't get out our pencil and do long division. We get out a calculator. And so I think it's important for us as journalists to make sure we don't outsource too much. And I experienced this writing my last column at Cipher back in July, and I mentioned that only because I had gone quite some time without writing, maybe a year or two writing anything substantial.
• 0:23
  Bill Loveless (14:34): You were the editor.
• 0:24
  Amy Harder (14:35): Exactly. I was editing, right? I was managing, doing other things. And so it was a while since I had written anything. And so I was like, oh my goodness, I could just have ChatGPT write this, and of course I didn't. But I'm saying the temptation is there, and I think for two reasons we shouldn't do that. One because it erodes our brain and critical thinking. Now there's been some studies that have started to connect those dots. Just anecdotally speaking, it makes every bit of sense that our brain power would erode if we don't do it. My handwriting is terrible because I don't handwriting anymore. Anyway, so that is I think very well proven anecdotally. And secondly, because it creates pretty cliched writing ChatGPT and other AI models are built upon humanity over the last several centuries, or at least the decades since the internet. And so we need to be careful. If we outsource everything to ai, we'll eventually come back to ourselves and just have a bunch of generic cliched, bad writing.
• 0:25
  Bill Loveless (15:38): You're missing the enterprise that is typical of good journalism, sort of assessing situations and considering feedback and responding and writing and researching in a very current way, responding to things and not simply an accumulation of what's on the internet. But I hear what you're saying. I think there's the risk perhaps in some news organizations even to just rely on sort of AI or temptation, I should say, to rely on AI to compile some stuff that in the past has been done by reporters. We've seen a lot of fragmentation in media over the years that we still have many of the traditional outlets, but there's nonprofits. There’s Substack. All of this has changed how stories including stories about the climate and energy reach different audiences. What do you make of different business models for journalism and in this case in particular for energy and climate journalism?
• 0:26
  Amy Harder (16:40): Yeah, there's a lot of different business models for journalism, and there's pros and cons to all of them, and I've personally experienced different ones. I would say at Cipher we are supported philanthropically by Breakthrough Energy. That was one way to do it. But obviously sometimes you're at the whim of changing priorities and then it becomes not as good. There's also being supported by advertising and live events. That's really where Axios makes a lot of its money. One thing that's been interesting to me is the growth of live events and how that brings in a lot of money through sponsorship in a very similar way that you would have a company sponsor a newsletter, they would sponsor a live event. And I think with the advent of AI going to become even more valuable because hopefully we will still want to gather as humans and live events will have an even greater premium as AI kind of dilutes the potential for writing. And I know I keep going back to AI, but that's
• 0:27
  Bill Loveless (17:53): Hard to avoid.
• 0:28
  Amy Harder (17:55): I mean, it is as I'm the millionth person to say, it's a little bit like the internet. How do you not talk about the internet when it first came onto the scene? So I would say Substack… an independent substack writer. I admire people who choose that route. I personally wouldn't want to do it right now in the stage of my career, there's something to be said for being part of a team. I mentioned the independent Substack or Substack-similar approach because no matter where you get your money, you've faced criticism for it. So when we get criticism at Axios by environmentalists. Fossil fuel companies advertised in Axios, I got criticism for working being funded by Breakthrough Energy, which is funded by Bill Gates. So I was bad and so far as I was associated with a billionaire. And my response to that is nothing's free And different models have their pros and cons, and I don't shun any one model. I think the way you do it, you need to do it right. So for example, we were not at Cipher, we were not influenced by Breakthrough Energy when we wrote stories that affected things involving Breakthrough Energy. And same thing at Axios. It's not like we know who's advertising or if it's a fossil fuel company. Really there is really a firewall between what we do in the advertising section, and I think that's really important.
• 0:29
  Bill Loveless (19:23): When you were at Cipher, did you encounter any skepticism about its editorial integrity because it was funded by Gates and philanthropy and it had a certain — its mission was to really focus on clean tech.
• 0:30
  Amy Harder (19:38): No, we didn't. Well, sorry, you asked if we faced skepticism. I would say most of the skepticism came at the very beginning when I announced that I was joining. And that's because people didn't know what the hell I was doing. They were like, what? She's leaving to go work at a venture fund. And as with most things, once we started the product and we hired this amazing team of journalists who have become close friends of mine, they saw that, oh, this is journalism. Okay, I understand. And when I left The Wall Street Journal to go to Axios, I got a very similar set of skeptical responses. Why would you leave The Wall Street Journal to go work for this company that nobody knows? Because back then in 2017, it was the new kid on the block. And so I think you just prove by doing, and the model for Cipher was to be like the Kaiser Health news in energy space and KFF News, I think that's a official name now is funded by a foundation, but it has partnerships with driven news outlets around the world, and it's really gotten a very good reputation despite, or in part because of this philanthropic funding.
• 0:31
  (20:50): And so there's lots of good ways to do it. You just have to show readers day in and day out what you're doing. And I think they'll come around.
• 0:32
  Bill Loveless (20:58): Studies show that climate change is an important issue to the US public as a whole, but not all that big when it comes to voting. And there's still a big divide over the issue among Democrats and Republicans. The same can be said of public attitudes over energy. How do you navigate political polarization when reporting on climate and energy policy?
• 0:33
  Amy Harder (21:19): Yeah, it's something I think about a lot because it is more often than not a lower tier or back burner issue. That's part of the reason why I like it. Maybe I like to be the underdog, and I also want to have a life and balance. And sometimes if you cover politics or Congress, you're at the whim of an extremely tumultuous news cycle all the time, whereas with energy and climate, it's not all the time. So I think it's one to just acknowledge that in stories and say that it's not a top tier issue, but also find ways to make it relatable to people, whether that's one of my last columns I did for Axios before launching Cipher was about my own journey of buying a clean, efficient, safe and affordable car. And I ultimately got a Toyota Prius, which is, spoiler alert, very boring.
• 0:34
  (22:20): But in the journey of buying that car, I discovered that I couldn't buy a Subaru Crosstrek hybrid because of, and I won't get into the whole details now, but the reasons actually mapped all the way up to President Trump during his first term. And so I was able to connect the dots of what a US president, the decisions made by a US president was impacting the types of cars I as an individual can buy. And to me, that's really important way to connect to these issues to the average person. I also think on this, one of the challenges that I've been thinking about lately is that the decisions we make today on buying a car or putting a heat pump in our house — they have zero bearing on extreme weather for the next, I don't know, 10 to 50 years. So we're really dealing with two different sets of problems within the climate and energy bucket. And that's just really confusing and hard for the average person to think about. Certainly when there's so much else going on in the world that's demanding our attention in a much faster timeline.
• 0:35
  Bill Loveless (23:31): Well, do you think the narrative around climate change has shifted at all in the public? At one point it seemed as though the focus was on future risk, and then it seemed as though there was more concern of a present day reality. I'm not quite sure where the narrative is these days. Perhaps you can tell me, and if so, how has that affected your reporting?
• 0:36
  Amy Harder (23:58): I would go back to the pendulum metaphor. I operate by metaphors because it helps me understand it. And so I think a pendulum swings right back and forth from a fixed spot, but in this case, in a debate, a society wide debate, the base of the pendulum is actually subtly moving while we're having these conversations. And so I would say for a while there, we really were actively debating whether or not climate change is real, should we do something? And we were debating that for decades, and that's for a lot of reasons that we don't need to get into here for the sake of time.
• 0:37
  (24:40): I think that has really changed, and we're really not debating if climate change is here and if we should do something. It very much is, it's a very big problem, we need to do something about it. I do think we've moved past this, even though President Trump continues to throw cold water on it, I think his comments on the matter are not landing quite as strong as they did before. And now, and you hear this from the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, we're debating how bad of a problem it is, and that's a subtle but important distinction. So I would say that at a high level, we've moved to more of a discussion of how bad is it, what are the solutions, what are the problems with those solutions, such as wind and solar don't always produce energy. Obviously there's ways to solve that, but nonetheless, that's where we're focusing on.
• 0:38
  (25:33): I would say me as a journalist, I go along with these changing focuses, and sometimes I wish I could grab a hold of this intangible society debate and say, Hey, let's talk about this instead. But as journalists, you're really, I don't want to say we're along for the ride. We have a more active role than that, but it's our job to help the public dissect what's happening. It's not our job to tell the world what to do. And so it's a subtle distinction. So it's one that we're, and now I talk about going along the river. I would say it's a raging, very wide river of AI exuberance, and we're all just trying to understand it and the details of AI, things like inference and training and chips, I find that, candidly, a little boring, but it's also important. And so I say that to say what I do a deep dive into inference and training of AI, probably not, but it's something I need to learn about and I need to go along with it. In the same way. A few years ago, I did a deep dive into hydrogen and electrolysis. I'm not doing that as much anymore. And that's because the debate has changed.
• 0:39
  Bill Loveless (26:54): Yeah, it's interesting, the deep dives that are necessary for journalists just to get up to speed each year, the Center on Global Energy Policy conducts the week long program for energy reporters called the Energy Journalism Fellows Program, and it gives them some time off the beat to deepen their understanding of complex issues associated with energy and climate change, like finance, science, technology, geopolitics, policy. We've had some 180 reporters from the US and other countries participating in the program since 2017, and they recognize the importance of keeping up with these issues, not only from experts they hear from, but also from each other. What do you think are the biggest challenges for reporters trying to explain complex issues like grid reliability, permitting reform, carbon markets, AI. Not only to informed audiences, and I think the work you do for Axios is primarily for an informed audience, but also for general audiences. And perhaps there, I'm drawing back more on your days, newspaper days, right? In The Wall Street Journal.
• 0:40
  Amy Harder (28:02): Yeah, I would say I think about our audience a lot, and I would actually say that I try to keep my target audience pretty much the same no matter what. And I think you should always go more general than you think. Always explain things even if you think you don't need to explain them. I think at Axios we have our energy newsletter that is definitely a more sophisticated audience in the energy climate space. But let's remember that the people who are reading Future of Energy and Axios, maybe they're a staffer for a Congressperson or they do greenhouse gas reporting inside a tech company. Those people only know deeply about their area of focus. They don't know about everything else happening in the energy and climate space. And we were always writing for the broadest audience in the energy and climate space. So when I write, for example, I did a story recently about a venture capital gathering or a finance gathering that had people like Bill Gates and John Arnold and Vinod Khosla there, and there's a line in there that I said it had the vibe of Shark Tank crossed with a TED Talk.
• 0:41
  Bill Loveless (29:30): I've read that. I enjoyed that.
• 0:42
  Amy Harder (29:32): And I have a venture capital friend, actually she's in venture capital, and she said, oh, venture capitalists hate it when we're likened to Shark Tank. And I said, well, I'm not writing this story for the venture capitalists that were at the gathering. I'm writing it for everybody else who wasn't there and who are far removed from the venture capital world. And describing it as Shark Tank is definitely the vibe that it had. Was it exactly like Shark Tank? No, Mark Cuban was not there, but at a high level, that's what it felt like. And so that's the way I try to generalize that in a way that the story can be accessible to most people. Now, I'll say I sometimes do the mom test. Would my mom understand this article? And sometimes she calls me up and she's like, oh, I started reading your story, but I didn't really understand it. And sometimes she's like, oh, I really liked your story today. And so I think it's important to be more general than not because that's what people are interested in. Even if you're a super duper expert in something, you still want to know how it fits into the big picture.
• 0:43
  Bill Loveless (30:46): Where do you see gaps in today's energy and climate coverage that journalists should be filling?
• 0:44
  Amy Harder (30:52): I was just thinking about this the other day and talking about with a colleague, and I'm guilty of this as much as anybody else in the journalism space might be. We do a really great job of covering the beginning of things, things when they're launched, things when they start to happen. And that's because people come to us with the launch. I want to get better. And I think all of us can get better at covering things when they don't work out. I think failure is an extremely informative lesson and it should not be viewed as it is, which is a big, scary, bad thing, but instead, a lesson to how to do things better in the future. And this is particularly important in energy and climate where failure is a big risk and it's common, it's very common. That's part of the system of investing in new technologies is failure.
• 0:45
  (31:46): And I'm not just talking about technologies here, but that's one of the clearer examples. I will say that the reason why we don't cover as much the sort of accountability of an effort after it's launched. I'm talking months, years down the line, and this might come off as a cop out, but we just don't have time. We're just bombarded by the news of the day and the week, and it can be hard to remember to go back and dig up things that were newsy a year ago. And it also would take a long time if it didn't flame out completely. It can take a time to uncover what happened. And again, everything comes down to time in my book in terms of navigating a lot of things in life. And so that's one gap that I see that I would personally like to get better at.
• 0:46
  Bill Loveless (32:37): The news profession ranks pretty low when they do surveys of professions along with Congress and some other institutions. Do you find it, I mean, you've been at this for some time now. Do you find more resistance when you go out and work on stories in terms of people who just see a journalist and immediately think, I don't trust this person.
• 0:47
  Amy Harder (33:07): It's something that I have noticed? I think it's one, I think that, to answer your question, it depends on who I'm talking to. I think the more, and I don't know if these are the exact best words to use, but the more insidery audience I think understands the role of journalism pretty well, and there's good relationships there in the energy and climate space. I think there have been times, and this was many years ago, I think maybe during the first Trump administration, but I grew up on a cattle ranch in a rural part of Washington state, and I went into the only bar that's in town of my little town, and somehow it came up that I was a journalist and somebody was like, oh, you work at CNN, and they just assumed I worked at CNN because that's their only connection to journalism. And they did not say it in a positive way. They said it in a quite judgmental way. So I think depending on where you're at in the country and what types of folks you're hanging out with, I think there's definitely some skepticism there and you just have to take it in stride. I don't try to change their minds because that's not going to succeed, but I am not saying I never will. I think someday it might be interesting to try to change people's minds
• 0:48
  Bill Loveless (34:37): With more companies branding themselves as part of the quote unquote energy transition. How do you separate real progress from spin? I mean, you've covered, you've done considerable coverage of clean tech financing breakthroughs, all of this stuff. We all get these news releases declaring some tremendous advance in technology. How do you analyze this? How do you determine what is newsworthy?
• 0:49
  Amy Harder (35:02): It's really hard, and it's something I grapple with every day. I will also say that it's very subjective. I think it's important to understand that journalism is subjective because therefore there's multiple right answers, right? And sure there's some wrong answers as well in journalism, but there's a lot of ways to do journalism well and to write about these topics in a useful and informative way. And this is another area that's really had a big pendulum swing. I think for a while we had this concept of greenwashing where companies were not doing things but saying they were. And then the last couple of years we've had this term green hushing where companies are doing things but not talking about them. I have actually not written about either of those trends too much, and instead, I tend to do more trend stories connecting the dots on multiple different initiatives or companies.
• 0:50
  (36:05): So that's how I try to paint a broader brush and to show what impact or not is happening. I will say that in this space of energy and climate, because it's so big and broad and there's so many different metrics by which we can judge success or failure, you can realistically and genuinely and factually use a dozen different metrics to paint a picture of a world that's going down the toilet in a flaming hot mess, or you can paint a world that's resilient and it's going to be solved by all of our problems will be solved by AI. And there's so many different ways to judge things that for me, that's one reason why I do the trend pieces because I think it helps make sense of the noise a little bit more, but it's hard and it's something that I think about every day.
• 0:51
  (37:03): And I think sometimes success. I guess the last thing I would say on this is that, again, it comes down to time in my book, sometimes one single announcement or technology breakthrough may not have a big impact. Now it'll be decades later before it could have an impact. And so the significance of the news moment may not be in that particular moment, but later on it could have a big impact. And one example of that is Google just announced recently that it's going to have a natural gas plant with carbon capture on it for its AI data centers. And I think it's an interesting announcement. I think it's fascinating even more so if it will. And one hypothesis, which I'm sure has been out there in journalism and in the public debate already, is to what extent the tech companies will fuel the hardest, most expensive breakthrough climate technologies because they're able to afford it. And this natural gas carbon capture example is interesting because of its potential, even if in the moment it might not seem quite as big of a deal,
• 0:52
  Bill Loveless (38:19): What kinds of stories about energy and climate do you think will dominate the next year, the next five years? And I got a feeling AI is going to come up again here, but it's one, it's a big one, but looking across the spectrum here, what stands out?
• 0:53
  Amy Harder (38:34): Yes, certainly AI will continue to be a dominant story, but it's not the only one. I think there's this, oh goodness, I wish I had, and I might try to look this up and say it later, but is it the Gartner Cycle, the hype cycle? Maybe we can look it up later and you can put it in the show notes, but it's this cycle that shows, and it's very well known in economics where there's this huge push of hype and attention, and then it comes crashing down, and then you're just on the plateau of middling acceptance. And there was this exuberance of climate right after COVID in ‘21 and ‘22. Yes, the Gartner Hype Cycle, that's what it's called. And there was this huge push for excitement over climate in ‘21 and ‘22. And again, that's the pendulum swinging. Now we've come back and I think there's things that are still happening, even if they're not being talked about as much, things are still happening.
• 0:54
  (39:41): There's the event I just attended recently in Half Moon Bay, California with the high-profile investors. They're really ambitious and confident about investing in new technology. So those are the types of things. So that's one thing I'll be focusing on in addition to AI. And then obviously I would be remiss if I didn't mention everything that the Trump administration is doing on this front, which is obviously a ton of things. One area that I find particularly interesting is how the administration is choosing to support certain projects and areas despite their green credentials, nuclear power. What
• 0:55
  Bill Loveless (40:28): Do you mean by that? What do you mean by that?
• 0:56
  Amy Harder (40:29): Oh, things like geothermal and fission and fusion are technologies that this administration supports, even though they're also very important climate technologies, that's not why this administration supports them. They support them for other reasons. Energy security, purity is one of the reasons. I also think once you get into politics, there's this weird sort of, I guess it's not weird, but me as sort of a nonpolitical person, I find it weird. That's the euphemism for it. Anyways, once you get into this political echo chamber, it's almost like anything that Democrats like Republicans hate, and it becomes just this magnet or the opposite of a magnet impact and doesn't actually matter what the thing is, you're just not going to like it if the other party does. And nuclear power has traditionally been associated with Republicans, and that's one reason why I think the Trump administration has always supported it, because Republicans have always supported it anyway.
• 0:57
  (41:32): So that's one area that I'll be looking at to see where are the unique avenues where climate technologies will continue. And I think geothermal and nuclear power are two clear examples of that. One last point on that, I was chatting with somebody the other day for a story, and they said the big beautiful bill is the biggest climate law since the Inflation Reduction Act. And I found that to be a fascinating comment because it's all relative, right? The Inflation Reduction Act was huge, biggest climate law ever in history. And then Trump repealed most of it, but he kept a lot there. And I should say Trump and Congress repealed most of it, but he kept a lot there. And because the IRA was so big, the things that he kept actually amounted to quite a lot just on their own. And so I think that's a fascinating point that I hadn't quite grasped until that conversation. So anyways, lots to cover. No dull moments.
• 0:58
  Bill Loveless (42:34): Well, how do you see the role of journalists like yourself evolving?
• 0:59
  Amy Harder (42:38): That's something I think about a lot in the context of, spoiler alert, AI. I think I came from, I guess you could call it traditional journalism, National Journal, which doesn't fully really exist anymore as a news outlet, which it was based in dc. But then I went to The Wall Street Journal, which is pretty traditional journalism, and then Axios and Cipher, and now back to Axios. And it gets me thinking about what's the best place to be right now. And I was talking to a couple of different outlets that I don't need to name, but some of them were in traditional media and I didn't want to go back there.
• 1:00
  Bill Loveless (43:22): Why was that?
• 1:01
  Amy Harder (43:23): Well, it was more that I knew Axios was an extremely well run company with good culture and good people. And that has become extremely important to me, to work with people and at a place that just has good values and good systems and structures in place. And so that was the main reason I went back to Axios. In addition to it being, I should say, that was the non-journalism reason I went back, the overarching reason is it's a great place to work and a great place to have my journalism. But I do think there's a debate about: where does journalism go from here? And I think AI, I don't know what AI will do to content on the internet. Axios reported not that long ago that 50% of the content on the internet is already written by AI, which is insane. Now, that doesn't include articles behind a paywall, and most journalism is still written by humans, but that's insane. That just happened since 2022. And again, this goes back to time because everything does. And so if writing somehow becomes extremely commoditized, where does journalism go from there? And I don't know, that's outside my wheelhouse of expertise, but it does get you thinking of what other roles can a journalist have if it's not just writing stories?
• 1:02
  Bill Loveless (44:49): Do you worry about the profession going forward? I mean, what might be the state of journalism in 10 years?
• 1:03
  Amy Harder (44:54): Certainly. I always worry, and I think if you don't, your head's in the sand, I think I'm also humble in realizing that we just don't know what we don't know. When I use ChatGPT, I often have been thinking this moment is a little bit like back in the early days of the internet where you had dial up internet and you couldn't be on the phone if you were on the internet. And I remember it's just really arcane. Like you had chat rooms where you'd go and talk to strangers, which in hindsight is so many red flags there, but it feels like ChatGPT is the very beginning of a whole new world and the internet itself through journalism into this whole new world and undercut our traditional advertising models and all of that. And many of us have come out stronger. Axios is an incredibly strong media company in this day and age. I just don't know what the future holds, but I know that it will hold something different than what is happening now.
• 1:04
  Bill Loveless (46:07): And as you know, many strong outlets out there, yours among them. But the times the post Bloomberg, Politico, I mean, I could go on with a list of them. I'll tell you one I worry about is the local newspapers, because so many of the energy and climate stories, the local and the men and women covering them are not necessarily branded as energy or climate reporters. They cover government, the local government or state government. And there things like zoning and security issues and other things that are the responsibility of mayors and governors all have a lot to do with how we respond to challenges, whether they're energy reliability, or storms or climate-induced things. And that's perhaps the area where the news coverage is most at risk among these not so well funded and supported newspapers, radio stations and that sort of thing.
• 1:05
  Amy Harder (47:07): I'm so glad you mentioned that, and I completely agree. And unfortunately, the decimation of local news is not a new trend. It's been something that's been going on for quite some time. And I think unfortunately, AI is just a further challenge to that. Just another plug for Axios. Axios does have its growing local footprint in a lot of different cities. I think what I hope happens with AI is that AI can automate certain things so then we can devote our human time and attention to deeper stories that require a lot of time and effort and digging and getting out to city council and doing things like that. That's what I hope, and that'll be something I advocate for within the walls of Axios. But I do think not only is local news important just for the education of humanity, but also to your point about climate, people care about things that are closest to them. And so climate is too often talked about in very abstract terms. So having stories that talk about the local impact is really important.
• 1:06
  Bill Loveless (48:19): Amen. I agree with you on that. Well, Amy, it's been a delight to have an opportunity to talk to you again and to talk to you about profession, your profession, and one I spent decades in as well with so much at stake right now, so much to report on and the very nature of the reporting changing even as we speak. So thanks again for taking the time to join me today on Columbia Energy Exchange.
• 1:07
  Amy Harder (48:44): You're very welcome. Thanks again for inviting me.
• 1:08
  Bill Loveless (48:52): That's it for this week's episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Amy Harder and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. Mary Catherine O'Connor produced the show, Greg Vilfranc engineered the show. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy Policy, visit us online@energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. We'll see you next week.