Climate of coverage: Lord Turner’s report

The beginning of this week saw the press respond (or not) to Lord Adair Turner’s new report on reducing our UK carbon emissions as part of his role as chair of the government’s Committee on Climate Change. Taking a snapshot (or synchronic, to use the technical term) analysis of the coverage of the report [...]

Shelling out on sustainability

Energy company (didn’t they used to be an oil company?) Shell are running a series of web dialogues, with today’s (6am GMT time, unfortunately they are not supplying the coffee) on ‘Sustainability Communications’ with their V-P for Comms, Björn Edlund.
Early skirmishes between the Comms team and the great unwashed (it is 6am) remind [...]

Round-up on Gore NYT editorial

There was lots of coverage of Al Gore’s “The Climate for Change” editorial in the New York Times on Monday. Gore takes the opportunity of Obama’s victory to pin together as tightly as possible climate change with energy security. It’s argument for action summed up is this:
Here’s what we can do — now: we can [...]

Climate change likened to ‘Y2k scam’

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.
Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until [...]

Engaging across blogging divides on climate

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that [...]

Five reasons Brendan O’Neill is wrong

Articles decrying environmental practice as “a tyranny of environmentalism” which is leaving people with more “fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could” are interesting cultural artefacts to examine.
Like fossils, they help us understand how previous cultures and the people that lived in them went about their [...]