If you want to fight climate change, one way is to pay journalists to spread the word while training them in environmental ideology. Another way is to promote products that are in line with the transition to renewable energy so that eco-friendly companies can profit from the so-called “moral opportunity.”
This is the approach of 1Earth Fund, which offers courses, certificates, and grants to climate-focused reporters in order to sound the alarm about fossil fuels while promoting green energy solutions. The organization was founded by Roy Richards Jr., whose family business, Southwire, sells green energy products and services.
The 1Earth Fund educational platform includes a “masterclass” of 11 video programs, including “Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” “Climate Solutions: Clean Energy,” and “Climate Change Language and Communication Strategies.” Reporters who complete at least eight video programs and attend a live training event receive a climate-reporting certificate.
The program targets more conservative states in particular, with courses such as “Climate Change Impacts in the Southeast” and “Climate Solutions in the Southeast; Drawdown Georgia.” According to its website, Drawdown Georgia, which Richards co-chairs, is “a diverse and inclusive movement to lift up and celebrate our progress on five fronts: transportation, buildings and materials, food and agriculture, electricity, and land sinks.”
Southwire, a Georgia-based company founded in 1937 by Richards’s father, Roy Richards Sr., offers products and services for electric utilities as well as for the transportation and construction industries. While many progressive and conservative organizations offer ideological training programs for journalists, 1Earth Fund is unique in that it also produces the products that are being promoted as the solution.
Brian Balfour, senior vice president of research at the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, called 1Earth Fund’s program “advocacy dressed up as news reporting” and said that the articles it finances are “sympathetic and almost promotional to renewable energy sources.”
1Earth Fund offers grants of up to $200,000 to reporters and media companies for news reporting that’s “suitable for a broad audience in purple states” and “can be piloted in Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.” Affiliates and beneficiaries of 1Earth Fund include the Pulitzer Center, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Savannah Morning News, The Tampa Bay Times, and the Orlando Sentinel. Recent 1Earth Fund grants include $65,000 to the Wilmington Star-News in North Carolina and $50,000 to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In a YouTube interview, Richards explained how Southwire had changed from a struggling company in the 1980s that was “clawing its way back from a near-bankruptcy experience, just super thin margins, barely profitable” and was run “with a lot of disregard for environmental stewardship.”
“Regulators were bad guys; environmental authorities were bad guys,” Richards said. But since then, he said, Southwire has come to see the value in working with government and has “so completely bought in to this idea of environmental stewardship and sustainability.”
Southwire also collaborates with other progressive Georgia companies, such as Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, to fight climate change through groups like Drawdown Georgia, which features a “business compact” among its members to “draw down CO2 emissions,” Richards said.
To the extent that the use of fossil fuels is reduced by, for example, replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles (EVs), the demands on the electric grid often increase, requiring substantial new investments in generation, transmission, and storage. Wind and solar power generators also often require new power lines to be put in place to connect these often remote sources to the grid.
Government intervention in the U.S. energy market goes beyond regulation to also include heavy subsidies for wind and solar power generation, as well as for buying EVs and building charging stations.
Southwire and 1Earth Fund didn’t respond to requests for comment.
