Page 214 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

210 G. MURDOCK

emissions set at the Paris Summit have any chance of being realised. And as
Michael E. Mann points out in his interview in this volume, this target only
gets us part of the way to the reductions necessary to avoid catastrophe.
The environmental destruction at the extraction site would be com-
pounded by a proposed 400 kilometre rail link to the Queensland coast at
Abbot Point, by the offshore processing facilities, and by the shipping
required to transport the finished coal to its final destination in India.
The project has unreserved support from the Queensland and Federal
governments. In a theatrical gesture in February the national treasurer,
Scott Morrison, brandished a lump of coal during Question Time in the
House of Representatives taunting opponents and declaring, ‘This is coal.
Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared.’ He elaborated on his position in a radio
interview a few days later stressing that the government “have no more fear
of coal than we have a fear of wind, or solar, or wave energy, or
pump-hydro, or whatever the option is” (Hunt 2017). This statement,
which positions coal as simply another option for energy generation
alongside renewables, is a prime example of the false equivalents at the
centre of opposition to the overwhelming scientific evidence on the causes
and consequences of climate crisis.
In March the dedicated climate change denier, James Delingpole,
posted a commentary on the alt-right news site, Breitbart, attacking a
Washington Post story reporting the scientific evidence of bleaching on the
Great Barrier Reef (mentioned earlier) asserting that it was “just a #fake-
news lie designed to promote the climate alarmist agenda” (Delingpole
2017). He claims to have been “out there personally to check” and found
that it is not “in any kind of danger”. He doesn’t say when he visited or
which part of the reef he went to, but has no hesitation in presenting his
casual observations as equivalent to the weight of systematic scientific
inquiry. He goes on to attribute the informed consensus on bleaching to a
“green-left-liberal echo chamber” singling out “anyone who works for the
ABC in Australia, the BBC, The Guardian” as leading promoters of his
conception of fake news on the issue. This list is instructive. The ABC and
BBC are both public service broadcasters and The Guardian is operated by
a trust and has no proprietor or shareholders. It is precisely the distance
from overt corporate influence these arrangements provide that opens
space for critical inquiry into competing claims.
A House of Commons Committee report on science coverage in the
British media published in March quoted the conclusion of an earlier study
that had found that the “BBC content was generally of a high quality and