In the final month of 2015 The 21st Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Paris. Delegates from every country on this warming planet clustered in the suburb of Le Bourget, six miles from the centre of the French capital, and negotiated an agreement that we hope, and it has only hope to enforce it, will limit greenhouse gas emissions from human activity enough to prevent the Earth’s mean temperature rising more than a dangerous two degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels.
It’s another inadequate outcome. The agreement to minimise the rise in temperature is not legally binding and leaves the door open for plenty more ‘business as usual’ from the fossil fuel industries. The binding part of the deal requires countries to set emission reduction targets, develop the policies for meeting them, publicly report their progress every five years starting in 2023, and update and enhance their targets after each review.
These conferences and meetings have been going on long enough now for there to be little in the way of expectation of a result that translates into action on the scale required. Since the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first agreement to cut emissions, was signed by 193 countries in 1997 atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from 360 to 400 parts per million, adding as much CO2 in 18 years as was added in the previous 27. For all the negotiating, speechifying and photo-op-exploiting the combustion of far too much carbon continues.
There is some cause for optimism. China and the US are acting on a domestic level, albeit frustratingly slowly. Many European countries are increasing the contribution made by renewable energy to their power demands, Denmark being the most exemplary. Island states, anxious at rising sea levels and incursions of salt water, are committing themselves to a low-carbon future and exerting what pressure they can on their bigger continental neighbours to do the same. Renewable technologies are being utilised and improved and, in most countries outside of the embarrassingly regressive UK, encouraged by government incentives. The process of a negotiated international agreement has, however, contributed little to this and monies promised to developing countries have for the most part failed to materialise.
The reasons for the lack of any progress, beyond broad agreements that something should be done at some point, can be condensed into two demijohns of blame. The first is the campaign of denial, cooked up by fossil fuel companies and their investors. The second is unwillingness and inability of our elected representatives to interfere in the workings of the global market economy in such a way that it might affect the profits of fossil fuel companies. If public opinion in the developed world had been unanimously behind action on mitigating the effects of climate change it is reasonable to assume we’d be on the way to bringing emissions under control by now. As far as the UK is concerned the state broadcaster, the BBC, could have done a great deal more to prevent public opinion from falling victim to the denialist campaign. The scientific consensus, and the evidence that supports it, are overwhelming, yet a large proportion of the public refuses to accept that humans have heated planet Earth by pumping extra greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
The 2009 conference in the Danish capital, COP15, was billed at the time as the big one, the make-or-break last chance for the world to reach an agreement that would stabilise the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The meetings leading up to Copenhagen appeared to have produced a momentum towards a meaningful deal. In the event it was sabotaged, not just by the reluctance of the biggest polluters to commit to any deal at all, but by the phoney ‘climategate’ scandal. Since this involved years of illegal hacking of The Climate Research Unit’s emails in order to produce no more than the use of the word ‘trick’ on one occasion, it would have been laughed off as a pathetic effort to undermine climate science had it not had the full weight of the fossil-fuel industry’s multi-million dollar denial campaign behind it. The BBC’s approach at the time was baffling. Having accepted the climate science consensus for years, it came under pressure to give air to the denialist point of view from interest groups like Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, and duly caved in.
There followed a period of the Beeb thinking that it served its commitment to impartiality by giving as much time to mavericks and oil-funded denialists as to experts in their field with robust theory and mountains of peer-reviewed work to back up their assertions. Lawson, maverick Aussie geologist Bob Carter, some amateur meteorologist working alone in the English Midlands, Terry Wogan. Anyone would do, so long as they were prepared to cast doubt on the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and respected scientists like James Hansen, Robert Watson, Jo Haigh and Steve Jones, who understandably found the frequent meetings between Lawson and the BBC’s director of editorial standards David Jordan disturbing, particularly in the light of negative, sceptical coverage of the IPCC’s 2013 report.
Having assisted in the denialist campaign to misdirect public opinion away from acceptance of climate science and towards misunderstanding, doubt and scepticism, the BBC has of late , better late than never, crossed over to the scientific consensus. Its reporting of 2015 having been the warmest year on record contained no input from doubtmongers or denialists, a huge contrast to coverage of the issue from 2009 to 2013. This is something to be welcomed, but we have to wonder why the Corporation so readily allowed itself to be manipulated by the denial campaign.
In stark contrast to its misguided false balance narrative on climate change, the BBC’s editorial team has taken up a stance on its treatment of the Labour Party which evidently involves no balance at all, not even a pretence at it. The 2015 General Election was notable for the way in which the mainstream media was able to focus on a handful of issues which favoured the Conservative Party. Europe, immigration, the alleged economic recovery and the ‘economic plan’ that was alleged to have produced it. The BBC adopted this restricted agenda, allowing the Tories to choose the electoral battleground. This is important, because the rightwing bias of printed news in the UK is almost as overwhelming as the scientific consensus on climate change. The effects of the cuts in public spending were ignored, as were the housing and cost of living crises, the fragmented mess in education, the creeping privatisation of healthcare, the assault on the environment and the legislation designed to protect it, and the failure of the government to meet its own targets on debt and deficit reduction.
The subsequent election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party produced a further entrenchment of the right wing news agenda at the BBC. Description of Corbyn as a left wing extremist and his opponents as ‘moderate’ was adopted without question, in spite of Corbyn’s views on rail nationalisation, the NHS, education, the environment, nuclear weapons, housing and economics being shared by a large proportion of the population. The plausible economic alternative to austerity has been ignored. Every reported PMQs session is somehow contrived to show David Cameron in controlled, witty form. The Beeb is following the mainstream media’s ploy of drowning out policy discussion with diversionary background noise, leaving former political editor, and ex-young Tory Nick Robinson shocked at the obvious lack of impartiality.
The guilty parties include James Harding, appointed head of news and current affairs in 2012 , live politics editor Robbie Gibb, Daily Politics anchor Andrew Neil and Robinson’s replacement Laura Keunssberg. They are blatant peddlars of the right-of-centre agenda. Don’t expect an intervention from Rona Fairhead, the Chair of the BBC Trust, either – like Harding, she’s a millionaire friend of George Osborne. If these people genuinely believe they’re making their best efforts at fulfilling the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, we should be worried. If they’re deliberately presenting rightwing bias to the licence-fee paying public, we should be worried and angry. If the Beeb is trying to save its skin from the circling vultures of commercial broadcast moguls like Rupert Murdoch ( former employer of both Harding and Neil at Times newspapers) by offering up a constant supply of sympathetic coverage of the Tory Party, it probably won’t work. The desire to scrap the licence fee and let business take over is driven by profit-facilitating ideology, not by pragmatism.
The BBC should be congratulated on finally abandoning its false balance on global warming and climate change, but needs to be challenged over its blatantly skewed political coverage. It’s not easy to achieve the right balance all the time, but it would help to employ people who actually want to find it.
Stuart Dye's Blog 