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CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir said he intentionally avoided using the word “climate” when covering the 2025 California wildfires at an Institutes of Politics discussion to keep the attention of audiences skeptical of climate change.
“It’s one of the most viral things we’ve done, and it doesn’t mention the word climate, other than my title on the lower third,” he told a crowd at the Harvard Kennedy School on Wednesday evening.
The event, moderated by Adelmania Consulting Founder Marc Adelman, is part of a new series at the IOP that brings a variety of creatives, including a writer from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and a New York Times bestselling author, to study storytelling.
During the Wednesday talk, Weir and Goodpower CEO Leah Qusba emphasized the importance of refocusing climate conversations on social media. Qusba, a former communications director for the Alliance for Climate Education, said that once the word “climate” is used in a video, social media algorithms push the content toward people who already identify with climate activists, rather than conservatives or people vulnerable to misinformation.
“When you go in the front door with climate, the algorithm is going to immediately sort you into a bucket to just reach progressives or just reach super left playing Democrats,” she said.
Since President Donald Trump took office, White House has reportedly circulated a list of banned words, that include “climate change,” in an effort to rollback funding for climate related research and initiatives.
Qusba, whose non-profit GoodPower is focused on accelerating the global transition to renewable energy sources, warned that the internet creates “rabbit holes” of information that limit audience reach and confine people to certain perspectives.
“There’s audiences that are sort of trying to be climate supporters, but we haven’t reached them yet, because the internet tribalizes us into these echo chambers,” she said.
Weir said that he felt an obligation to report on climate change because of the people he saw affected by natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.
“The only solution we have is to rally around each other and our local community and nature based solutions and build resilience wherever we are,” he said.
While both said that climate change was a growing problem, they said there were already a number of success stories for climate mitigation and adaptation. Qusba cited Pakistan’s transition to decentralized renewables and Texas’s mass construction of wind turbines.
Despite Texas’s Republican state legislature, Qusba said the state’s politicians have been convinced that implementing renewable energy has economic benefits.
“It’s safe, it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s affordable. It creates jobs,” she said.
Qusba said that though there are people who deny the existence of climate change, a decarbonized future is still possible.
“I think the story I’d want to tell is that a future without fossil fuels does exist. It’s out there, it’s happening” she said. “The energy transition is inevitable, and it’s not a matter of if it will happen. It’s when it will happen.”
