Page 161 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

152 B. BREVINI AND T. WORONOV

George Brandis, Attorney-General for Australia, during a Question Period
in the Senate, the mine would also help tackling climate change issues:

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, Hansard 2015).

Within this logic, the government argues that opening up the Southern
Hemisphere’s largest coalmine “will cut carbon pollution” (Hansard
2015).

UNWANTED FACTS AS DEBATABLE,DOUBTFUL OR POLITICAL
A second component of ‘truthiness’ is the practice of deliberately presenting
empirical facts as debatable, uncertain or political. This is accomplished in
several different ways. One prominent tactic is the use of oxymorons to
create contradictory messages. Kirsch and Benson (2010) derive their
analysis of corporate oxymorons from George Orwell, whose book 1984
described how the state sought to make alternative thought impossible
through the tactical appropriation and juxtaposition of key terms, rather
than outright censorship. As they point out, in Orwell’s use, some of these
terms were euphemisms that meant almost the exact opposite of what they
appeared to mean. Today, they note, corporations also rely on new oxy-
morons that rely on a figure/ground reversal that conceal the contradic-
tions of capitalism (in this case the harms of the mine).
In the case of the Carmichael mine, proponents created new terms to
conceal the harmful effects of the mine. One is the same tactic described by
Kirsch (2010), the construction of a concept of ‘sustainable mining.’ As
Kirsch describes, mining corporations globally have redefined the term
‘sustainable’ away from its original meaning, linked to environmentally
sustainable projects, to now mean mining projects that provide employ-
ment (ibid.). In Australia, mine proponents were quick to use this redefi-
nition of ‘sustainability.’ On 15 March 2016, Anthony Lynham,
Queensland Minister for Development and Natural Resources, declared: