Inside Climate News staff writer Nicholas Kusnetz on Tuesday won first place for explanatory reporting for a series on carbon capture in the 22nd annual awards sponsored by the Society for Environmental Journalists.
Kusnetz, who is based in New York City and covers the fossil fuel industry, took readers from Texas to Wyoming in reporting “Pipe Dreams: Is Carbon Capture a Climate Solution or a Dangerous Distraction,” describing potential benefits and drawbacks of technologies that capture carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions or straight from the air.
Supporters, he wrote, “point to modeling by academics and others that show the technologies could play a critical role in curbing emissions, particularly from hard-to-tackle sectors like heavy industry and shipping. Their arguments have won unprecedented spending on carbon capture over the past year, with governments in Europe, Canada and Australia also committing billions in subsidies. Proponents say all this funding could prove transformative and, within a decade, could help cut hundreds of millions of metric tons of pollution annually.
“But many progressive climate groups like Greenpeace and 350.org say oil companies are promoting the technologies as a distraction to avoid phasing out their products. At best, they argue, carbon capture and removal will play a marginal role in limiting emissions. At worst, they warn, subsidies for the technologies will prolong demand for fossil fuels, squandering money that would be better spent on replacing coal, oil and gas altogether.”
In their comments for the award in the small media category, SEJ judges wrote that Kusnetz’ series “told a complicated story in a way that is accessible and understandable to readers. His reporting showed how the oil industry lobbied to shape climate policy toward carbon capture and storage.
“The result was more than $12 billion in federal spending from the bipartisan infrastructure bill and, last year, tens of billions more in potential loans and tax incentives for this controversial and largely unproven technology. Many environmental advocates warn that these technologies are at best a distraction, and at worst the latest attempt by oil companies to delay climate action.”
Also in the explanatory reporting category, Anne Marshall-Chalmers, a freelance reporter on assignment for Inside Climate News and a former ICN fellow from the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, won third place for her story, “How a Timber Mill Spawned a Black Community, and Likely Sparked the Fire That Destroyed It. A Story of Segregation and Climate Change.”
Reporting from Weed, California, Marshall-Chalmers described the 2022 wildfire that raced through the Lincoln Heights neighborhood below Mount Shasta. The judges said she provided a “poignant remembrance” of a community beset by “redlining, water rights, environmental contamination, economics and eventually wildfires” that “won’t likely recover.”
