Opinion

How the media stoke the climate crisis

52March/April 2022IntroductionWhistleblowing is usually seen as a cousin of “snitching”, whereas it might be more helpful to view whistleblowing on a spectrum of willing–ness to circumvent group consensus, either head-on or indirectly.This by-passes the tendency to scrutinise the whistleblower for personal “defects”, as is nor–mally the case in whistleblower conficts.According to a recent Village article, ‘Enemies of the People’ citing Kate Kenny’s book, ‘Whistle–blowing: Towards a New Theory’, journalists often exacerbate the sufering of whistleblowers by scrutinising the whistleblower, as if the answer to the confict is to be found in the whistleblower’s character.Ultimately, no matter what the group might say in its defence, or no matter what allegations the group might make to suggest that a whistle–blower is crazy or criminal or defective in some other way, whistleblowing is not really about the whistleblower at all, it is about the group.MobbedDr Janice Harper, an American cultural anthro–pologist, observed a colleague whistleblowing on a water quality issue. The colleague was then discredited by management with attacks on her character. The usual destroy-the-whistleblower response. Harper had assumed that the people who attacked her friend were “bad” people, in contrast to her own “enlightened” circle of friends and colleagues.But it was only when she herself was demon–ised following a faculty disagreement in the Blowers are FlowersBy Eamonn KellyWhistleblowers save us from ourselves; their bullies driven by primeval instincts for survivalGroup psychology operates very differently from individual psychology – I hadn’t stood a chance when I opened my big mouth and fought for ‘principles’university where she was employed as a lecturer in anthropology that she realised that she had misunderstood the collective “bullying” her friend had experienced. This collective “bullying” she calls “mobbing”, the title of her book: ‘Mobbed: What To Do When They Are Really Out To Get You’.At frst, when she was subjected to hostility by work colleagues, she sought clarity by read–ing up on adult bullying, but discovered, too late, that the advice such books ofered only exacerbated the situation when acted upon.She writes:“What I did not see clearly was that focusing on the ‘bullies’ made it impossible for me to see what was going on with those who were not ‘bul–lies’. What I did not see or understand was that group psychology operates very diferently from individual psychology – and that I hadn’t stood a chance when I opened my big mouth and fought for ‘principles’”.Harper, a university professor who special–ised in organisational cultures and warfare, realised, when teaching a course on genocide, at the same time as she was “battling” with her employers, that many of the same psychologi–cal processes that enable a population to follow an autocratic leader to genocide are apparent in the manner in which management can lead workers towards demonising an individual. This is dramatic stuf.She writes:“Their [the target’s] diference is communi–cated to others and, in time, meaning is conferred on that diference to suggest they are inferior to the rest of the workplace…they are called names to dehumanise them (making it easier to harm them); and the rest of the work–force learns that they could become targets themselves if they align with the target, but could beneft if they help leadership get rid of them…”.In other words, the targets, through pro–cesses of dehumanisation and exclusion become friendless candidates for what psychol–ogists’ call “normative violence”. That is, violence that is morally approved of by the group.One of the greatest ironies about a workplace mobbing is that eventually the target may be given a label that goes against the values of the group, allowing the group to then “legally” be rid of the individual.In Harper’s case she was labelled a bully. This is kind of brilliant in its cheek. But it’s conveni–ent too, not just in getting rid of the by now labelled “trouble-maker” on trumped-up charges, but also making the group “victims” of the target, exculpating the group, in the eyes of its members, of any wrong-doing in the destruc–tion of the target individual.The bully label also had the efect of causing people outside the group to disbelieve Harper’s story.“Somehow the worse my employers and co-workers behaved toward me, the more the perception shifted from what they were doing to me, to what I had done to deserve it”.This idea of somehow “deserving it” possibly OPINION March/April 2022 53also underlies the idea that whistleblowers tend to be “egoists”. But this is just a diferent name-calling that has a similar efect of causing people to believe that they somehow deserve their mal–treatment through some character defect.WhistleblowersOne of the things that happens to a person when they become the target of injustice, is that they become rattled, and when it comes time to say exactly what it is they are rattled about, the story tends to come tumbling out in a disjointed, often garbled way, having the unfortunate efect of causing people to back of in uncertainty rather than engage with the story the person is trying to tell.Village magazine’s series of articles on Frank Mulcahy, former CEO of business group ISME, , who has been in such a confict with various heavyweight parties for the past 20 years, dis–plays this quality of tumbling grievances. Perhaps Frank McBrearty too.This is possibly why it is so easy to side-line whistleblowers, because often they are alone, usually against an organisation or a collective of some description, and they are rattled as indi–viduals, for very human reasons related to group dynamics and a sense of belonging.It is easy then, and even amusing for some, to gaslight such people. This is a standard weapon used by organisations and groups against indi–viduals, often supplemented by accusations and charges of sexual impropriety, as hap–pened with Julian Assange and Maurice McCabe.Primitive GroupsIn Janice Harper’s case, when she found herself the target of a faculty mobbing, her training as an anthropologist kicked in to fnd some per–spective in the otherwise traumatic experience she was undergoing.She was able to bring her learning to bear on the situation, providing some striking insights as to what was actually

50March/April 2022Over 60 per cent of households in County Galway, for example, were one-of houses, the highest in the country. Roscommon (56%) and Leitrim (52%) weren’t far behind.After 2016 there was an improvement as more apartments were built.5481, 5622 and 5292 one-of houses were built in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 respectively – representing respecivel 19%, 14%, 12% and 23% of the total dwellings including apartments built and adding more than 1% to the stock of one-of houses annually. There were 442,669 one-of houses at the time of the last census in 2016, representing 26 per cent of all occupied dwellings in the State.Almost 40 per cent of all homes constructed between 2011 and 2016 were one-of houses (detached houses with individual sewerage systems), suggesting no lessons had been learnt. Despite the pretence of difculty obtaining permissions, remarkably in 17 counties one-of housing comprised over half of all dwellings built since 2011.If you don’t plan to optimise the social, environmental and economic effects of your policies, quality of life suffers and everyone paysBy Suzie MélangeOPINIONOne-off Housing fritters €5.6bn (on Broadband provision) March/April 2022 515481, 5622 and 5292 one-off houses were built in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 respectively –19%, 14%, 12% and 23% of the total dwellings built and adding more than 1% to the stock of one-off houses annually.Refecting the Covid-driven increase in one-of-house building (which is less regulated than say apartment building), in December 2021 Property Industry Ireland (PII), an Ibec front, said “Given the National Planning Framework and the Climate Action Plan objective of more compact living it is concerning to see the growth in permission for one-of housing relative to multi-development housing and apartments”.Despite a Green component the Programme for Government is silent on one-of housing. Though individual Green Party members are typically concerned about planning, its elected members don’t like to be seen to say No. They’re happy to champion a ‘Town Centre frst’ policy but would sooner manage a McDonald’s than oppose one-of housing or even sprawl, in case someone scream ‘God gave me the land’ or ‘Housing Crisis’at them. The media and public have entirely failed to register that for the modern Green TD planning is very yesterday.The 2018 National Planning Framework guides the whole framework. Those oxymorons are important – it is mostly fouted and intended to be fouted, on one-of housing. Ofcials pontifcate about planning while one-of housing builders get on with the business of breaching the policy because of the Third Secret of Fatima of Irish Planning: local authorities don’t have to follow their own plans. In a part-EU-law-driven departure from the 2005 Rural Housing Guidelines, the NPF mooted the concept of “demonstrable economic need”  as an alternative to the current“local housing need” as the relevant s criterion for one-of rural housing in the commuter hinterlands of all cities and towns. Meanwhile the actual guidelines promised for January 2021 have been delayed because the Greens are too embarrassed to face up to another climbdown, for a while. Junior (anti-)Planning Minister Fine Gael’s Peter Burke is plotting more of the same. Remember the more stuf is mooted the more the Greens can avoid taking any responsibility for what is actually happening. Of course the problems with one-of housing are long-documented and long-ignored. They are rooted in the fact that non-planning is unsustainable i.e. doesn’t balance economic with social and environmental imperatives (though of course all of these agendas are swept aside to meet the housing defcit, itself caused by long-term deference to the market). The fabulous thing about one-of housing for the nouveau-peasant anti-ideologues is that it is shit on all of these agendas, perhaps most of all economic. The social problems of isolation and de-energised towns and villages; and the environmental problems of water pollution and car-pollution dependency are very serious. But economically one-of housing is extravagant. Dense communities serve society well as they can be served with public transport and good facilities and infrastructure. They beneft from something that economists rate highly – economies of scale. For example a terraced community has fewer walls, can be more easily heated and of course is more easily served by postal, electricity, gas, water, waste and other services. And by broadband. All the while we have a National Broadband Plan (NBP) which, according to Eoin Burke-Kennedy writing in the Irish Times“promises what no country on the planet has done – to connect a scattergram of remote cottages and out-of-the-way holiday homes, to a state-of-the-art broadband network, bypassing 50 years of bad or zero planning. The cost? A whopping €5½ billion, including a €2.6 billion State subsidy and without ownership of the end product”. He notes that the rollout has been “mired in delays and difculties to do with the complex terrain and dilapidated condition of existing infrastructure – poles and ducts”.This was all predictable. “Other countries have made similar promises but for example Boris Johnson’s Conservative party recently ditched its £5 billion election manifesto pledge to give all homes across the UK superfast broadband by 2025. Leinster House, underpinned by a strong rural lobby, has written a blank cheque to fx the problem. Due diligence and cost-beneft analysis were shoved to one side”.The Department of Public Expenditure said precisely this in a 2019 letter to the Minister for Finance, recommending against the plan on grounds of afordability, risk and value for money.When you don’t plan – when you ignore the social, economic and environmental costs of major policies, everyone loses.

48March/April 2022How the media stoke the climate crisisYES, WE should rake over the coals. And the oil, and the gas. Democratic accountability means remembering who helped to stoke the climate crisis. We should hold the fossil fuel companies to account.In 1979, an internal study by Exxon concluded that burning carbon fuels “will cause dramatic envi–ronmental efects before the year 2050”.In 1982, as the Guardian’s Climate Crimes series recalls, an Exxon memo concluded that the science of climate By George Monbiotchange was “unanimous”. Then it poured millions of dollars into lobby groups casting doubt on it.They didn’t call themselves lobby groups, but “thinktanks” or “research institutes”. Across the world, the media took them at their word.So scientists and environmental campaigners found themselves fghting the oil companies at one step removed, and with one hand tied behind their backs. When some of us were pitched against a “thinktank” in the media, if we tried to explain that it was not what it claimed to be, or asked it to reveal Death by mediaOPINION March/April 2022 49its funders, we were accused of being “conspiracy theorists”, or of “playing the man not the ball”. But if we didn’t, its false claims about climate science were given equal or greater weight. After all, who were we, a threadbare bunch, beside those respect–able-sounding institutes with ofces in Washington or Westminster?When we criticised the media for its determined naivety, we were frozen out. Before long, the think–tanks and trade associations had a clear run. They were the serious, sensible people, to whom the media turned to explain the world. And still turns.If the oil companies are to be held to account, so should the media that amplifed their voices. It scarcely needs to be said that the billionaire press took the lead in attacking climate science. After all, the owners have long perceived an attack on one corporation or plutocrat as an attack on all. But far more dangerous were the public sector broadcast–ers – which tend to be taken more seriously, as they are widely seen as independent and unbiased.For Channel 4, winding up environmentalists became a blood sport. In flms such as Against Nature and The Great Global Warming Swindle, the mistakes and distortions came so thick and fast that it was hard to see them as anything but deliberate provocations. When I complained, the channel sought to justify them with further unfounded claims. All that counted was noise: Channel 4, at the time, clearly couldn’t give a damn about the impacts.The BBC’s role was more insidious. Its collabora–tion arose from a disastrous combination of gullibility, appeasement and scientifc ignorance. It let the fossil fuel industry walk all over it.When some of us pointed out that failing to ask its contributors to reveal their sources of funding was a direct breach of its own editorial guidelines, the BBC produced a series of bizarre, catch-22 excuses, and carried on breaking its rules for several years. It gave the oil and tobacco companies just what they wanted: in the words of the American Petroleum Institute, “victory will be achieved” when “recogni–tion of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.Only in 2018, a mere 36 years after Exxon came to the same conclusion, did the BBC decide that cli–mate science is solid, and there is no justifcation for both-sidesing it. But the nonsense continues.Until last year the GCSE module on BBC Bitesize listed the “positive” impacts of our global catastro–phe. Among them were “more resources, such as oil, becoming available in places such as Alaska and Siberia when the ice melts”; “new tourist destina–tions becoming available” (welcome to Derby-on-Sea); and “warmer temperatures could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles”.In a sterling example of the corporation’s endless confusion between balance and impartiality, the list of positives was roughly equal to the list of nega–tives. The greatest crisis humanity has ever faced looked like six of one and half a dozen of the other.Only when it caused a social media storm did the BBC remove this content. I asked it how, when and why this list was included, whether external organisations were involved, and why the corpora–tion ignored previous requests to improve the module. It told me it would not be commenting. So much for public service.The frontier of denial has now shifted to the big–gest of all environmental issues: farming. Here, the BBC still gives lobby groups and trade associa–tions sowing doubt about environmental damage (especially by livestock farming) more air–time than the scientists and campaigners seeking to explain the problems.Not just airtime, but kudos. The head of the National Farmers’ Union, Minette Batters, has sought to undermine the ban on neonicotinoid pes–ticides, pressed for continuation of the cruel and useless badger cull, and lobbied against reductions in meat consumption, among other harmful posi–tions. But last year, BBC’s Woman’s Hour included her on its power list of “30 inspiring women whose work is making a signifcant positive contribution to the environment”. She was placed above true envi–ronmental heroes such as Gail Bradbrook, Judy Ling-Wong, Franny Armstrong and Safa Minney. The BBC continues to confuse mainstream with respect–able, and respectable with right.The lesson, to my mind, is obvious: if we fail to hold organisations to account for their mistakes and obfuscations, they’ll keep repeating them. Climate crimes have perpetrators. They also have facilita–tors. This article frst appeared in the Guardian. www.monbiot.comThe thinktanks and trade associations are the serious, sensible people, to whom the media turn, to explain the worldIf the oil companies are to be held to account, so should the media that amplifed their voices. The billionaire press took the lead in attacking climate science

42March/April 2022Michael Williams wants an end to Judges trespassing into the role of elected legislators especially through inference of rights from the consitution. Michael Smith wants a new constitution but meanwhile, apart from theoretically (!), is relaxed about whether judges inferring rights is democratic and useful.OPINION March/April 2022 43Judges exceed their constitutional powers.In 1937 our grandparents adopted a Constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, laying out how they wanted their country to be governed. They specifed it would be a democracy. Only elected legislators would make laws. If we were not satisfed with how they served us,we could reject them at the next election.Over eighty years later, judges have infated their role. ‘Superior Court’ Judges, especially in the Supreme Court, make law by annulling legislation that is compatible with the people’s Constitution, if they fnd it incompatible with “rights” they identify, but which the Constitution does not mention. They have changed the rules on how public money is to be spent, how referenda to amend the Constitution are to be managed and who may claim Constitutional rights. They refused a Habeas Corpus hearing to a man who credibly claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned. The constitution promises that everyone who makes a stateable case that he is imprisoned unjustly, has a right to a speedy hearing by a judge and prompt release if he is entitled to it.  In Edward Ryan v. Governor of Midland Prison, the Supreme Court efectively inserted the word “not” before “everyone”. They adjudicate on what legislators do or say in the course of their work. Judges should be bound to enforce legislation compatible with all express terms of our Constitution. In a 1965 High Court case, Gladys Ryan claimed that the The Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act, 1960 was unconstitutional because it authorised the addition of a small amount of fuoride to piped water. She said this contaminated water supplied to her home, claimed she and her children had an implied right under our Constitution to an uncontaminated water supply and the Act infringed their right by depriving them of that supply. She asked the Court to examine scientifc material, to disagree with the decision of the Oireachtas on the merits of fuoridation, and to “correct” the “blunder” of the Oireachtas, by annulling the legislation. Article 15.2.1o of our Constitutiondeclares the power of the Oireachtas to make laws for the State to be “sole and exclusive”. Those words must Michael Williams doesn’t approve of judicial additions to Constitutional rightsMichael Smith argues that a new constitution is needed but that for the moment the judges can be trusted as much as other forces for democracyNew constitution and constitutional convention neededI think Bunreacht Na hÉireann betrays ancient and religious thinking in a modern and post-religious world. It is is after all invoked “in the name of the holy spirit from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our fnal end, all actions both of men [sic] and States must be referred” The spirit infuses the whole document. It should be taken out. My personal – probably radical – view is that we should have a new constitution-making process, somewhat similar to the Citizens’ Assemblies we have had on several issues, but with everybody involved – and steered to take not their own interest but the public interest or common good as their guide on every issue. I think a series of citizens’ assembles should preface a non-religious, progressive, liberal and egalitarian new document enshrining civil, political social, environmental and economic rights. It would also guarantee against fascism, Trumpery and Putinism.  In places it should replicate the existing Constitution to avoid years of clarifying litigation. The new document should be regularly reviewed following further citizens’ assemblies and additional rights enshrined.Meanwhile…This does not seem to be on the political agenda and, while we wait for radical change, I am relaxed enough about judges inferring rights from the fact the rights are, crucially, stated not to represent a comprehensive iteration. However, needless to say the separation of powers between the judiciary and the government and legislature is important. I appreciate that the separation of powers is crucial and that there is a technical danger of judicial tyranny. But not in Ireland in 2022. An ideal constitution would aim to make all rights explicit. It would rewrite the role of judges but would also rewrite the roles of the executive and the legislature. One overarching concern is that the appointment and censure of judges should be a lot less political and more stringent and seems anywhere close to being the case at the moment.Interventionism peaked in 1970sActually the courts have been more and more reluctant to intervene to infer rights.  The court of Chief Justice Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh was the most interventionist or “activist”, 40 or 50 years ago, and current judicial thinking refects the unfashionability, perhaps driven by the debate in the US of judicial interventionist. The recent move from unenumerated to derived refects lack of enthusiasm for the swashbuckling theories of the optimistic 1970s. Derived rightsAmong the derived rights identifed by the Clarke-led Supreme Court is that to seek work. A 2020 Supreme Court judgment, written by Gladys Ryan: her case precipitated inferred rights 44March/April 2022mean that even if, as Mrs Ryan contended, the Oireachtas had been wrong in its conclusion about the benefts of fuoridation, a judge had no power to correct it. But Judge Kenny, who heard the action, came up with a new theory that in his eyes justifed him in hearing and deciding Mrs. Ryan’s claim. This was that the short list of citizens’ rights mentioned in the Constitution was not meant to be exhaustive, and citizens might have other rights. Elected legislators in the Oireachtas could of course legislate to recognise such rights, but Judge Kenny asserted that judges might also identify rights. If they did, the “right” they identifed would notionally be added to the Constitution, so that if an Act of the Oireachtas was incompatible with that “right” he or she had authority to