An odd silence - at the end of humanity's hottest year...yet

The Crucial Years

The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.

Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. (...)

And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another. (...)

Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) (...) We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.

The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our defintions perfectly. (...) But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. (...) Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again. (...)

[W]e’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: there were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day) but it will have to go much much faster.

These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates. (...)

"The only really important question is, 'How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public's consciousness?'" (...)

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Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #heatwaves #extreme_weather #flooding #fossil_fuel #co2 #media #news #news_cycle #journalist #journalism

World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say

the Guardian

Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America. (...)

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.” (...)

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Flash floods in the Libyan city of Derna were the most deadly climate disaster of 2023, killing 11,300 people. Photograph: Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images.

“The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.

His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels. (...)

Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.

He said these new developments indicated the Earth was in uncharted territory ​​and under siege. (...)

[W]hat disturbed him most in 2023 was the sharp increase in sea surface temperatures, which have been abrupt even for an El Niño year. (...)

In the Antarctic, scientists have also been perplexed and worried by the pace of change. (...)

[H]uman influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. (...)

This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. (...)

Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in US history, which happened in August. (...)

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The media needs to cover the climate crisis as seriously as it covered Covid

The Guardian

With some exceptions, the news industry is still not responding to the true scale and danger of global heating. (...)

Despite our living through the hottest summer in history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms and crazy-hot oceans, the news media continues to be outdone by the rest of popular culture when it comes to covering the most urgent story of our time.

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‘With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Inexplicably, climate crisis remains a niche concern for most mainstream news outlets. In the US, most TV coverage of this summer’s hellish weather did not even mention the words “climate change” or “climate crisis”, much less explain that the burning of oil, gas and coal is what’s driving that hellish weather. Too many newsrooms continue to see climate as a siloed beat of specialists. (...)

Dramatic changes in climate have made increased news coverage of extreme weather unavoidable. But explaining the climate connection to extreme weather is a different task. Linking changes in the weather to the decisions being made by industry and government, that have overheated the planet is where news coverage needs to end up. (...)

In every newsroom in every community, climate crisis needs to be thought of not as a beat, but as a through-line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is exempt – not business or culture, not sports or city hall. (...)

Can politics reporters and editors scale back their fixation on horse-race coverage and instead provide the kind of coverage that voters need to make informed choices? Election coverage should help audiences understand what the candidates will do about the climate crisis if elected, not just what they say. It should hold candidates accountable by asking them not (as Fox did at the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate change but rather, “What is your plan to deal with the climate crisis?”

Overall, we also need much more and better coverage of climate solutions. (...)

What else does “more and better” climate coverage mean? We expect some answers to emerge this week at Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation, a conference at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. (...)

With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Only when the general public understands what is happening, why and what needs to be done, can large enough numbers of people compel governments and corporations to change course. (...)

But the news industry as a whole is still not matching the scale of the crisis with the kind of coverage that’s required. (...)

Complete article

> See also: Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders (Media Lens)

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Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders

Media Lens

None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. (...)

Almost as astonishing has been the indifference of our leaders. The silence has been deafening. Where are they? Why is no-one joining the dots and demanding some kind of serious response? (...)

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Broadcaster and author Stephen Fry said on the BBC:

‘Extraordinary that you can have a conversation with an economics minister in Labour who didn’t even mention the climate catastrophe coming, that there’s a tsunami coming towards us… yet everyone is talking about just doing the same thing only better. It’s catastrophic.’ (...)

Or compare with NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, previously arrested for defending the Earth:

‘Dear journalists of the world: We are at risk of losing basically everything. This – what we’re experiencing now – is how that process unfolds. The more fossil fuels we burn, the further in that process we go.

‘You MUST begin to tell 5 critical truths. Civilization depends on it.’

Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate catastrophe is not just a looming threat, it is here; despite the desperate pleading for help from climate scientists; and despite the surreal silence and indifference of Western political leaders, a stubborn rump of opinion continues to insist that the climate crisis is a cynical scam promoted by vested interests. (...)

It is crucial to look deeper because the reality becomes clear when we ask even the simplest of rational questions:

How does the [media] coverage afforded to climate collapse compare to coverage afforded to other comparable threats?

How much of this coverage recognises the true severity of the threat, its true corporate causes and the business-unfriendly revolution in priorities required if it is to be addressed? (...)

As recently as April 2019, even after the start of the mass climate protests a year earlier, Columbia Journalism Review reported:

‘Yet at a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news… Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.’ (...)

Corporate media are not making this the World War Three-style crisis it clearly is. Indeed, the deepest causes and solutions of the crisis are rarely even mentioned. The irony is that climate deniers are convinced the ‘mainstream’ is giving climate collapse heavy coverage precisely because the ‘mainstream’ has obscured the true scale of a crisis that actually merits vastly more coverage. (...)

Thus, while it is, of course, true that our world is currently awash with corporate propaganda downplaying the reality of climate collapse, the disturbing truth is that these deceptions often find a receptive audience. Why? Because many people don’t want to consume less or less cheaply; they don’t want to drive or fly less or less cheaply; they don’t want to be denied ever-expanding consumption. (...)

When industrial capitalism tries to impose infinite economic growth on a finite planet, loss of freedom is the inevitable ultimate result. At this point, we have a painful choice between losing some personal freedoms and losing literally everything.

Complete article

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The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is how.

The Guardian

As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues.

Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times. (...)

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If governments limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers [of people] exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions that ranged from dangerous to impossible. (...)

Culture war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to curtail our freedoms. (...)

You cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: “They’re coming for your ...” It’s becoming ever harder, by design, to discuss crucial issues such as SUVs, meat-eating and aviation calmly and rationally.

Climate science denial, which had almost vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills, communists, murderers and paedophiles. (...)

As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands of miles away, and people come to our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis they played almost no role in causing – a crisis that might involve real floods and real droughts – the same political forces announce, without a trace of irony, that we are being “flooded” or “sucked dry” by refugees, and millions rally to their call to seal our borders. (...)

[L]egislators in Texas are waging war on renewable energy, while a proposed law in Ohio lists climate policies as a “controversial belief or policy” in which universities are forbidden to “inculcate” their students. (...)

Already, at Europe’s borders, displaced people are pushed back into the sea. They are imprisoned, assaulted and used as scapegoats by the far right, which widens its appeal by blaming them for the ills that in reality are caused by austerity, inequality and the rising power of money in politics. European nations pay governments beyond their borders to stop the refugees who might be heading their way. In Libya, Turkey, Sudan and elsewhere, displaced people are kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, raped and murdered. Walls rise and desperate people are repelled with ever greater violence and impunity. (...)

Already, the manufactured hatred of refugees has helped the far right to gain or share power in Italy, Sweden and Hungary, and has greatly enhanced its prospects in Spain, Austria, France and even Germany. In every case, we can expect success by this faction to be followed by the curtailment of climate policies, with the result that more people will have no choice but to seek refuge in the diminishing zones in which the human climate niche remains open. (...)

The two tasks – preventing Earth systems collapse and preventing the rise of the far right – are not divisible. We have no choice but to fight both forces at once.

Complete article

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Blocking roads isn’t crazy – It’s our last hope that sanity will prevail

Jonathan Cook (Middle East Eye)

A lack of public concern in the West at dealing with the impending climate catastrophe isn’t accidental. It’s been engineered.

COP27, the United Nations’ annual climate conference attended by world leaders, kicked off in Egypt at the weekend in the midst of a wave of civil disobedience actions in the UK.

The protests have been led by environmental groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and come as oil giants have announced massive profits from surging energy prices caused by the Ukraine war, and new reports show catastrophic climate change is soon to reach a tipping point, becoming irreversible. (...)

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Protesters, with their necks padlocked together, block the road as they take part in a protest by Just Stop Oil climate activists at Piccadilly Circus, London, on 9 October 2022 (AFP)

Most of these actions have been ignored by the media or dismissed as the antisocial posturings of individuals divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. (...)

But the criticism most widely hurled at these various forms of direct action is that they are counterproductive, that they antagonise ordinary people and make them stop listening.

There is an obvious rejoinder. No one appeared to be listening before the activists took to the streets. Endless scientific warnings have made little impact on public discourse. The establishment media have paid only lip service to the dangers, even as the effects on the climate have become harder to overlook. And governments have made placatory noises while doing nothing meaningful to reverse the collision course humanity is on with the planet. (...)

The World Meteorological Organization, meanwhile, noted that the three greenhouse gases have reached record highs, with methane – the biggest offender – showing the largest year-on-year jump.

Civil disobedience is a symptom not of the climate crisis – nature won’t listen to the protesters – but of the inaction that continues to be the default position of governing political elites, as well as the billionaire-owned media that is supposed to serve as a watchdog on their power. (...)

The establishment media is playing a crucial part in twisting social and political priorities. Every time it focuses on the inconvenience caused by the climate protests – or the potential risk of someone dying in an ambulance caught in a hold-up – it is downplaying what are already the tangible, lethal consequences of the climate emergency. (...)

Nonetheless, the claim that there is widespread antipathy in Britain towards acts of civil disobedience on the climate is greatly overstated – and by the very same media outlets determined to play down the climate crisis. (...)

Despite this, the rightwing Conservative government in London has been progressively eradicating the right of protest – precisely to prevent actions to highlight its continuing crimes against the planet.

A spate of recent legislation has been designed to criminalise any expression of dissent. (...)

Actions like glueing oneself to railings, sitting in a road, obstructing fracking machinery or tunnelling can result in up to three years’ imprisonment. “Disruption prevent orders” can be issued to anyone who has attended a protest in the last five years, banning them from taking part in future demonstrations for two years. Activists’ freedom of movement can be limited by orders requiring them to wear an electronic tag or denying them entry to specified areas. (...)

One might have hoped that at least Britain’s opposition party would be vowing to reverse such draconian measures once in office. But Labour leader Keir Starmer has suggested he would legislate even stiffer penalties for those taking direct action on the climate. (...)

What all this represents is a shift over the past decade from one kind of political insanity – a denial, either implicitly or explicitly, of a climate crisis – to a different kind of insanity: official acknowledgment of a looming climate catastrophe but a refusal to do something meaningful to avert it. (...)

But even more troubling, wars seem to be increasingly useful as a distraction. (...)

In this way, wars helpfully deflect attention from the far bigger global crisis of the environment, one in which Western leaders cannot present themselves as the Good Guys – because they are, in fact, the worst, the greediest and the most destructive of the Bad Guys.

The endless War on Terror has served this purpose all too well over the past two decades, when the climate crisis should have been the world’s top priority. (...)

Instead the constant chatter in western capitals, on TV and in the press, is about how to find new ways to generate gas and oil for public consumption to overcome the energy crisis, not how to wean ourselves off these climate-destroying fuels. (...)

But in a world of self-inflicted collapse, Putin is no more insane than his western counterparts. In truth, the only sane people are those trying to wake up everyone else, whether by glueing their hands to the road, climbing bridges or hurling soup at paintings.

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> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

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‘Soon it will be unrecognisable’: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert

The Guardian

Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist.

The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. (...)

As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. (...) “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left. (...)

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.” (...)

[I]t is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.” (...)

“It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.” (...)

At the Cop26 climate meeting in Glasgow last year, it was agreed that every effort should be made to try to limit that rise to 1.5C, although to achieve such a goal, it was calculated that global carbon emissions will have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

“In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.”

And we should be in no doubt about the consequences. Anything above 1.5C will see a world plagued by intense summer heat, extreme drought, devastating floods, reduced crop yields, rapidly melting ice sheets and surging sea levels. (...)

From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown. Instead we need to adapt to the hothouse world that lies ahead and to start taking action to try to stop a bleak situation deteriorating even further, McGuire says. (...)

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.” (...)

McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. . (...)

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire is published by Icon Books, £9.99

Complete article

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty Images.

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This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather

George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Dangerous heat will become the norm, even in the UK. Systems need to urgently change – and the silence needs to be broken.

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. (...)

This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. (...) But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. (...)

We have seen nothing yet. (...)

We do not deserve this. The billionaire press and the politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. (...)

They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. (...)

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to see that mainstream environmental movements have made a terrible mistake. (...) It goes something like this. There is too little time and the ask is too big to try to change the system. People aren’t ready for it. We don’t want to scare away our members or provoke a fight with the government. So the only realistic approach is incrementalism. (...)

But while they have been playing patience, power has been playing poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system change, they proved us wrong by changing everything. (...)

Only a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and to inspire and mobilise the millions of people required to generate effective action. (...)

There was never time for incrementalism. Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is a morass in which ambition sinks. (...)

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. (...)

So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. (...)

But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?

Complete article

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe.’ A firefighter tackles a wild fire in Gironde, France, 17 July 2022. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images.

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Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis

Media Lens

(...) Increasingly, now, we do have citizens among us: scientists – particularly, climate scientists – who are awakening from their ‘mainstream’ slumber to the reality that they are citizens of a decaying society on a dying planet. (...)

To be fair, even veteran activists are asking themselves: ‘In what kind of world have we actually been living all along?’ For when it comes to anything other than maximising profit for corporations and pacifying the public, there appears to be no-one piloting the ship of state. (...)

The confusion and outrage are understandable. But why is climate denial still so prevalent? Why are so many people behaving as if there is no crisis? (...)

State-corporate interests generate and galvanise public fear into action with great efficiency when they want to. We need only think of World Wars I and II when millions of people were mobilised to kill and be killed to defend ‘democracy’, the ‘Fatherland’, the ‘Motherland’. After 1945, public fear and outrage were similarly brought to fever pitch by ‘red scares’ insisting that ‘The Russians are coming!’ As Zinn noted, the alarm was also rung to devastating effect in 1990 at the time of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. (...)

The same was true at the time of Nato’s assault on Serbia in 1999, also in 2003 when Iraq was invaded and conquered, in 2011 when the Libyan government was overthrown, and when the same attempt was made in Syria. (...)

This is why there is no sense of climate crisis, of emergency. It has nothing to do with human indifference; it has to do with people with authority and power – interests fanatically committed to expanding profits – NOT producing banner, front-page headlines of this kind:

‘CLIMATE COLLAPSE: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’

‘FOSSIL FUEL INTERESTS ARE KILLING US FOR SHORT-TERM PROFIT: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU? OR WILL YOU BECOME VERY, VERY ANGRY?’

Far from alarming us, front page headlines are still literally celebrating indications of looming climate collapse. On January 2, the Sunday Telegraph front page featured a smiling, costumed performer at London’s New Year’s Day parade, under the headline:

‘Warmest New Year’s Day on record’

(...) Even when the impacts of climate change are not being celebrated, they are still being questioned. A BBC article asked:

‘Are soaring temperatures linked to climate change?’

How, in 2022, with everything we know, can this even be a question? By contrast, during ‘red scares’ and ‘the war on terror’, often bogus ‘threats’ were shrieked out as undisputed and utterly terrifying. Any expressions of doubt were reviled as genocide-denying treachery.

This surreal combination of celebration and denial is being produced in the context of devastating weather extremes that are only going to get much, much worse. (...)

More than 20 US states were experiencing dangerously hot temperatures impacting nearly 100 million Americans as grim footage was shared of thousands of cattle killed by dangerous temperatures, raising the much-feared spectre of global food shortages as temperatures continue to rise. (...)

It is reported that the current drought in Italy threatens more than 30% of national agricultural production. In Sydney, 50,000 people have been urged to evacuate their homes as floods hit Australia’s largest city for the third time this year. (...)

Climate scientists are warning that ‘every heatwave occurring today is more intense due to climate change.’ Heatwaves linked to climate change reportedly killed 157,000 people worldwide between 2000 and 2020, with four-fifths of those deaths during the 2003 European heatwave and 2010 Russia heatwave. (...)

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has been scathing in his denunciations of the fossil fuel industry and their political backers. Addressing a climate conference organised by the White House, he warned:

‘We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.’

He continued:

‘They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.’ (...)

Scientists like Kalmus are now pleading with the corporate media to drop the denialism and phony ‘balance’, and hit the alarm button with full force:

‘The single biggest media failure of all time is how the media still isn’t treating global heating as an emergency.’

He added:

‘Climate journalists, the climate emergency just isn’t a normal thing to report. There need to be new rules/norms/practices when our entire planet is at stake. It’s a singular story.’

(...) How to escape state-corporate control of the means of mass communication?

It is a problem no-one has yet managed to solve. But a powerful step in the right direction must be for scientists to radicalise and mobilise – to look deeply and understand the true nature of corporate politics and corporate media – and to act together to demand public insurrection, rebellion and revolutionary change.

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> See also: It’s democracy v plutocracy – this is the endgame for our planet (The Guardian)

> See also: ‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness (Media Lens)

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #global_warming #sea_level #ocean_level #water_security #drought #desertification #paris_agreement #cop26 #government #international_cooperation #pollution #water #water_quality #supreme_court #lobby #rupert_murdoch #media #journalism #journalist #corporate_media #state #public_opinion #heat_wave #extreme_weather #food_shortages #deforestation #bush_fires #propaganda

Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results

The Guardian

One in five ads served on search results for 78 climate-related terms placed by firms with interests in fossil fuels, research finds.

Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”. (...)

Advertisers pay for their ads to appear on the search engine when a user queries certain terms. The ads are appealing to businesses because they are very similar in appearance to search results: more than half of users in a 2020 survey reported they could not tell the difference between a paid-for listing and a normal Google result. (...)

However, Shell’s net-zero strategy relies heavily on carbon capture and offsetting, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, which says: “Despite its ‘highly ambitious’ framing … Shell’s vision of a continued role for oil, gas and coal until the end of the century remains essentially the same.” (...)

“Since at least the 1980s in the US, there has been a very concerted effort by public relations agents to help polluting companies develop strategies to ‘go green’ while maintaining business as usual.

“Many of the initiatives companies are taking are very piecemeal and will not amount to any kind of long-term or systemic change.” (...)

The analysis also looked at “snippets”, which are not paid-for but are chosen by Google’s algorithm as the most relevant result. The Guardian found the snippet chosen for “fracking” linked to the website of an oil and gas lobby group, the Independent Petroleum Association of America. (...)

A years-long piece of research by the US Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2016 that in some cases fracking had harmed drinking water supplies.

Unlike Facebook, Google does not have a publicly accessible ad library, meaning it is difficult to analyse advertising on the platform. (...)

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> See also: The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing (The Guardian)

Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion #ExxonMobil #Royal_Dutch #shell #Aramco #Goldman_Sachs #google #greenwashing #McKinsey #Independent_Petroleum_Association_of_America #alphabet #snippets #google_snippets #lobby

The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing

The Guardian

Since the 1980s, fossil fuel firms have run ads touting climate denial messages – many of which they’d now like us to forget. Here’s our visual guide.

Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.

The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day. (...)

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Tags: #capitalism #environment #pollution #waste #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #cop26 #global_warming #aur_pollution #neoliberalism #market_fundamentalism #inequality #cerrado #desert #rivers #amazon #co2 #nox #fossil_fuel #deforestation #brazil #brasil #flooding #heat_dome #extreme_weather #forest_fires #media #carbon_footprint #oil_industry #lobby #desinformation #economic_growth #consumerism #citizen #protest #Fridays_for_Future #Green_New_Deal_Rising #Extinction_Rebellion