Page 156 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 12

Nothing but Truthiness: Public

Discourses on the Adani Carmichael
Mine in Australia

Benedetta Brevini and Terry Woronov

Senator Waters, I am sure it has not escaped your notice that some forms of
coal are cleaner than others and the coal that will be mined from the
Carmichael mine by Adani is some of the cleanest coal in the world. So the
consequence of the development of the Carmichael mine by Adani, the
export of that relatively clean coal to India and its use in a new generation of
Indian electricity generation to replace the pollutant biomass upon which
those people rely at the moment will be to produce a much cleaner energy
outcome (Senator Brandis questioned at Senate, 23 November 2015).

‘Post-truth’ has been celebrated by the Oxford and Maquarie Dictionaries as
the 2016 Word of the Year, after dominating media and political discourses
during the American election campaign and the Brexit debate in the UK.
Defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are
less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and per-

B. Brevini T. Woronov (&)
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: terry.woronov@sydney.edu.au
B. Brevini
e-mail: benedetta.brevini@sydney.edu.au

© The Author(s) 2017 147
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_12