Green Week: What's the story?

By David Gow - 31st May 2005

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If climate change is the single biggest threat to mankind, how come it's so hard to find any coverage in newspapers or on TV? David Gow has a few suggestions.

"Everybody agrees that climate change is utterly important, raising dramatic images of melting ice-caps, vineyards on the bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond and tsunamis flooding Manhattan - the very stuff of Hollywood disaster movies.

So how come it's hard to find vast acreages of space devoted to the issue in the newspapers or on TV? After all, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has consistently said - apart from in the recent general election campaign - that it is the biggest single threat facing human beings - bigger than global terrorism or Third World poverty.

And his government has set the standard in combating global warming by setting a goal of a 60 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by the middle of this century.

The topic figures high in the list of priorities set out in the recent Queen's Speech (five-year government programme) not just for Britain but also for the EU and the G8 group of developed countries which Blair will chair in the second half of this year.

This time, it is said, Blair means business now that he has won his third term and wants to amplify his place in history.

It is a source of genuine tension between Blair and President Bush who has notably failed to respond to the British premier's unswerving support for the war in Iraq with a reciprocal agreement to sign up for Kyoto protocol cutting greenhouse gases (though scores of US cities have taken measures to meet the US target of a seven per cent cut by 2010).

A prime reason for the disregard for the subject is its sheer complexity. The bulk of scientists agree that global warming represents a genuine threat to the earth's ecological balance and, hence, to human survival - and that of the planet's other inhabitants.

But they disagree about the imminence of that threat - and a few others honestly believe that it is grossly exaggerated.

A recent late-night panel discussion among politicians and government advisers/consultants on BBC TV's Newsnight underlined the problems for "ordinary" voters in coming to grips with the issue.

The seven participants, including spokesmen for Britain's three main political parties, simply were not talking to each other in a meaningful, constructive dialogue and unable to answer the simple questions put to them by the combative interviewer, Jeremy Paxman.

What is the biggest source of global warming? Is it the large-scale industrial plants, including power stations, targeted by the EU in its ground-breaking CO2 emissions trading scheme?

Is it transport, including the growing number of cars congesting roads across more and more continents? Is it the wasteful use of energy in private homes?

No clear answers emerged. Even more unclear was the equation between combating global warming through the shift to non-fossil fuels and security of energy supplies.

If the experts cannot agree on the true costs of building new, smaller, cheaper, and less waste-generating nuclear power stations or on the extent to which and when and at what cost renewables such as wind, wave and solar power, let alone biomass, can fill the gap in supply left by a switch out of coal or gas, what hope for the public?

Let's face it; the public is more interested in the fact that Kylie has contracted breast cancer and in the prospects for her recovery. What's more, they view with distrust - and blatant self-interest - the politicians calling for constraints on the use of the private car or an extra levy on aviation fuel resulting in higher ticket prices to combat a threat that, compared with Saddam's WMD, is even more distant or chimeric in their eyes.

And there are plenty of business lobbyists to confirm their right to turn a blind eye. Journalists dealing with and genuinely trying to come to terms with this issue in an honest, objective manner are faced, then, with a multiple series of obstacles.
First, there is the incomprehension or, worse, boredom of their news editors when told of a complex chain of events or issues that would require large amounts of space.

Second, many balk at the need to compress and/or simplify these. Third, new, hard facts are always required to buttress a story pointing to the gap between objective and reality: the persistent under-shooting of its CO2 targets, for instance, by the Blair government.

Fourth, the journalist may simply feel overwhelmed by the conflicting information available.

Matters are not helped by the protagonists of the campaign against global warming. The government ministers in charge tend to be middle-ranking, grey, entirely lacking in charisma or vision - exactly as in the case of the EU's worthy but dull environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas - and/or the portfolio is shared across competing ministries answerable to different interest groups.

So, one way to convince the public that the threat is genuine would be to set up special government departments or units and select a high-profile, if necessarily independent, person to spearhead the campaign, drawing in celebrities on the same scale as, say, those against famine or poverty.

This would help generate a bigger appetite for articles or programmes on the issue.
The public needs to be brought to exert market pressure on, say, car-manufacturers to speed up the availability of fuel-cell technology or airlines to switch more rapidly to cleaner, more fuel-efficient engines.

And it needs to understand the relation between, say, cheaper home-heating bills and energy-saving when costs are soaring.

For now, the public cares but not enough and the short-termists in government are not doing enough to make them care. It would at least make the work of the committed journalists less frustrating."