This is drawn from a much longer quote that's reproduced at a post at Climate Progress. The author is Mark Brayne who spent 30 years with the BBC.
... I often ask myself -- and, obsessively, others -- what it will take to get Western-style, ratings-and-profit-led journalism, reflecting as it does the emotions of politics, economics and public opinion, to take climate change and sustainability as seriously as it deserves, as a present, existential threat to the very survival of our species.
Putting it bluntly, I regret to have concluded that this will only happen once very large numbers of people start dying. As in, hundreds of thousands to millions, and quite clearly climate-change-related.
The Pakistan floods were shocking, as were the Russian summer peat fires and the landslides in China. But in order for enough of humanity to wake up (as we all ultimately, of course, will), not enough people died. Ouch.
