Page 199 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

194 D. RITTER AND B. BREVINI

almost every other issue that the media routinely reports on. In a sense, it is
a kind of ultimate threat because everything depends on having a func-
tioning climate and the kind of media that we have is not used to
addressing issues of that nature. I was recently reading the book The Great
Derangement by Amitav Ghosh about the failure of the novel as a form to
properly respond to climate change because of the extent to which it is
historically rooted in as set of historically situated bourgeois sensibilities.
I think that probably, at least in relation to newspapers or old-fashioned
television ‘nightly news’, that there are conventions of the form that are
contributing to the failure to cover the issue adequately. It isn’t ‘just
another issue’—it is existential. Then there is the political economy of the
industry: you’ve got the problem of those benefiting from the current
system or are in denial of the need for change in the position of being
newspaper owners or editors. The peculiarly destructive role of some news
sources like Fox in the US is obviously particularly well known. At the
other end of the spectrum, there are some media outlets which really do
their best—the Guardian for example, and the Black Inc publications.
Crikey also deserves a special mention as does the work of particular
journalists like Peter Hannam at Fairfax. For government outlets, like the
ABC, while lots of incredibly important work goes on, I think there is a
sense in which absurd and outlandish positions on the climate science have
been given too much air-time, with the search for balance leading to some
rather ridiculous false equivalencies.
All of that said, trying to get across the inherently complex truth about
Paris – that on the one hand it’s an incredibly significant threshold moment
getting the deal, getting the level of commitment to the targets on the one
hand, but on the other hand the actual national pledges are woefully
insufficient to get us there – is inherently difficult, even for well intentioned
media because it does not conform to a neat narrative. The two are in
tension because one can be reduced to ‘we are saved’ and the other to ‘we
are doomed’, so telling both of those messages at once was probably a
subtlety that the media was always going to struggle with.
BB: As a series of recent interventions have made clear, including
Klein’s interview in this volume and her book, the present climate
crisis is rooted in the current organisation of capitalism and its
dependence on carbon-based sources of energy. What is your view on
the matter?