Planet guardian - Village Magazine

66 April 2015

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 scientic 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