Hurricane Helene spared St. Petersburg, Florida, from a direct hit, but on top of plaguing residents with power outages, flooding and downed trees, it brought another misery that can only be described as yucky. Hundreds of people lost sewer service. Even worse, some people who fled their homes returned to find backed-up sewage over everything.

Setting aside the risk of disease, this is the sort of thing that can make anyone want to take action.

Certainly, climate change alone didn’t cause Helene to form and then ramp up fast to a Category 4 storm. On the other hand, higher-than-normal water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico fueled the high winds and heavy rains Helene carried across the southeast.

A couple of weeks before Helene, Poynter’s Beat Academy session was all about pointing audiences to their stake in climate change. As panelist Tony Barboza with the Los Angeles Times reminded us, there’s a climate change angle on any beat.

“Once you start looking it’s hard not to see it everywhere,” Barboza said.

If you need it, buy it, consume it, use it, rely on it, or want to avoid it, there’s better than even odds that climate change will push things in ways you’d rather it didn’t. Here are a few starting points. Think of them as all-purpose gateways to making the climate change connection.

Anything manmade and exposed to the elements is at risk

It’s an obvious but essential square one.

• Schools without the air conditioning to handle heat waves
• Bridges weakened by more water seeping into cracks and not built for floodwaters pressing on the piers that hold them up
• Hospitals with their heating, ventilation and air conditioning and power systems in basements that can be flooded
• Churches with roofs not built for high winds

Everything is designed for certain conditions, and when those conditions move outside that range, bad things can happen.

Staying healthy

Think heat, safe drinking water and bugs. By some estimates, heat kills more people than any other facet of extreme weather. Flooding can contaminate water supplies, or force water systems to shut down. The loss of hard freeze winters and warmer, wetter summers jacks up mosquitoes and tick populations, which spread disease through their bites.

Supply chains

The national and global links behind everyday goods can come with positive and negative climate connections.

• When drought pummeled cotton growers in Texas, the price of diapers and tampons shot up.
• On the flip side, fast food restaurants are finding growing demand for their waste oil as an ingredient in less harmful aviation fuel.
• Aluminum soda and beer can recycling is cutting the cost and carbon footprint of this lightweight metal essential to a less energy intensive economy.

Recreation

Let your antennae go up for anything that takes place outdoors.

• Tourism confronts algae blooms that send fishing enthusiasts and other tourists away from affected waters.
• The insect borne diseases above are another deterrent.
• On the plus side, from his listening post in Los Angeles, Barboza shared a Disneyland development. The theme park announced electric cars will replace the gas-powered ones in its Autopia ride.

Workers and jobs

The shift to renewable energy is shaking up the job market, creating a quilt work of winners and losers.

• The battery and electric vehicle industry in places like Georgia is creating thousands of new jobs, but putting a strain on electric supplies across the region.
• Then again, the demand for electricians is rising and is on track to grow much faster than the average across all occupations.
• And don’t forget to track who is getting trained to do what jobs in local community colleges and apprentice programs. This all gets very personal very fast.

Fun and games at Beat Academy

Poynter partnered with the Society of Environmental Journalists to produce a webinar about climate change and, as we pondered what we would do, we came up with a small game. People could shout out a topic, a setting or whatever and the panel would give a climate connection.

Christie Zizo at WKMG Orlando typed in “Growth of the space industry along the Gulf Coast and the Florida Atlantic Coast.”

Yours truly thought about scrubbed launches due to bad weather, which is already a thing. If extreme weather becomes even more problematic, that’s going to reduce the launch window.

Delaney Dryfoos with The Lens in New Orleans and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk thought of a more complicated knock-on effect. She focused on the new launch sites on the Gulf Coast.

“It disrupts wetland ecosystems in this area, and we know that as we lose wetland ecosystems, there is less of a buffer for the storm surge when storms, like Hurricane Francine, do roll into the Gulf Coast,” Dryfoos said.

Seeing the connections is what this is all about. Let that game play in your head and you’ll be finding novel stories to share with your audience.

In the webinar, our A Block focused on water-related climate change stories. Our B Block dealt with the energy transition. Here are the slides to spur your thinking in both categories.

(Screenshot/Poynter)

(Screenshot/Poynter)

Tracking Biden’s impact: A powerful search tool

In the last segment of our Beat Academy session, we walked people through using the Climate Program Portal from Atlas Public Policy. With its blend of clickable maps and smart search filters, the portal is a shortcut to finding your local climate change projects tied to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. There’s a similar portal for water projects.

The portal used to be available only to government officials and climate advocates, but when Poynter suggested opening it up to journalists, Atlas agreed.

This article from Oregon Public Broadcasting shows what’s possible when you check what happens after a project award is made. The Department of Energy promised a tribal nation a $32 million solar grant. Thanks to bureaucratic snafus, the clock could run out and the tribe might never get a dime.

Finding stories like this comes down to asking one simple question of the person running the project: How are things going?

If you are a working journalist and want access, email beatacademy@poynter.org.