Blanca Begert
Blanca Begert covers climate and energy with a focus on how policy, markets and corporate behavior shape environmental outcomes in California. Her reporting follows the money and the regulation at the same time, tying climate impacts to decisions by government agencies, lawmakers and energy companies. She works on the environment desk at the Los Angeles Times as a climate and energy reporter.
Climate and energy in California
Begert’s core beat is climate and energy, with an emphasis on California’s power sector, oil and gas industry, and the state’s efforts to cut emissions. She tracks how state agencies and legislators design and enforce rules for utilities, refiners and other energy companies, often highlighting the friction between climate goals and business interests. Her recent work includes examining how California officials respond when energy companies post outsized profits, linking corporate earnings to consumer costs and political pressure. Across this coverage, she treats climate change as a system of policies, infrastructure and markets rather than a stand-alone science topic.
Oil profits, war and regulation
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, Begert reported on how the war in Iran has driven soaring profits for oil companies and California refiners, and what state officials propose to do in response. She detailed how geopolitical conflict translated into higher earnings for energy firms, then followed the calls from California leaders for measures to curb windfall profits and protect consumers. The piece fits into a broader pattern in her work: she treats energy companies as key actors in the climate story and examines how their financial performance and business strategies collide with state oversight. Her reporting in this space often features regulators, watchdog groups and lawmakers side by side with industry voices, reflecting the regulatory and political stakes of climate and energy debates.
Climate policy and political dynamics
Before joining the Los Angeles Times, Begert reported on California climate policy and politics for Inside Climate News and Politico, where she covered state-level climate legislation, regulatory battles and the industries shaped by them. Her prior work chronicled how climate change drives shifts in sectors such as energy, agriculture and technology, and how those shifts play out in statehouses and local government.
She has anchored coverage that closely follows legislative negotiations, regulatory rulemaking and the key figures behind California’s climate agenda, including lawmakers, agency heads and corporate leaders. That experience shows through in her current reporting, which pays close attention to the design of climate policies, the political coalitions around them and their consequences for businesses and communities.
Forests, Indigenous rights and carbon markets
Begert has an extensive background covering forests, Indigenous land rights and carbon trading, including work on conflicts over protected area management and carbon markets in the Peruvian Amazon.
She has written and produced reporting on how conservation policies and climate finance schemes affect Indigenous communities and their control over land and resources. Her work has also examined policies affecting Indigenous livelihoods in Latin America, connecting local land-use decisions to global climate mechanisms.
This history gives her climate and energy coverage a wider lens, linking California’s policy debates to international questions about justice, land rights and the design of carbon markets.
Multimedia and environmental storytelling
Across outlets, Begert has worked as a reporter, editor and multimedia producer on environmental stories, including video journalism focused on climate and ecosystem issues. Her portfolio spans traditional news articles, newsletter-driven coverage of climate politics, and longer-form pieces that combine reporting with research on environmental governance. She consistently centers climate change, environmental regulation and the communities affected by them, whether she is writing about California’s energy system or forest conservation in Latin America. That mix of policy fluency, market literacy and field reporting defines her approach to the environment beat.
4 more environment journalists.
Adelaide Lang
Adelaide Lang combines climate reporting with courtroom and Indigenous-focused journalism. She reports for The Daily Telegraph, with work also appearing in The Canberra Times, and contributes guest pieces to National Indigenous Times. Her environment coverage focuses on climate-threatened islands, community resilience and how policy decisions affect people facing direct environmental risks. She follows local campaigns, adaptation efforts and political pressure while keeping the human effects clear. Lang also covers court proceedings involving public officials, including the trial of State MP Gareth Ward over historical sexual and indecent assault charges. Her reporting examines how allegations are tested in court and how the justice system handles accusations against people in power. With more than five years in digital media and courtroom reporting, she writes clear, factual accounts of events, legal processes and their consequences.
Ashleigh McMillan
Ashleigh McMillan is a breaking news reporter at The Age. She stands out for covering the environment through public events, infrastructure and everyday city life. Her reporting tracks how protests, policy decisions and sudden incidents change routines, public safety and the spaces people move through. She covers fast-moving stories across Victoria, with a focus on community tension, access and the lived effects of official decisions. Her work includes protests and public demonstrations, crime and courts, transport and ticketing changes, traffic experiments, weather, and environmental conditions in the city. She reports on what people see and feel on the ground, with attention to victims, commuters, residents and the practical consequences of legal and infrastructure decisions.
Bareket Falk
Bareket Falk uses environmental stories to show how growing bodies handle physical stress, especially heat, during exercise. She is a pediatric exercise physiologist and kinesiology professor whose work focuses on how children, adolescents and adults respond to activity across growth and development. She writes evidence-led explainers for The Conversation that test assumptions about children’s vulnerability and turn decades of exercise science into clear, practical guidance. Her core piece looks at how children and adults cope with extreme heat, walking through basic thermoregulation and challenging the idea that children are automatically more fragile. Her journalism draws directly on research into blood flow, sweating, body size and growth, keeping technical detail tight and translating findings into concrete behaviours such as pacing activity, seeking shade and hydration. She is interested in how physical activity interacts with maturation, body composition and recovery, and uses data to check myths about kids’ risk.
Bec Lorrimer
Bec Lorrimer is a visual journalist and picture editor who tells environment stories through photography and careful image selection at the Guardian. She works at the intersection of climate coverage and visual editing, using picture-led formats to show how global heating and other environmental pressures play out in everyday life. Her environment beat centres on picture galleries that track the lived experience of climate extremes, including record high temperatures in South Korea, with in pictures sequences that foreground the scale of global heating over text-led analysis. She also contributes to monthly roundups of the strongest photos and human-centred features such as a nursing home story, focusing on people and places under pressure. As a global visual editor and assistant picture editor on international fronts, she selects images across environment, politics, culture and general news, drawing on her background as a photographer, video director and photo producer.