6 0 Nov/Dec 2016
ENVIRONMENT
W
HAT IS salient is not important. What is
important is not salient. The media turn
us away from the issues that will deter-
mine the course of our lives, and towards
topics of brain-melting irrelevance.
Television channel-controllers, perhaps the least
accountable arbiters in public life, see themselves as
edgy and provocative, but they have purged from the
schedules almost all challenges to established power.
Newspapers style themselves defenders of free speech,
but within their own pages most of them stamp out dis-
senting voices and dissonant topics. If you are scarcely
aware of what confronts us, don’t blame yourself.
This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever
measured. The previous record was set in 2015; the one
before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years have
occurred in the 21st Century. Eleven of the past 12
months have been the warmest on record, according to
NASA data.. But you can still hear people repeating the
old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel lobbyists, that
global warming stopped in 1998.
Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area last winter than
in any winter since records began. In Siberia, an anthrax
outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer pop-
ulations, because infected corpses locked in permafrost
since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed. India has
been hammered by cycles of drought and flood, as
extreme heating parches the soil and torches glaciers in
the Himalayas. Southern and eastern Africa have been
pitched into humanitarian emergencies by drought.
Wildfires storm across America; coral reefs around the
world are bleaching and dying.
Throughout the media, these tragedies are reported
as impacts of El Nino: a natural weather oscillation
caused by blocks of warm water forming in the Pacific.
But the figures show that it accounts for only one fifth of
the global temperature rise. The El Nino phase has now
passed, but still the records fall.
Nearly a year ago in Paris, 177 nations promised to try
to ensure that the world’s average temperature did not
rise by more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level.
Already it has climbed by 1.3C – faster and further than
almost anyone predicted. In one respect, the scientists
were wrong. They told us to expect a climate crisis in the
second half of this century. But it’s already here.
If you blinked you would have missed the reports, but
perhaps the most striking aspect of the Democratic plat-
form (the party’s manifesto) was its position on climate
change. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has promised a
national and global mobilisation “on a scale not seen
since World War II.” She wanted to seek to renegotiate
trade deals to protect the living world, to stop oil drilling
in the Arctic and Atlantic and to ensure America is “run
-
ning entirely on clean energy by mid-century”.
There were some crashing contradictions in the plat
-
form. To judge by one bizarre paragraph, the Democrats
believed they could solve climate change by expanding
roads and airports. It boasts about record sales in the
car industry and promises to cut “red tape”, which is the
term used by corporate lobbyists for the public protec-
tions they hate. But where it is good it is very good,
reflecting the influence of Bernie Sanders and the nomi-
nees he proposed to the drafting committee.
Trump, on the other hand – well, what did you expect?
Climate change is a “con-job” and a “hoax”, that was
“created by and for the Chinese in order to make US man-
ufacturing non-competitive”. His platform reads like a
love letter to the coal industry. Coal, it said, “is an abun-
dant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy
resource”, He will defend the industry by rejecting the
by George Monbiot
Mediacrity
on climate
The climate crisis is here, now, but
a compromised, corrupted media
doesn’t want to know.
Fifteen of the 16
warmest years
have occurred in
the 21st Century
Nov/Dec 2016 6 1
Paris agreement, stopping funds for the UN’s climate
change work, ditching Obama’s clean power plan and
forbidding the Environmental Protection Agency from
regulating carbon dioxide.
What’s most alarming about the platform was that
Trump didn’t write it: the deranged and contradictory
bluster of the Republican party leadership was a collec-
tive effort. But at least it cleared something up. Though
boasting of his great wealth and power, he posed as the
friend of the common citizen and the enemy of corporate
capital. On every significant issue in the platform, cor-
porate capital wins. To read it is to discover where the
land lies and where the lies land.
Incidentally, Trump’s executives don’t share his belief
that climate change is a hoax. His golf resort in Ireland,
Doonbeg, is seeking permission to build a wall – not to
keep out Mexicans, but to defend his business from
rising sea levels, erosion and storm surges caused, the
application says, by global warming. If you can buy your
way out of trouble, who cares about the other seven
billion?
It’s not that the media failed to mention what the two
platforms said about humanity’s existential crisis. But
the coverage was, for the most part, relegated to foot
-
notes, while the evanescent trivia of the conventions led
the bulletins and filled the front pages. There are many
levels of bias in the media, but the most important is the
bias against relevance.
In Britain, the media largely failed to hold David Cam
-
eron to account for his extravagant green promises and
shocking record. Theresa May has made some terrible
appointments, but the new climate change minister, Nick
Hurd, is an interesting choice, as he seems to under-
stand the subject. The basic problem, however, is that
the political costs of failure are so low.
To pretend that newspapers and television channels
are neutral arbiters of such matters is to ignore their
place at the corrupt heart of the establishment. At the
US conventions, to give one small example, The Wash
-
ington Post, The Atlantic and Politico were paid by the
American Petroleum Institute to host discussions, which
provided a platform for climate science deniers. The pen
might be mightier than the sword, but the purse is might-
ier than the pen.
Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell
us the truth about multinational corporations? And if
they cannot properly inform us about the power in which
they are embedded, how can they properly inform us
about anything?
If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the
industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not
transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All them can
behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic col-
lapse, only with a social licence to operate. The problem
begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise,
grants them this licence: the one for which I work.
This article first appeared in the Guardian.
www.monbiot.com
At the US conventions The Washington
Post, The Atlantic and Politico were paid
by the American Petroleum Institute
to host discussions, which provided a
platform for climate science deniers

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