Simon Hoggart’s ‘dogmatic and irrational’ mistake
Yesterday in the Guardian Simon Hoggart referred to the environmental movement as a ‘religion - dogmatic and irrational’ in a small aside about wind power as the last entry in his week’s sketch. The full quote:
We are to have across our still beautiful countryside thousands more ghastly, noisy, hideous wind turbines, which produce very little energy at enormous cost. Proof that the environmental movement has become a religion - dogmatic and irrational - in that it has now persuaded government that to save the environment, we must first destroy it. [my emphasis]
Not the kind of environmental journalism you expect from the Guardian, which has delivered a consistent and well-researched line of sober alarm on climate change. In contrast, Jeremy Leggett’s piece took apart the government’s ‘green revolution’ in a far more measured way. Wrapped up in the safety net of opinion with no need to check facts, Hoggart has got it all wrong. For example:
- which produce very little energy…
According to Research Energy Solutions and the British Wind Energy Association, “Modern wind turbines are operational for 70-85% of the time and over the course of the year they will generate, on average, up to 35% of the theoretical maximum output. The exact figure is dependent on the location, technology, size, turbine reliability and wind conditions. By comparison, the load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50%2. A typical modern 2.3MW wind turbine can produce enough power for over 1,000 homes - and that is taking into account the fact that the wind doesn’t blow all the time.”
- at enormous cost…
According to both the British Wind Energy Association and the US Electric Power Research institute, prices are competitive with both coal and nuclear. In the UK, “An average for a new onshore wind farm in a good location is 3-4 pence per unit, competitive with new coal (2.5-4.5p) and cheaper than new nuclear (4-7p).”
- still beautiful countryside…
Hoggart’s use of the ’still’ here is a linguistic rhetoric device to stir up emotive reactions, making the beautiful countyside live in the continuous present tense, and therefore providing the threat that this continuous present is under threat. And personally, I think wind farms are pretty stunning and beautiful themselves.
- the environmental movement is a religion - dogmatic and irrational…
Which is pretty ironic, really, as Hoggart’s piece has ‘proved’ (another rhetorical device) that his opining is, well, rather dogmatic (‘asserting opinions in a doctrinaire or arrogant manner; opinionated’) and irrational (‘not in accordance with reason’) . No, environmental action is not a religion. Unless, of course, religion is based on science. Or if religion is a focus on the present world, not a future transcendental. Or if religion is a way to justify the dismantling of the military-political complex, rather than a way to excuse its gross expansion. The modern environmental movement began with Rachel Carson’s highly scientific and focused study on pesticide use and its impact on the environment (Silent Spring). Driven by passion and justice, yes. A blind faith in a cognitive myth, no.
Such a shame that this old and buried meme is stil circulating.
More on ads: the Exxon ‘flip-flop’
I’m writing this blog as it’s announced that Exxon’s damages for the Valdez oil spill, in 1989, have finally been agreed. Nineteen years after. The oil company are also infamous for allegedly providing US$23m to undermine the science of climate change, and offering scientists and economists $10,000 each to undermine the findings of the latest IPCC report. Now Exxon have just released these ‘game-changing’ climate ads across Europe. A flip-flop, or just good old greenwash?
Mitchell Anderson over at DeSmogBlog has already provided a great summary of Exxon’s activities, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s important and fair to note that this is not the only perspective on the issue. Some bloggers are picking up on the story/allegation that the scientific community are cashing in on global warming, and that finance is the biggest draw for shouting loudest on climate change as a threat. I totally disagree with that, but it’s out there. (Oh, and here’s the link to how much they’re paying for the Exxon Valdez spill).
So from me, rather, a few comments on the discourse of these adverts from Exxon, ad by ad (click on the ad for larger versions): Read more
Lexus advertises its climate credo
Lots of ink on car advertising this morning, as The Guardian report Fiat are criticized by the Advertising Standards Authority for “boasting” about claims on low CO2 emissions. FIat were found to have breached “the CAP code on grounds of truthfulness, prices, comparisons, motoring and qualification of environmental claims.” That’s a lot of breaching.
Now then, I wonder which of these categories could be used against this ad from Lexus? Probably none, unfortunately. I spotted this ad as I was on my way to work the other day:
Ad agencies and their clients have responded to climate change in a number of ways. Many have been aggressive and counter to the general trend that there is more we can contribute in reducing our individual levels of consumption (e.g. the carbon footprint idea). Others have been more responsible.
Team Lexus have taken an approach that is not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s unsavoury. What’s unsavoury is the translation of its strapline: yes, we know we pollute, but let’s drive faster, let’s accelerate that pollution, and take a swipe at the carbon reduction community at the same time.
- Putting your foot down = accelerating, driving fast, getting there in a hurry, often in an emergency
- ‘Putting your carbon foot down’ = all of the above, but with the understanding that you’re sending carbon into the atmosphere at an increased rate.
So what is it saying?
What this advert is saying is that buy a hybrid, but get the performance. Buy green, assuage your guilt, and pollute freely. This for a car that, on its website, claims its green credentials. This is not an individual instance for Lexus. As Segnit and Ereaut noted in their Warm Words II report for the IPPR, “Ads for the… Lexus RX400H attempt a bolder piece of mythmaking: guiltless emissions.
‘High performance. Low emissions. Zero guilt’ (Lexus Dealers 2007)
This was, like Fiat’s, found guilty (the irony) by the Ad authorities last year for misleading people on CO2 emissions information. Lexus company spokesman Scott Brownlee said: “We weren’t trying to be misleading and any changes that are needed, we will certainly make.”
Well, they haven’t shifted their position too far, have they?
Writing in the London Review of Books John Lanchester argues that the ‘SUV driver is…trying at the same time to send a signal…that even if climate change comes she will be able to protect herself from it.’
And that is exactly what the Lexus advert is appealing to: the need to protect yourself from an emergency. Because somewhere buried behind the machismo of peak performance and thrusting acceleration, and why it’s so unsavoury, is that the advert conflates the emergency of changing our CO2 consumption habits (our carbon footprint) with the need to be able to drive fast in an emergency, to protect those inside.
SUV vehicles such as the Lexus are causing more and worse accidents: worse for the other driver (if in a smaller, less builky vehicle) in the accident. SUV’s are sold on protection in emergencies, that is, for those inside. This is the anthropocentric mindset that, some theorists argue, is at the heart of the global system of exploitation that means a few million people own the world’s majority of capital; and the mindset that exploits the natural resources of our planet to continue to grow that capital ownership (it’s capitalism, by the way). But back to the ad.
So why has Lexus taken this approach?
Clue One: It may be an electric hybrid, but it ain’t that green by a long way: take a look at the top ten lowest emitters. So it cannot sell itself in a competition with the Honda Insight or Toyota Prius, so it has to maintain its market advantage: luxury performance. (It has a 3.3l V-6 engine, by the way). Read more
Twenty years on: covering climate change
I wonder what the long-term impact will be on my personality of writing about climate change.
I am writing a chapter for a book provisionally entitled ‘Media and Climate Change’, an academic text, and my focus is on the reporting of the policy texts: how the Kyoto Protocol, IPCC reports, UK Climate Bill, etc, have been received and dealt with in the press, and what impact this has had on effective action.
It can be upsetting and depressing work. It would be fair to say I’m struggling this week. One example why: read this intro to a news story I was anaylsing:
SCIENTISTS, politicians and journalists are part of a conspiracy to predict catastrophe through global warming, a Channel 4 programme suggested last night. The programme claimed that disparate groups were making this claim for their own reasons and presented data allegedly demolishing the greenhouse theory. Scientists from the Meteorological Office meet today to decide whether to complain to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
Sounds familiar? The Great Global Warming Swindle from last year, right? No. This was The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast by Channel 4, which I found while researching media coverage of the first IPCC report in 1990. Watch it on Youtube.
Upsetting and depressing. We’ve gone around in circles. And as an IPSOS-MORI report released this weekend and covered by Juliette Jowitt in the Observer, the public continue to be confused by the messages they receive through the media about the science.
How does this happen? This quote is from the report itself: Read more
‘Churnalism’ strikes with earthquakes
News sites and the Associated Press in America are being criticized by a leading climate blog for failing to check the veracity of a report that was pushed in a press release last week, claiming that earthquakes are linked to global warming.
Did you miss it? This story was published on:
- Yahoo Biz
- Investigate Express.co.uk
- MSNBC
- Free Republic (grass roots conservatism)
- Ad Hoc News (says it all…)
Erm. That’s about it. Thanks to RyanM on the Climate Audit site, Sans Pretence, the comments on Pat Dollard, and Wesley Smith for picking up on the news items. As Wesley says, “Does anybody do any fact checking anymore? Or are the words “scientific study” on a press release all that it takes to make the news?” (filed under: Stupidity in Media). The story was picked up by a number of other climate and political blogs, many of which are providing normally excellent citizen journalism, and, as such, (e.g. Deprogram your mind) quickly removed.
So where’d they get the story? Read more
Climate talks end without… any coverage
The UN Climate Talks which ran from 2-13 June in Bonn, Germany, to pave the way for a new agreement on how to tackle climate change, have ended with no national or regional UK press coverage.
The opening and close of the climate debate was covered by the wires (Reuters, AFP), by the Chinese news agency Xinhua, and by WWF the wildlife charity. Reuters reported from the middle of the debate on the “lack of leadership from Western countries” (surely a story worth reporting?), as did the WWF. In the UK, the talks were announced by just one newspaper. Fiona McCloud, writing in the Scotsman on June 1, opened her news piece (500 words, page 6) with:
CRUCIAL climate-change talks get underway today to discuss the next steps the international community needs to take to tackle global warming. Some 2,000 delegates from 162 countries and dozens of specialist agencies will gather… to get into the nuts and bolts of a new global-warming agreement meant to take effect after 2012.
Note that word: Crucial. Fiona got it right–what is decided in this conference and those to follow is one of the, if not the, most significant piece of lawmaking of our future societies. But as Reuters, AFP and Xinhua all reported, the outlook is not good: Read more
Networked journalism to cover climate change
How can citizen media help improve the mainstream and commercial coverage of climate change?
Through networked journalism: professional journalists and citizen journalists working together. How it could work for climate change was inspired by a case of good/bad reporting. RealClimate.org (good) picks up on a Wired article (bad) from last month, and takes apart the weak argument (”air conditioning is better than heating”) with some fairly straightforward science. What riles RealClimate most is that:
WIRED got the story egregiously wrong, and not just because they did the arithmetic wrong. In their rush to be cute, they didn’t even make a half-baked attempt to do the arithmetic.
Some comments pin down Wired for this and blame it on profiteering (”eyeballs for advertisers”). Both the comment and RealClimate’s commentary of a ‘rush to be cute’ are straying a bit far from a fair hearing on the matter, I’d say, because even Wired has to make money, and it generally does a good job of reporting across its tech homeland under the standard pressures that journalists face: file quickly, file accurately, move on.
What’s happening now?
But digital media is now providing unlimited freedom to respond to the media’s inaccuracies; we are no longer confined to a letters page or in the hope that a printed competitor will take up the matter. Of course, even the best journalists slip up, but there is now so much media surveillance that any errors or biases are very quickly spotted and addressed. This is one of the key benefits of networked journalism for those publications that are willing to work with sites and reporting such as RealClimate’s.
Networked journalism is coming through as a powerful idea for reshaping the newsroom and news practices. This is not the technical overview, but as a brief intro, it could work like this:
1. Journalists network with the best non-professional journalists (particularly experts) to gather more and better info
2. They publish. Praised when great, and take the stick when wrong
3. Incorporate, amend, improve (win awards)
4. Grow the network, refine, use RSS, Twitter, WIkis, and produce better journalism
The only option?
No, of course this is not the only option to think about. There are, including the idea of networked journalism as option A), four ways of improving climate change reporting:
a) develop the ’21st century newsroom’ according to Paul Bradshaw, and ‘network’ the journalist into the myriad digital opportunities for improved coverage
b) put less pressure to file on normal journalists
c) train every journalist and journalism student in science reporting
d) embed journalists with scientists at the UN, IPCC, Oxford and MIT, the Radley Centre…
I’m sure you can think of more. But sticking to these four, in reverse order:
d) is not going to happen. A bit of tongue in cheek on this one
c) is also not going to happen, and is less likely than d): see Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, which blames ‘churnalism’, the rapid output of poorly researched articles, on economic pressures that even Wired journalists would be under, and not the journalists themselves. This is not going to change any time soon.
b) is a viable option. Science training as standard for every journalist (and student of journalism). Although highly improbable.
a) then is the most likely and most effective, that goes with the flow of developing media patterns, utilizing the changes in the way we now consume and produce (as prod-users) new media, and the speed at which journalists can find, connect with, talk to, work with, and source/quote from a range of experts who are already publishing on their story issue.
Think about the quality of the Wired story if they had connected with RealClimate BEFORE they published…
“The walls will fall”: last night’s calamity on C4
“When humans disappeared, sea levels were already on the rise.” This is not, as you might expect, the tale of house owners retreating from Brighton beach because the English Channel is swelling, caused by man-made climate change. This is a tale of the immediate disappearance of the human race (we’re not told why), and the water levels are rising because there are no longer humans to operate the pumps to clear the metro tunnels of ground water, to monitor and maintain the dams; to keep, to be precise, the dangerous forces of nature in check
Last night’s Channel 4 programme on a world without us, Life Without People, was a calamity for serious consideration of the issues facing the planet. The programme, an American documentary with American settings and predominantly American experts, with scenes of an overgrown New York reminiscent of Will Smith’s recent remake of The Omega Man, I Am Legend, showed us what Life would be like without humankind to stop it from getting out of hand. So what did we do? Read more
Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 1
A number of posts this week from Fiona Fox, Charlie Beckett and the Knight Science Tracker have gone into the writing of these two linked entries (second one tomorrow). My subject is responsible, well-researched journalism that remains aware of its power to influence its audience. Practice of this journalism is an essential part of tackling climate change.
And Janet Raloff gets it wrong
Picked up by the Knight Science Tracker earlier this week was a story written on Monday for US Science News by Janet Raloff, their science reporter. It’s a great example of the traditional inverted pyramid having value in the news reporting of environment issues.
Raloff attended a poorly attended press conference where Arthur Robinson, co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, put forward a spurious, flawed and baseless ‘petition’ of, he claimed, 30,000 scientists who think the IPCC has got it wrong on climate change. The petition has no credibility. The IPCC are right. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the main cause of dangerously accelerating climate change. Note that I am not linking to, and therefore validating, Arthur Robinson. Note, also, that I have clearly invalidated his petition. This was not Raloff’s approach: what did she do? Read more
‘Cheaper to cover Britney than the IPCC’
Considering the undressed lengths that Britney has been reaching for press coverage recently, this is not a surprising. But thanks to Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International in the US, this fantastic Friday headline is now legitimately used.
In a five minute talk to the TED conference, Alisa neatly visualises the American mainstream news media coverage in February 2007. This was on the back of some research from the Pew Centre for Excellence in Journalism and their State of the News Media report. Take a look at these maps, the first by land mass. Read more
