For people who like to say they follow the science, the climate groupthink conformists of the media sure don’t like facts. I demonstrated last week how Paul Barry and MediaWatch pretended climate scientist Andy Pitman was misrepresented, and created the impression his research supported precisely the opposite conclusions to what he had articulated.
Many other journalists went along for that ride, either out of ignorance, laziness, ideological imperatives or all three, leaving unexamined the salient fact that Professor Pitman’s assessments had debunked politically charged efforts to attribute our current drought to climate change. Yet since then we have seen even more examples of deception and self-censorship in climate reporting.
READ MORE: Media Diary: ABC flies high as minister slums it | China, Russia block Antarctic marine park plan | IAG warns on climate change
If there was clear evidence that Australia was on track to meet its Paris emissions reductions target, you would expect this to be news. Because for years there has been extensive coverage about us being in danger of failing to cut emissions by 26-28 per cent cuts from 2005 levels by 2030.
“A new report from the International Monetary Fund has slammed Australia’s performance in tackling climate change,” said the ABC’s The World Today last month. “The IMF says Australia will fail to meet its targets under the Paris agreement on reducing emissions, contradicting claims by the Morrison Government that it’s on track to do so.”
In January David Sparkes told ABC’s PM listeners: “Federal government claims that Australia will meet its emissions reduction targets in a canter have been flatly contradicted in a major international assessment of Australia’s environmental performance.” In June an ABC story declared “Australia’s Emissions Reduction Fund is failing to deliver, government data shows.”
The ABC’s Four Corners said in April: “The government’s own projections show Australia is not on track to meet its current Paris target.” In September the ABC’s science reporter Nick Kilvert wrote analysis claiming Scott Morrison’s absence from a UN Climate Summit was a national embarrassment. “Australia’s emissions have continued to increase over the past five years, and most projections see us overshooting our 2030 target without some drastic reductions,” he wrote.
A year ago James Fernyhough argued in The New Daily — a website partly controlled by the trade union movement — that the Prime Minister’s claim that Australia would make the Paris targets “in a canter” were wrong. “Mr Morrison is either being blindly optimistic or he is an outright liar,” Fernyhough wrote. Last month on SBS, Tom Stayner reported that Australia wouldn’t meet its Paris targets even if it raised a climate tax. Around the same time Adam Morton in The Guardian Australia drew the same conclusion: “Leading climate researchers have overwhelmingly rejected the federal government’s claim it is on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions as promised under the 2015 Paris agreement.”
The narrative is clear. The Coalition is not to be trusted on climate and its policies will fail. Similar arguments have been made about the rate of renewable energy investments, with various journalists and activists cherrypicking information to suggest Morrison made incorrect claims at the UN in September.
The government continues to insist that it will achieve its Paris emissions targets but much of the media bends over backwards to display its scepticism or amplify any experts or arguments that claim it will fail. The ABC even concluded as much when it fact-checked Morrison’s election debate claim the target would be met: “But according to the 2018 projections, released by the Department of the Environment and Energy, Australia will reduce its emissions by just 7 per cent.”
So, it was always going to be fascinating to see the reaction when recognised academic experts from the Australian National University published a report that found “Australia’s world-leading per-capita rate of deployment of solar and wind energy” would easily deliver the Paris targets. You would expect this to be significant news, wouldn’t you?
But in some places — notably the ABC — it was greeted with silence. Deliberately self-censored. Relevant information hidden from ABC audiences.
Professor Andrew Blakers and Dr Matthew Stocks released findings showing how continued deployment of wind turbines and solar installations displacing fossil fuel combustion will see carbon dioxide emissions drop substantially in coming years, producing significant net reductions, even allowing for increased emissions elsewhere in the economy. “Continued deployment of solar and wind at current rates allows Australia to meet its Paris emissions target at low or zero net cost without using past Kyoto accounting credits,” declared Blakers and Stocks.
This bold statement could hardly be more newsworthy, given the current debate. Neither could it be of more interest or import to those interested in climate and energy policy.
Given their claimed concerns for the planet and apparent conviction that Australia’s policies matter globally, the ABC and their fellow travellers could be expected to see this as not only big news but encouraging too. The study was reported in this newspaper by environment editor Graham Lloyd and by Shane Wright in Nine newspapers. I shared the news on television that day, noting it was probably the most significant news of the day and predicting it would be ignored by much of the media.
The ABC pretended it never happened. The national broadcaster’s wilful deceit on global warming is so entrenched that its self-censorship was as difficult to predict as sunrise.
Assessments that say we will miss our Paris targets, or that Morrison and his government are wrong to claim we will meet them — they are news. But reputable studies saying our current policies are doing exactly what they are intended to do and relaying facts about what is really happening — they are not news. That is climate, energy and media in 2019.
Fascinatingly, while searching the ABC for mentions of this report I found some coverage of a similar finding from Blakers and Stocks back in February. An online story by Gary-Jon Lysaght was headed: “Australia on track to meet Paris Agreement targets five years earlier than expected, research finds.”
Lysaght’s fact-rich story was filed for the regional ABC from the far north of South Australia where there are substantial renewable energy investments, but was largely ignored elsewhere.
On Radio National Breakfast a seemingly unconvinced Fran Kelly at least gave Professor Blakers a fair hearing on his positive news. But that night on ABC television, The Drum ran climate activist Ketan Joshi saying the “numbers are a little suspect” and former Labor minister Craig Emerson saying “it’s not going to happen with government policy”.
The latest report was publicised with an ANU media release headed “Australia’s carbon emissions set to drop: ANU experts” and circulated with email and phone contacts for Professor Blakers and Dr Stocks. It seems the ABC decided this time it was easier just to ignore the ANU experts, who did a range of radio, television and newspaper interviews but were not troubled for comment by the national broadcaster, which failed to report their findings.
The only reference I could find in the ABC’s vast array of radio, television, online and digital news services was an oblique one by Fran Kelly when interviewing then energy minister Matt Canavan on Insiders; she referred to the ANU study to suggest coal-fired generation was becoming redundant.
It is now abundantly clear that while Australian taxpayers fund a national broadcaster to provide information to improve the quality of national debate, they get precisely the opposite. The ABC hides information in order to undercut national debate and advance propaganda.
BBC apologises to staff over Russell Brand sex complaints
Some employees had stayed silent about the behaviour of the comedian and actor because they believed he ‘would always get his way’, a BBC director said.
Questions about ABC platforming ‘radical fringe Jewish voice’
Jewish groups have questioned why the national broadcaster has chosen to platform and ‘mainstream’ a Jewish ‘radical fringe voice’, in its coverage of anti-Semitic events in Sydney.