Earlier this month saw the announcement of the 2019 SEAL awards honoring environmental journalists who toe the activist line particularly well. The list of reporters makes more sense when you begin to dig deeper into the award and realized it is organized by Project Drawdown, an environmental group that seeks to eliminate fossil fuels. In essence the group, whose “advisors” include a star-studded list of climate activists like Wendy Abrams, May Boeve, Lyn Davis Lear, Tom Steyer, Kat Taylor, and Bill McKibben–and the celebrity power couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen–has released a list of its favorite reporters.

The SEAL Awards, which honor Sustainability, Environmental Achievement and Leadership, blurs the bounds between reporting and climate activism, and rewards journalists who do the same. This year, the recipients include six repeat winners—Dave Roberts of Vox, Stephen Leahy of National Geographic, Jonathan Watts of The Guardian, Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times, Adele Peters of Fast Company, and Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic—and six new reporters—Emily Atkin of HEATED, Justin Worland of TIME, Fiona Harvey of The Guardian, Umair Irfan of Vox, Lisa Friedman of The New York Times, and Yessenia Funes of Earther/Gizmodo.

Taken together, the list shows who climate activists consider worth reading, a list that includes several reporters who take extreme anti-energy positions. It also shows divisions within the climate movement.

Here are a few highlights from the 2019 SEAL Award recipients:

• Hiroko Tabuchi claims to have found methane “super emitters” in the Permian Basin but results are inconclusive.
  Writing for the New York Times in December, Tabuchi claimed to have found the source of methane spikes in West Texas. She claimed that “vast amounts of methane are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming.” Energy in Depth looked into the story and found that Tabuchi and the New York Times were relying on a dramatic image of steam, not methane:

“EID reached out to multiple infrared imaging experts and none of them could confirm that this was methane. Instead, the consensus was that what this image was showing was likely heat or steam, not methane.”

In addition to the inaccurate image, the Times story argued that fracking specifically was causing a global methane spike. In fact, data from the Global Methane Project showed that from 2013 to 2017, methane emissions were flat, though fracking was increasing.

• Jonathan Watts recycles Richard Heede’s flawed climate attribute science for The Guardian.
  In October, Watts was part of a team of reporters who spun Richard Heede’s “Carbon Majors” report into a full-length story—without ever acknowledging key flaws and underlying assumptions in his work.At the time, Energy in Depth called out The Guardian for functioning like an accessory to anti-oil and gas activists:

  “Embarrassingly for The Guardian, which has taken the extraordinary step of directly allying itself with the activist group 350.org for the Keep It In The Ground campaign, the new CAI research suffers from the same flaws as the old research. CAI’s research is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other major anti-oil and gas funders, and its new research crucially admits that 90 percent of fossil fuel emissions can’t be attributed to these energy companies, but rather to consumers when they drive their cars, fly on airplanes, and heat their homes.”

• Yessenia Funes eschews wrapping paper for the sake of the planet.
  Not all articles published by SEAL award winners are inaccurate. Some are just silly, like when Yessenia Funes of Earther wrote in December about how she was forgoing wrapping paper to lower methane emissions and help save the environment. Despite her love of the holidays and seasonal wrap, she would instead give gifts wrapped in reused paper grocery bags:

“Wrapping is a fine art, and the right wrapping paper can make or break a perfectly wrapped present. This year, however, I’ve come to terms with how this art can create unnecessary waste and environmental destruction… That’s why I changed up my Christmas routine and decided not to spend ridiculous amounts of money on the beautiful papers I adore. Instead, I opted for something a lot more simple.”

Earthshaking journalism? Not exactly.

The awards also show divisions within the climate movement. Two reporters from the New York Times won SEAL Awards this year, has been criticized for its global warming coverage. Just this summer, Extinction Rebellion protested outside the New York Times offices, calling its coverage of climate change “completely unacceptable” and a “public safety crisis on a global scale.” Robinson Meyer, another 2019 SEAL recipient, wrote an article on the “problem” with the New York Times’ climate change reporting, alleging that it “lets Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry off the hook.”