Perhaps only 100k-1M people will do important work on climate technologies. But the impact of media on that topic is not limited to its influence on those people alone. Other readers, who don’t practice in the field, but who are interested in the topic, can use that knowledge in their role as nodes in society’s “idea network.”
With better understanding, they’ll be able to distinguish better ideas from bad ones, and they’ll amplify or damp accordingly. That’s particularly helpful in fields like climate change, longevity, BCIs, etc, where there are many charlatans and ineffective do-gooders.
Novel insights can only occur when the prerequisite ideas manage to propagate through the “idea network” and reach the relevant nodes. Even non-experts and non-practitioners have a role to play there. If they amplify nonsense, they make it harder for experts’ ideas to serendipitously propagate between experts, because the strongest path between two experts may be through non-experts.