66 April 2015
T
HERE is nothing new about
newspapers striking pos-
tures over climate change. On
December 7th, 2009, some
55 major newspapers from
all over the world (including the Irish
Times) ran a joint editorial just ahead of
the opening of the Copenhagen UN cli-
mate conference.
Who could forget the dramatic call
to arms from some of the world’s most
respected newspapers? It began:
“Humanity faces a profound emer-
gency. Unless we combine to take
decisive action, climate change will
ravage our planet, and with it our
prosperity and security. The dan-
gers have been becoming apparent
for a generation. Now the facts have
started to speak: 11 of the past 14
years have been the warmest on
record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting...
In scientic journals the question is no
longer whether humans are to blame,
but how little time we have got left
to limit the damage. Yet so far the
world’s response has been feeble and
half-hearted.
Overcoming climate change will
take a triumph of optimism over
pessimism, of vision over short-sight-
edness. The politicians in Copenhagen
have the power to shape history’s
judgment on this generation: one that
saw a challenge and rose to it, or one
so stupid that we saw calamity coming
but did nothing to avert it. We implore
them to make the right choice”.
Stirring stuff. The Copenhagen con-
ference, mired in phony controversy and
crippled by internecine squabbling, was
a wretched failure. Less than four weeks
later, with Ireland in the g rip of a (climate
change-related) freezing spell, the Irish
Times editorial writer had a Damascene
conversion. “So much for all of that guff
about global warming! Are world leaders
having the wrong debate? We are experi-
encing the most prolonged period of icy
weather in 40 years and feeling every
bit of it”.
Humanity’s ‘profound emergency’
turned out to be little more than a nine-
day wonder, as the media folded up its
collective tent and moved on to more
promising editorial fare. After all, who
could be bothered reading (or writing
about) the dull, technical and seemingly
interminable non-story that climate
change and the relentless destruction
of our planet’s biodiversity and habita-
bility had become.
Sprinkle this journalistic ennui with a
side order of character assassination of
selected individual scientists and voilà,
the greatest crisis humanity ever faced
morphs into the greatest non-story
of the century. That may be how the
media work, but nature itself contin-
ues to be stubbornly cooperative with
the grimmer prognostications of those
wearisome scientific eggheads.
“Climate change is one of those sto-
ries that deserves more attention, that
we all talk about”, Jeff Zucker, president
of news network CNN said last year. “But
we haven’t figured out how to engage the
audience in that story in a meaningful
way. When we do do those stories, there
tends to be a tremendous lack of inter-
est on the audience’s part”, was Zucker’s
candid appraisal.
Paul Weller opened The Jam’s 1980
single ‘Going Underground’ with the
line, “the public gets what the public
wants”, but as the song unfolds, this
inverts to become: “the public wants
what the public gets”.
The
Guardian
is a rare
exception to media
climate hypocrisy.
By John Gibbons
Planet
guardian
The public
wants what
the public gets
“
ENVIRONMENT Climate Hypocrisy
linked with the very fabric of the natural
world it is carelessly unravelling.
In recent weeks, the Guardian news-
paper, under outgoing editor, Alan
Ru sb ri dge r, ha s s ou gh t t o br ea k th i s c om-
munications impasse. And it has done so
in the most spectacular style, beginning
its campaign with full wraparounds on
several editions of the newspaper carry-
ing in-depth articles from Naomi Klein
and Bill McKibben, among others.
Both the newspaper and its editor
are out on a limb, and success is far
from assured. Explaining his thinking,
Rusbridger described journalism as a
rear-view mirror. “We prefer to deal
with what has happened, not what lies
ahead. We favour what is exceptional
and in full view, over what is ordinary
and hidden”.
Vast, complex stories with no appar-
ent beginning, middle or end, in which
there is no clearly identifiable bad guy
and in which we in the rich world and
almost everything we do are to blame
are an exceptionally poor fit for the news
paradigm.
“Changes to the Earth’s climate rarely
make it to the top of the news list. The
changes may be happening too fast for
human comfort, but they happen too
slowly for the news-makers – and, to
be fair, for most readers”, he expanded.
“These events that have yet to materi-
alise may dwarf anything journalists
have had to cover over the past troubled
century. There may be untold catastro-
phes, famines, floods, droughts, wars,
migrations and sufferings just around
the corner. But that is futurology, not
news, so it is not going to force itself on
any front page any time soon”.
Unless, that is, an editor, backed by
his newspaper, refuses to accept the
failed and increasingly dangerous model
of journalism that has us all stumbling
blindly off a cliff, too distracted by trivia
and bedazzled by celebrity to even notice
our world rapidly vanishing behind us.
“To my mind, the science of climate
change is without doubt. The threat to
the species is so severe that this is one of
those rare subjects where you can move
from reporting to campaigning”, Rus-
bridger explained.
The Guardian has taken t his ca mpa ig n
up a notch, by launching its ‘Keep it in
the ground’ campaign to encourage and
shame institutions and organisations,
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Founda-
tion to the Wellcome Trust, to dump their
investments in fossil fuel companies.
The Irish public today knows far more
about the disturbed sexual fantasies of
one south Dublin architect than it does
about the existential noose that draws
ever tighter around our collective neck.
Since these salacious stories, along with
exhaustive ‘economic’ analysis predi-
cated solely on growth and consumption,
are what the public gets, day after day,
ergo this must be what the public wants.
Small wonder then that our politicians
and public servants shrug off environ-
mental angst as being not on the public
agenda, and therefore nothing for them
to bother with.
To put a number on our collective fail-
ure, consider the following: the world’s
political leaders have known since 1990
that CO2 emissions were putting human-
ity in jeopardy. Countless conferences,
protocols, treaties and solemn declara-
tions later, and, rather than reducing,
global emissions have instead spiralled
by 61% since Jack Charlton led the Irish
team to the World Cup quarter finals
in Rome. In the same period, species
extinctions have intensified and global
biodiversity has gone into free-fall.
The neo-liberal assault on the founda-
tions of life on Earth is fast approaching
its triumphant, albeit suicidal, apotheo-
sis. Anyone who pays more than fleeting
attention to the output of the world’s
leading climate journals and scientific
academies will realise this is not mere
journalistic hype. It is instead an unre-
markable observation on a species that
has run amok and has been blind-sided
to the fact that its ow n fate is inextricably
The Guardian Media Group has itself
divested from any such interests.
The numbers here are surprisingly
simple. For there to be any reasonable
prospect of preventing global warming
from breaching the +2C ‘red line’, at least
80% of the world’s proven fossil fuel
reserves can never b e bu r ne d. Si nce the se
reserves are worth trillions of euros on
the balance sheets of the major energy
companies, nothing short of a revolu-
tionary shift in public attitude can have
even the slightest prospect of preventing
their being burned, and humanity being
destroyed in the process.
From where we are now standing, the
prospects for success seem slim. The
energy industry is the richest business
the world has ever known, and its wealth
buys political and media obsequiousness.
But since the alternative to fighting is to
sit helplessly and wait for everything we
know and value to be destroyed, that’s
reason enough to battle on, no matter
how unpromising the odds.
History reminds us that there are
invisible social tipping points, moments
where the unimaginable becomes, almost
overnight, inevitable. The ending of the
global slave trade, the women’s suffra-
gette movement and even the spread of
democracy itself are examples of ideas
that initially appeared to have few pow-
erful advocates and little chance of
success. South Africa’s Apartheid system
and the Soviet Union also once seemed
unassailable – just as neo-liberal capital-
ism and globalised consumerism appear
today.
“The world as we have created it is
a process of our thinking”, remarked
Albert Einstein. “It cannot be changed
without changing our thinking”. •
John Gibbons is a specialist environmental
writer and commentator and tweets @
thinkorswim
Stories with
no beginning,
middle or
end, in which
there is no
identifiable
bad guy and
in which the
rich world
is to blame,
are a poor fit
for the news
paradigm
“
not this
April 2015 67
T
HERE is nothing new about
newspapers striking pos-
tures over climate change. On
December 7th, 2009, some
55 major newspapers from
all over the world (including the Irish
Times) ran a joint editorial just ahead of
the opening of the Copenhagen UN cli-
mate conference.
Who could forget the dramatic call
to arms from some of the world’s most
respected newspapers? It began:
“Humanity faces a profound emer-
gency. Unless we combine to take
decisive action, climate change will
ravage our planet, and with it our
prosperity and security. The dan-
gers have been becoming apparent
for a generation. Now the facts have
started to speak: 11 of the past 14
years have been the warmest on
record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting...
In scientic journals the question is no
longer whether humans are to blame,
but how little time we have got left
to limit the damage. Yet so far the
world’s response has been feeble and
half-hearted.
Overcoming climate change will
take a triumph of optimism over
pessimism, of vision over short-sight-
edness. The politicians in Copenhagen
have the power to shape history’s
judgment on this generation: one that
saw a challenge and rose to it, or one
so stupid that we saw calamity coming
but did nothing to avert it. We implore
them to make the right choice”.
Stirring stuff. The Copenhagen con-
ference, mired in phony controversy and
crippled by internecine squabbling, was
a wretched failure. Less than four weeks
later, with Ireland in the g rip of a (climate
change-related) freezing spell, the Irish
Times editorial writer had a Damascene
conversion. “So much for all of that guff
about global warming! Are world leaders
having the wrong debate? We are experi-
encing the most prolonged period of icy
weather in 40 years and feeling every
bit of it”.
Humanity’s ‘profound emergency’
turned out to be little more than a nine-
day wonder, as the media folded up its
collective tent and moved on to more
promising editorial fare. After all, who
could be bothered reading (or writing
about) the dull, technical and seemingly
interminable non-story that climate
change and the relentless destruction
of our planet’s biodiversity and habita-
bility had become.
Sprinkle this journalistic ennui with a
side order of character assassination of
selected individual scientists and voilà,
the greatest crisis humanity ever faced
morphs into the greatest non-story
of the century. That may be how the
media work, but nature itself contin-
ues to be stubbornly cooperative with
the grimmer prognostications of those
wearisome scientific eggheads.
“Climate change is one of those sto-
ries that deserves more attention, that
we all talk about”, Jeff Zucker, president
of news network CNN said last year. “But
we haven’t figured out how to engage the
audience in that story in a meaningful
way. When we do do those stories, there
tends to be a tremendous lack of inter-
est on the audience’s part”, was Zucker’s
candid appraisal.
Paul Weller opened The Jam’s 1980
single ‘Going Underground’ with the
line, “the public gets what the public
wants”, but as the song unfolds, this
inverts to become: “the public wants
what the public gets”.
The
Guardian
is a rare
exception to media
climate hypocrisy.
By John Gibbons
Planet
guardian
The public
wants what
the public gets
“
ENVIRONMENT Climate Hypocrisy
linked with the very fabric of the natural
world it is carelessly unravelling.
In recent weeks, the Guardian news-
paper, under outgoing editor, Alan
Ru sb ri dge r, ha s s ou gh t t o br ea k th i s c om-
munications impasse. And it has done so
in the most spectacular style, beginning
its campaign with full wraparounds on
several editions of the newspaper carry-
ing in-depth articles from Naomi Klein
and Bill McKibben, among others.
Both the newspaper and its editor
are out on a limb, and success is far
from assured. Explaining his thinking,
Rusbridger described journalism as a
rear-view mirror. “We prefer to deal
with what has happened, not what lies
ahead. We favour what is exceptional
and in full view, over what is ordinary
and hidden”.
Vast, complex stories with no appar-
ent beginning, middle or end, in which
there is no clearly identifiable bad guy
and in which we in the rich world and
almost everything we do are to blame
are an exceptionally poor fit for the news
paradigm.
“Changes to the Earth’s climate rarely
make it to the top of the news list. The
changes may be happening too fast for
human comfort, but they happen too
slowly for the news-makers – and, to
be fair, for most readers”, he expanded.
“These events that have yet to materi-
alise may dwarf anything journalists
have had to cover over the past troubled
century. There may be untold catastro-
phes, famines, floods, droughts, wars,
migrations and sufferings just around
the corner. But that is futurology, not
news, so it is not going to force itself on
any front page any time soon”.
Unless, that is, an editor, backed by
his newspaper, refuses to accept the
failed and increasingly dangerous model
of journalism that has us all stumbling
blindly off a cliff, too distracted by trivia
and bedazzled by celebrity to even notice
our world rapidly vanishing behind us.
“To my mind, the science of climate
change is without doubt. The threat to
the species is so severe that this is one of
those rare subjects where you can move
from reporting to campaigning”, Rus-
bridger explained.
The Guardian has taken t his ca mpa ig n
up a notch, by launching its ‘Keep it in
the ground’ campaign to encourage and
shame institutions and organisations,
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Founda-
tion to the Wellcome Trust, to dump their
investments in fossil fuel companies.
The Irish public today knows far more
about the disturbed sexual fantasies of
one south Dublin architect than it does
about the existential noose that draws
ever tighter around our collective neck.
Since these salacious stories, along with
exhaustive ‘economic’ analysis predi-
cated solely on growth and consumption,
are what the public gets, day after day,
ergo this must be what the public wants.
Small wonder then that our politicians
and public servants shrug off environ-
mental angst as being not on the public
agenda, and therefore nothing for them
to bother with.
To put a number on our collective fail-
ure, consider the following: the world’s
political leaders have known since 1990
that CO2 emissions were putting human-
ity in jeopardy. Countless conferences,
protocols, treaties and solemn declara-
tions later, and, rather than reducing,
global emissions have instead spiralled
by 61% since Jack Charlton led the Irish
team to the World Cup quarter finals
in Rome. In the same period, species
extinctions have intensified and global
biodiversity has gone into free-fall.
The neo-liberal assault on the founda-
tions of life on Earth is fast approaching
its triumphant, albeit suicidal, apotheo-
sis. Anyone who pays more than fleeting
attention to the output of the world’s
leading climate journals and scientific
academies will realise this is not mere
journalistic hype. It is instead an unre-
markable observation on a species that
has run amok and has been blind-sided
to the fact that its ow n fate is inextricably
The Guardian Media Group has itself
divested from any such interests.
The numbers here are surprisingly
simple. For there to be any reasonable
prospect of preventing global warming
from breaching the +2C ‘red line’, at least
80% of the world’s proven fossil fuel
reserves can never b e bu r ne d. Si nce the se
reserves are worth trillions of euros on
the balance sheets of the major energy
companies, nothing short of a revolu-
tionary shift in public attitude can have
even the slightest prospect of preventing
their being burned, and humanity being
destroyed in the process.
From where we are now standing, the
prospects for success seem slim. The
energy industry is the richest business
the world has ever known, and its wealth
buys political and media obsequiousness.
But since the alternative to fighting is to
sit helplessly and wait for everything we
know and value to be destroyed, that’s
reason enough to battle on, no matter
how unpromising the odds.
History reminds us that there are
invisible social tipping points, moments
where the unimaginable becomes, almost
overnight, inevitable. The ending of the
global slave trade, the women’s suffra-
gette movement and even the spread of
democracy itself are examples of ideas
that initially appeared to have few pow-
erful advocates and little chance of
success. South Africa’s Apartheid system
and the Soviet Union also once seemed
unassailable – just as neo-liberal capital-
ism and globalised consumerism appear
today.
“The world as we have created it is
a process of our thinking”, remarked
Albert Einstein. “It cannot be changed
without changing our thinking”. •
John Gibbons is a specialist environmental
writer and commentator and tweets @
thinkorswim
Stories with
no beginning,
middle or
end, in which
there is no
identifiable
bad guy and
in which the
rich world
is to blame,
are a poor fit
for the news
paradigm
“
not this

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