Category Archives: Environment

Charlotte Business Journal: Business makes case at UN climate summit

Sustainability experts from Facebook (left) and VF Corp. Photo by Justin Catanoso

Most people COP21 missed a unique panel discussion at the U.S. Pavilion in Friday, Dec. 4, 2015. Called “Leaning In, How Companies Influence Climate Policy,” it was sponsored by the White House and Ceres, a U.S. nonprofit organization that advocates for sustainability leadership in the business community. Here’s the link.

Robert Morris, editor of the Charlotte Business Journal, was gracious enough to run the story on his site.

WGHP Fox 8 TV — Talking with anchor Neill McNeil about the Paris climate summit

One third of the Peruvian population — 9 million people — live in Lima. Problem is, Lima is a desert. It does not rain there. At all. Lima depends on glacier melt for the sprawling city’s drinking water. Yet those Andean glaciers have shrunk by 30 percent due to global warming. On the evening of Dec. 1, 2015, the Triad’s top news anchor invited me on WGHP-TV to talk about the UN climate summit in Paris, I was more than happy to do so.

Mongabay: Paris climate meeting begins in optimism; REDD+ part of solution?

Working for mongabay.com is such a pleasure. I have this great editor in Vermont, Glenn Scherer. He knows the issues cold. He make a good sentence great. He finds amazing photos to run with my stories. This is my last pre-COP21 story. The next one will be from Paris. Here’s Glenn’s summary:
Each nation participating in COP21 has made its own, self-determined commitment to the amount of carbon emissions it can trim from its economy.
Unfortunately, the total carbon commitments by all nations falls roughly 50% short of the cuts needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.
REDD+, a policy that allows industrial nations to keep burning fossil fuels while paying developing countries to preserve forests, may be part of the solution, though some argue it lacks the monitoring mechanisms needed to prevent cheating.

News & Observer: UN climate change summit could bring first progress in years

On the eve of the 21st United Nations climate summit in Paris, France — a city in which I will arrive on Friday morning, Dec. 4, the News & Observer of Raleigh runs on its Sunday front page a story of mine regarding what’s at stake for the talks and what obstacles lie ahead to meet carbon emissions target to slow the rate of global warming.

The story also appeared in the Charlotte Observer, and likely other McClatchy newspapers in the chain. John Knox, a Wake Forest law professor and special UN representative on climate change and human rights, was a key source.

Wake Forest University law professor John Knox is the United Nation’s special representative on climate change and human rights. He will be in Paris this week for the international climate summit.

News & Record: Commentary — Pope may influence climate talks

I was a staff writer for the News & Record of Greensboro from April 1987 to April 1998 — 11 years. When I decided to take the job as executive editor of a new weekly newspaper in town, The Business Journal, I was asked to leave the paper immediately, even though I was prepared to give at least four weeks notice. Today, Nov. 29, 2015, I have my first byline in my old daily newspaper in 17 years. It’s a commentary on the UN climate summit in Paris, France, which I will cover for mongabay.com.

Mongabay.com: Catholic bishops ask for binding, transformative COP21 climate treaty

Indonesia on fire, October 16, 2015. An image posted on Twitter purporting to show the smoke-choked city of Palangkaraya. Damages from the record wildfires has already topped US $30 billion; acrid smoke has sickened half a million people. “This is my urgent call… Guarantee the future of Oceania. Change society to a low-carbon lifestyle,” said Monsignor John Ribat, President of the Federation of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Oceania and the Archbishop of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Glenn Scherer, my talented editor at mongabay.com found this photo to run with a breaking news story I wrote for the web site on Oct. 27, 2015. Jim Yardley, my friend and New York Times bureau chief in Rome, let me know about an important Vatican press conference that would be streamed live on Oct. 26 and that I should “cover” from my office at Wake Forest. Amazingly, I did. I split my screen with the Vatican’s YouTube channel on one half, and a Word doc for notes on the other. As Glenn’s cutline points out, the bishops call for a binding, transformative agreement at COP21 in Paris in December is critical. I made my 6 p.m. deadline, Gleen edited it expertly and filled it in with amazing photos. The story is here.

On Nov. 5, 2015, my 56th birthday, I received this gift from the United Nation’s Council on Climate Change (UNFCCC):

“You have been successfully registered for the UNFCCC session Twentyfirst Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) and the eleventh Session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP11).”

Mongabay.com: Papal encyclical draws harsh critique from Peru’s private sector

Elena Conterno, who heads Peru’s fisheries group, is a fierce critic of the papal encyclical. Photo by Emilia Catano

He may be beloved in his home region of Latin America. He may enjoy 82 percent approval ratings in Peru, where three out of four people are Catholic. But Pope Francis has some fierce critics. And Elena Conterno is one of them. As Glenn Scherer summed up at mongabay.com:

Peru’s commercial fishing industry is sustainable, productive and well regulated, says Elena Conterno, but the illegal “artisanal” fleet of the poor is “growing too fast and unsustainable.”
“Why blame business?” Conterno asks of the Pope’s encyclical, when “the public sector is really lagging,” failing to regulate the environment and the climate, and provide for the poor.
“Who are the ones doing the most illegal activities? It’s the poor. Not the big companies,” she says. The Pope’s encyclical “is more than naïve. It lacks institutional analysis.”

A tense, compelling interview, start to finish with a the head of the Peru’s fishing industry,

Mongabay.com: Pope’s encyclical draws support from Peru’s #1 environmental official

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is Peru’s minister of the environment, and among the most most influential climate change policy makers. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

I remember Manuel Pulgar-Vidal well from the UN Climate Summit in Lima in December 2014. He was seemingly everywhere, certainly at every press conference. He was friendly and accessible. I was offered to interview him the day COP20 opened, but declined; I could not get to Lima so soon.

In mid-July, 2015, through the high-level connections of Enrique Ortiz, my fixer and interpreter for two weeks in Puru, I got an hour with the minister. He had studied he encyclical and had a lot to say about it. He was less keen on discussing the Tia Maria copper mine in southern Peru. It was a great interview, linked here, and I’m glad mangabay.com chose to run this and two others.

Mongabay Edior Glenn Scherer’s summary:

1, Peruvian Environmental Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal hosted COP20 in Lima, and will play a leading role at Paris COP 21 in December.

2. He praises the Pope’s controversial encyclical written in “the language of a poet, with the precision of an engineer, and by a leader with the moral authority to have influence.”

3. “We [will] have an agreement in Paris,” says the minister. Obama, China, France, Peru, many nations want it. “The political moment is key, and this papal document is very helpful.”

More photos by Emilia Catanoso from the interview and just before:

Hanging out with an Indian tribe outside his office. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

During the interview. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Not too happy in the direction change of the interview. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Mongabay.com: Pope and Peru’s top mining CEO agree and at odds on environment

Roque Benavides, CEO of BuenaVentura, Peru’s largest precious metals mining company. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Through the good fortune of meeting TV producer Luis Moray in Lima, I was able to spend the last morning of my reporting during my first of two trips to Peru last summer interviewing one of the country’s most influential businessmen — Roque Benavides, CEO of BueanaVentura Mining. He read the encyclical before our interview so he would be prepared. Mongabay.com, with expert editing by Glenn Scherer, published a series of three of my Q&A stories during the week of Pope Francis’ history visit to the United States in late September 2015. My first Q&A is here.

Glenn Scherer wrote as an intro to my interview:

Roque Benavides makes no apologies for Peru’s extraction industry, noting that it employs tens of thousands, and gives much back to the communities in which it works.
The CEO fears that the Pope’s encyclical is overly simplistic, putting too much of the blame for the environmental crisis on industry and business.
He argues forcefully that government has failed in its role as environmental protector, and that the poor are more destructive to the environment than industry.

Emilia Catanoso took a series of amazing photographs. Her best of the entire two-week experience.

Sunday News & Observer: Pope gets pushback on environment

"The life of the plant is more important than anything the pope says." Photo by Jason Houstin

Emel Salazar in La Oroya, Peru: “The life of the plant is more important than anything the pope says.” Photo by Jason Houston

Every Pulitzer Center journalist must ensure that his or her work will be published or broadcast before a grant is considered. That’s the model. They pay expenses so that your work can fill the gaps of news organizations that want foreign reporting, but no longer have staff abroad. When my Pulitzer turn came around around again last spring, I called an editor I’ve long admired but never had the opportunity to work for: John Drescher of the New & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. After explaining my project, he readily agreed to take one of my stories. I was thrilled.

So on Sept. 20, 2015, I had my first page 1 story in a Sunday daily newspaper since I left the News & Record in Greensboro in May 1998. That’s a long time before Sunday fronts, but given that the N&O practically cleared page 1 for me and published all 1,900 words I wrote, plus several photos, it was worth the wait. It’s funny, but in buying papers in Chapel Hill, I felt the same thrill I did when I was a kid, seeing my first byline in print.

Front page, The Sunday News & Observer, Sept. 20, 2015. Photo by Justin Catanoso