Page 203 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

198 D. RITTER AND B. BREVINI

live in Australia in an “extractivist” political economy and that explains a lot
about what happens around the place. Anything that does anything other
than just get stuff out of the ground as fast as possible is in some way
defined as being a ‘nuisance’,a ‘roadblock’, ‘unrealistic’, almost no matter
who owns the mine or how much it’s going to benefit. As we can see from
the court case in which the Adani fellow was cross-examined on his job’s
figures, it seems you can almost just make stuff up. If it was just neolib-
eralism it would be different, but it’s this “extractivist” political economy
and that is rooted deep in our culture, even though it has always also been
contested… Last year when I was in Canberra at Parliament House I had a
few conversations which illustrated the point. At that stage we were calling
for an inquiry into the power of influence in the fossil fuel/mining
industry, and the problem that I had speaking to journalists about it was
that they tended to say: “This isn’t a story. This is something we already
know.” Effectively, people were saying ‘come on mate, this is just how
things are, we all know that’. I thought that said a lot. That the fact that
people simply accept that power in this industry: the malign power it has
within Australian democracy, despite the fact that it’s by some measures
really quite a marginal economic concern, despite climate, despite what
coal pollution does even without climate, despite the fact that it’s just such
a negative vision of Australia and the Australian people: that destructive
and negative idea that all we can do as a people is dig holes in the ground.
BB: Given the failure of mainstream media to effectively convey the
issues surrounding climate change, have you connected with any
media reform groups in the UK to collaborate on environmental and
social movements?
DR: I’ve never been contacted, at least never in the sense of, “Hey, would
you be interested in running a campaign around X issue?”. But I certainly
wouldn’t rule it out as an issue that Greenpeace could campaign on for the
reasons that we’ve outlined: that it’s extremely difficult to shift mindsets
around consumption or extractivism or anything else when one has the
media acting like a propaganda machine for the status quo, which people
do unwittingly. In other words, media reform could be perfectly within our
organisational mission of securing an earth capable of nurturing life in all its
diversity if it was seen as precondition to achieving that end. I have had
private conversations with a number of significant figures in the area of
media reform. What I can say is that I have felt that there has been a
meeting of the minds about the relationship between the problems.