[D66] ‘Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis’

[R.O.]

https://www.medialens.org/2020/six-months-to-avert-climate-crisis-climate-breakdown-and-the-corporate-media/


  ‘Six Months To Avert Climate Crisis’:
  Climate Breakdown And The Corporate Media

23rd June 2020 Alerts

In his classic science fiction novel, ‘Foundation’, Isaac Asimov posited 
a future in which ‘psychohistorians’ could predict outcomes based on 
past history and the large-scale behaviour of human populations by 
combining psychology and the mathematics of probability. Using 
‘psychohistory’, the protagonist Hari Seldon discovers that the 
12,000-year-old Galactic Empire will collapse in 500 years. He warns the 
galactic rulers of this likely fate, while explaining that an 
alternative future in which human knowledge is preserved can be 
attained. For his trouble, he is exiled to the remote planet of Terminus.

In today’s world, the prospects for human civilisation, never mind the 
existence of historians in the future, look bleak indeed. According to 
many leading climate scientists and biologists, the most likely outcome 
for humanity is the collapse of what is called ‘civilisation’. They warn 
that it may already be too late to change course.

These are the shocking expert conclusions, rooted in scientific evidence 
and careful rational arguments, which are routinely underplayed, 
marginalised or simply ignored by ‘mainstream’ news media.

Last November, the world’s most prestigious science journal, /Nature/, 
published a study by eminent climate scientists warning that nine major 
‘tipping points’ which regulate global climate stability are dangerously 
close to being triggered. These include the slowing down of ocean 
circulation in the North Atlantic, massive deforestation of the Amazon, 
and accelerating ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet. Any one of 
these nine tipping points, if exceeded, could push the Earth’s climate 
into catastrophic runaway global warming. There could even be a ‘domino 
effect’ whereby one tipping point triggers another tipping point which, 
in turn, triggers the next one and so on, in a devastating cascade.

Given the normal custom of academics to use sober language, the warning 
statements in the pages of /Nature/ were stark:

    ‘The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must
    *compel* [our emphasis] political and economic action on emissions.’

The researchers are clear that:

    ‘we are in a climate emergency and [our study of tipping points]
    strengthens this year’s chorus of calls for urgent climate action —
    from schoolchildren to scientists, cities and countries.’

In short, there is ‘an existential threat to civilization’ and ‘no 
amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us.’

This should have dwarfed news coverage of Brexit for months.

One of the study’s co-authors, Will Stefen, emeritus professor of 
climate and Earth System science at the Australian National University, 
told /Voice of Action/, an Australian publication, that all this raises 
the ultimate question:

    ‘Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now
    inevitable?’

In other words, there may simply not be enough time to stop tipping 
points being reached, as he explained with this metaphor:

    ‘If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about 5km
    that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km away
    from the iceberg, it’s already doomed.’

We searched the ProQuest media database for mentions of this 
particularly disturbing quote by Steffen, a world-renowned climate 
expert, in national UK newspapers. We found the grand total of one in a 
short article in the Daily Express. What could better sum up the 
pathology of the ‘mainstream’ news media than ignoring urgent 
authoritative warnings of the likely collapse of the climate system?

Scientists have been sounding the alarm for some time that we are in the 
midst of a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s long biological history. But 
this time the cause is not a natural calamity, such as a huge volcanism 
event or an asteroid strike, but human ‘civilisation’. Worse still, the 
careful evidence accrued by biologists in study after study indicates 
that the global mass loss of species is /accelerating/. In 2017, a study 
published in the journal /Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences/, reported that billions of populations of animals have 
disappeared from the Earth amidst what they called a ‘biological 
annihilation.’ They said the findings were worse than previously thought.

Earlier this month, a new study revealed that five hundred species of 
land animals are likely to become extinct over the next two decades. 
  Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University 
of Mexico and lead author of the paper, declared:

    ‘We’re eroding the capabilities of the planet to maintain human life
    and life in general.’

While humans continue to destroy species and natural habitats, Ceballos 
and his colleagues warn of a ‘cascading series of impacts’, including 
more frequent occurrences of new diseases and pandemics, such as 
Covid-19. He summarised:

    ‘All of us need to understand that what we do in the next five to 10
    years will define the future of humanity.’

But the crucial window for action is likely much shorter than that. And 
it is not just the ‘usual suspects’ of Greens and wild-eyed radicals who 
claim so. According to Fatih Birol, executive director of the 
International Energy Agency, the world has just /six months/ to avert 
climate crisis. This is the timescale required to ‘prevent a 
post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm 
efforts to stave off climate catastrophe’.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and 
research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told 
/Voice of Action/ that the looming end of organised human society would 
not be a single event. Instead, we are approaching a stage:

    ‘where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of
    civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and
    civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things
    going for a bit longer.’

He added:

    ‘Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary
    challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I
    feel, is terminal.’

Meanwhile, Steffen believes that current mass protests, such as Black 
Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, are not yet a sign of collapse 
but one of ‘growing instability’. Alexander concurs, saying that it is a 
sign of ‘steam building up within a closed system’. Without large-scale 
grassroots action and radical shifts in government policies, we are 
‘likely to see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things 
continue to deteriorate’. However, he offered hope that, with sufficient 
public pressure, the future could still be ‘post-growth / post 
capitalist / post-industrial in some form.’

Graham Turner, a former senior Australian government research scientist, 
observed:

    ‘I think if we all manage to live a simpler and arguably more
    fulfilling life then it would be possible still with some
    technological advances to have a sustainable future, but it would
    seem that it’s more likely … that we are headed towards or perhaps
    on the cusp of a sort of global collapse.’

He fears that the public as a whole will only demand change once 
‘they’re actually losing their jobs or losing their life or seeing their 
children directly suffer’.

One positive practical step that people could take, he says, is to push 
for changes in the law governing corporations:

    ‘so that corporations don’t have more legal rights than people, and
    are not compelled to make a profit for shareholders.’

Meanwhile, Siberia, of all places, is undergoing a prolonged heatwave, 
described by one climate scientist as ‘undoubtedly alarming’, which is 
driving 2020 towards being the globally hottest year on record.

*Media ‘Failure’ Is Default Media Performance*

Many new and dramatic climate findings are, of course, reported in the 
science and environment sections of newspapers. /But the compelling case 
for a radical shift in society towards sustainability are barely touched 
upon in corporate news media/, for obvious reasons.

In particular, the imminent threat of climate collapse rarely intrudes 
into the numerous pages devoted to ‘politics’, business and the economy. 
These pages feature a whole slew of correspondents, columnists and 
commentators who are rewarded for /not/ questioning the status quo.

Worse, no leading political editor – the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and 
ITV’s Robert Peston spring to mind – ever seriously challenges the Prime 
Minister, or other senior politicians, on the huge risk of climate 
breakdown. The Westminster ‘village’ – surely as insular a social bubble 
as has ever existed in this country – is almost entirely divorced from 
the reality of onrushing climate chaos.

As independent journalist Rebecca Fisher, formerly of Corporate Watch, 
noted recently:

    ‘UK’s current form of “democracy” cannot protect the public. The
    “Westminster model” was developed to promote unregulated economic
    growth and prevent the public from real participation in how society
    is run.’

And yet, unlike the power-hungry Westminster navel-gazers, the public 
/does/ believe climate is an urgent issue. A new survey of 80,000 people 
conducted across forty countries reveals that fewer than three per cent 
believe climate change is not serious at all.

But, as we and others have long argued, a fundamental obstacle to 
shifting to a saner, more democratic society is the narrow concentration 
of media ownership; a structural impediment in today’s world to truly 
free and open debate. This extreme state of affairs has been tracked in 
the UK by the independent Media Reform Coalition which represents 
several groups and individuals committed to promoting journalism and 
communications that work for the benefit of the public. The MRC is 
currently chaired by Natalie Fenton, professor of media and 
communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The coalition’s most recent report on UK media ownership, published in 
2019, revealed that the problem is now even worse than at the time of 
its previous report in 2015. Just three companies – Rupert Murdoch’s 
News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach (publisher of the /Mirror/ titles) 
dominate 83 per cent of the national newspaper market (up from 71 per 
cent in 2015). When online readers are included, just five companies – 
News UK, Daily Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph – dominate 
nearly 80 per cent of the market.

The report’s authors warned:

    ‘We believe that concentration in news and information markets in
    particular has reached endemic levels in the UK and that we urgently
    need effective remedies. Concentrated ownership creates conditions
    in which wealthy individuals and organisations can amass vast
    political and economic power and distort the media landscape to suit
    their interests.’

The warning is further backed up in a forthcoming book, ‘The Media 
Manifesto’ (Polity Books, August 2020), by Fenton and co-authors Des 
Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik. They emphasise a crucial 
point that is a longstanding characteristic of rational media analysis: 
we must stop using the misleading framework of media ‘failures’. As Noam 
Chomsky observed many years ago in describing media performance:

    ‘The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with
    the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.’ (‘Deterring
    Democracy’, Hill & Wang, 1992, p. 79)

It is therefore not a ‘failure’ when newspapers and broadcasters neglect 
to scrutinise state-corporate power. Granting a free pass to power is 
virtually their /raison d’être/. Or, as ‘The Media Manifesto’ observes:

    ‘[The] inability to hold power to account shouldn’t be seen as an
    unprecedented “failure” of the media to perform its democratic role
    when, in fact, this has long been the media’s normal role under
    capitalism: to naturalize and legitimize existing and unequal social
    relations.’

The authors continue with examples:

    ‘It’s not about failing to hold banks to account but about the
    complicity of financial journalists and commentators in celebrating
    neoliberal economics ahead of the 2008 financial crash; it’s not
    about failing to be tough on racism but about the media’s historic
    perpetuation of racist stereotypes and promotion of anti-immigrant
    frames; it’s not about failing to recognize the challenges of
    apocalyptic climate change but about repeating tropes about
    “natural” disasters such as hurricanes, heatwaves and forest fires,
    together with routine “balanced” debates between climate change
    scientists and deniers. These are not examples of the media’s
    malfunctioning but of its default behaviour.’

But, goes up the cry from the back row, what about ‘our’ blessed BBC? It 
is, after all, obliged by its Royal Charter to report objectively and 
impartially, untrammelled by billionaire ownership or tawdry 
commercialisation. Right? Not so.

As Des Freedman observes of the BBC:

    ‘[It] is a compromised version of a potentially noble ideal: far too
    implicated in and attached to existing elite networks of power to be
    able to offer an effective challenge to them’. (‘The Media
    Manifesto’, /op. cit./, p. 88)

As can be seen every day of the week, the BBC typically follows a 
similar agenda to UK newspapers in its own news coverage. Freedman adds:

    ‘Far from retaining its autonomy from all vested interests, and
    delivering a critical and robust public interest journalism, the BBC
    has been a key institutional mechanism for reinforcing establishment
    “common sense” and has represented the strategic interests of the
    powerful more than the disparate views of ordinary audiences.’

He continues:

    ‘It has reached the point where even the accomplished former World
    Service journalist, Owen Bennett-Jones, has condemned the BBC’s
    dependence on official sources and argues that “there is plenty of
    evidence that the BBC, in both its international and domestic
    manifestations, deserves the epithet ‘state broadcaster’.” Without
    significant reform, public service media are, in reality, just as
    likely to be embroiled in the reproduction of media power as their
    commercial counterparts and therefore just as likely to be part of
    the problem rather than the solution.’ (pp. 23-24)

Fenton emphasises the point later in the book:

    ‘despite its claims to be impartial and independent, the BBC has
    always sided with the elite and been in thrall to those in power.’
    (p. 88)

Regular readers will be aware that, since we began publishing media 
alerts in 2001, we have examined in depth hundreds of examples of the 
BBC doing exactly this. If you include those examples that we highlight 
almost daily on Twitter and Facebook, they undoubtedly number in the 
thousands. Many of the most insidious examples of such bias, omission 
and distortion in BBC News have been expanded upon in several of our 
books. There is no shortage of evidence that BBC News functions as a 
propaganda outlet for state and corporate interests.

A fundamental obstacle to radical societal change to avert climate 
breakdown, therefore, is that ‘mainstream’ media, including BBC News, 
exist primarily to uphold the interests of capital and, in addition, 
particularly in the case of the BBC, the state:

    ‘Modern capitalism resides on the complex relationship between the
    neoliberal market and the neoliberal state. To address meaningfully
    the consequences of climate change, massively reduce inequality and
    eradicate poverty, would destabilize the power relations that
    underpin finance-led growth. For example, if the mainstream [sic]
    press industries do not attempt to maximise their profits in any way
    they can today, they will probably not exist tomorrow.’ (pp. 84-85)

*Concluding Remarks*

In a sane world, if senior scientists who normally use understated 
academic language start warning of an ‘existential threat’ to human 
civilisation, then responsible news media would leap into action with 
huge headlines and in-depth coverage. There would be extensive 
interviews with scientists on BBC News at Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, 
Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, BBC Radio 4 Today, and other major 
programmes. They would all follow up with urgent analysis of what needs 
to be done immediately in the realms of politics and economics to avert 
the climate threat, or at least minimise the serious consequences of 
that threat. Instead, state-corporate media have, in effect, exiled 
scientists to a distant planet in a remote part of the Galaxy where they 
can be ignored.

Billionaire-owned media, controlled by corporate boards and dependent on 
corporate ad revenue, and a state broadcaster forever hobbled by bowing 
to corporate-beholden governments, can never provide the answers to 
climate breakdown.  As ‘The Media Manifesto’ argues, with detailed 
recommendations, we need properly accountable, public-interest news 
media that are truly democratic, diverse and sustainable.

All the citizen movements that we see today, including Black Lives 
Matter and Extinction Rebellion, will not succeed unless common aims are 
sought across diverse campaigns with a united goal; namely, 
/dismantling/ the state-corporate media that are the propaganda wing for 
destructive state-corporate power, and /replacing/ such media with news 
organisations that serve the public interest.

We must be clear that the powerful need to be challenged directly; 
non-violently, yes, but with strength, persistence and wisdom on the 
basis of clear strategic aims. Meekly asking for change and accepting 
weak compromises will not work given the gravity of the climate crisis. 
Media academic Robert McChesney put it well:

    ‘Many liberals who wish to reform and humanize capitalism are
    uncomfortable with seemingly radical movements, and often work to
    distance themselves from them, lest respectable people in power cast
    a withering eye at them. “Shhh,” they say to people like me. “If we
    antagonize or scare those in power we will lose our seat at the
    table and not be able to win any reforms.” Yet these same liberal
    reformers often are dismayed at how they are politically
    ineffectual. Therein lies a great irony, because to enact
    significant reforms requires a mass movement (or the credible
    prospect of a mass movement) that does indeed threaten the
    powerful.’ (Robert McChesney, ‘Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First
    Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist
    Democracy’, Monthly Review Press, 2014, pp. 26-27)

In short, the powerful need to have their power – originally stolen from 
us anyway – taken away from them in order to ensure human survival.

DC

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