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Third of Conservatives don’t accept climate change

Yesterday the Guardian published figures showing that a third of Conservative MPs don’t believe, or don’t know what they believe about, climate change. This on the same day that Gordon Brown gave the keynote speech to the Guardian’s ‘Climate Change Summit: how to beat Green Fatigue’ conference.

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Brown says climate change “is a challenge that inspires rather than daunts me.” Currently critical columnists (there’s a mouthful of cs) of Brown agree: Jonathan Freeland agress that “Brown sees this vast horizon: Cameron and the others can barely glimpse it.” Yet Cameron is for the Guardian “Britain’s most influential politician”.

Another view, this morning in the New Statesman, is that Labour would do better by leaving the coming economic downturn in the hands of Cameron, as it could mean another 20 years of Labour if the Conservatives get it wrong. More »

Tags: climate change, David Cameron, environmental reporting, media, politics

Green & Local 4: global stories, green pounds

Just some links this morning on different ‘green and local’ issues in the press (and to celebrate UN World Population Day).

The Knight Science Tracker does a crawl of environmental reporting, and reporting on environment each day, and last night picked up on this serendipity of similar reporting across continents:

• In the Times of India, the story was about hurricanes getting worse.
• In the Ottawa Citizen, it was about storms getting weaker.
• In the Tewksbury Advocate (Tewksbury, Massachusetts), a rise in huge storms (from an unattributed activist on the street)

A good example of how a story can be relevant anywhere in the world (and treated differently, locally).

A quick look in at the regional news in the UK via EU Feeds doesn’t show any similar stories, although a nice bit of reporting from the Belfast Telegraph, the ‘European Monsoon’.

The closest we get to a top 10 story about the environment is the Reading Evening Post’s “Town Bins £27m in Food Each Year”.

So. That got me thinking about an article re: classified advertising that I’d just read. One of the problems with classifieds is that their placement is terrible. That’s why display ads fight so hard for good placement–get the ad next to the story that’s relevant, etc… Google Ads and other targeted campaigns are very simple premises that are tried and tested.

But classifieds get bundled together at the back of the paper (when in print) nowhere near the relevant story. For example, argues Bill Ostendorf, do something about that, move the ads to where the story is relevant, and classified ads will start pulling their weight again, particularly online. So, a simple equation:

1. the ‘green pound’ is growing in spending strength: more people are buying/going green
2. more companies are selling green products (check out www.ecoseek.net)
3. online and in print, technology means classifieds can sit next to relevant editorial
4. green editorial = green pounds

Knowing, however, that online advertising brought BBC.com only £3m $3m (£1.5m) (measly, says Alfred Hermida: have to agree in the scale of things), it’s not going to save regional journalism, but small measures added up… I’d like to see some research done into the green pound and its local effect on specific regional communities, to see what benefits it can bring for regional press, either in print, or much more likely digital. There was a flurry of talk of the green pound back at the end of 2006, but not much since… If you know of any let me know?

Tags: climate change, green pound, local journalism, media

The Onion, CJR do climate change

The Columbia Journalism Review and The Onion have both turned their attention to climate change, running a couple of good stories about how the topic is covered.

First, the CJR looks at the rhetoric of the term ‘carbon footprint’ and wonders if we adopt new terms far more easily than adopting the substance or actions behind them. The second addresses the five failings of environmental journalism, which was checked with the Society for Environmental Journalists and picked up by the blogs, coming as a response to the Wired article that ran in June on revisiting our ‘preconceptions of green’. More »

Tags: CJR, climate change, media, reporting, The Onion

Resurgence of the ‘Consensus’

This morning the Guardian carries Bjorn Lomborg’s latest perspective on global warming, suggesting that both McCain and Obama are barking up the wrong tree in their support for a US cap-and-trade system to curb emissions.

I’m reading similar critiques of the cap-and-trade argument by leading economists/scientists in Ernest Zedillo’s book Global Warming. The main thrust of the counter-argument is that people such as Lomborg, to quote Freeman Dyson, writing in the NY Review of Books:

are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

This is Lomborg’s position, clearly communicated by this piece in today’s Guardian. More »

Tags: climate change, Copenhagen Consensus, environment, Lomborg, media, reporting

Media’s blind eye to advertising

Yesterday I wrote about protests by publishers and car manufacturers against plans by the EU to introduce compulsory rules governing pollution info on car advertising. In last night’s 7pm Channel Four flagship news programme, the producers covered the story (good) but relegated it to the ‘And Finally…’ slot (bad) generally reserved for the more lighthearted story of the day.

I want to pick up on this, because news media play an important role in developing the public’s broader understanding of political and health issues.

Is Climate Change a serious issue or not?
Serious political and health issues are well covered, in general, by C4. And, just like smoking (the example C4 used as a parallel), climate change is both a political and health issue. So why the almost clownish approach? Watch it for yourself:

By relegating the story to the lighter-hearted final slot, through its ordering of scenes and interviews, by its very headline (’Driven to Distraction by Brussels’) and therefore by its emphasis on certain aspects of the story, the importance of the issue was downplayed. If this health threat concerned fire hazards in toys or flooding in the home counties, would it have be covered in the same way?

Media’s blind eye to advertising
No. And the reason is, I feel, the fact that advertising came into the mix. This report provides what I see as an example of the ‘institutional blind eye’ from which media suffers in relation to advertising. Generally this comes, in relation to climate change, in the form of charges of hypocrisy levelled at writing articles criticising government and business, but accepting advertising money from polluting products (airlines, car manufacturers etc). MediaLens picked up on this. For the Guardian, Monbiot and the readers’ editor responded.

But last night was interesting in that the turn of this blind eye became in many ways more subtle, challenging and, I feel, dangerous. The relationship moved beyond one of reliance, to one of defense: that is, this report, this news piece, made advertising the hero, in exactly the same way the car is made the hero by advertising. More »

Tags: advertising, Avenue-A, car advertising, channel four, climate change, media, Rob Lawrence

Artemis ads hunting me down

That’s Artemis Investment Management, not the Greek goddess of of the hunt.

I’m thinking through the choice of cultural objects as case studies for my PhD that explores how we represent, talk about and communicate the environment. I’ll be looking at media, long form journalism, literature, poetry, and now, I think, a key contender has to be advertising. In particular, the long-term campaign and advertisements of Artemis Investment Management: The Profit Hunter.

The Profit Hunter Campaign
I’ve been incensed by these ads for a while. They’re all over the UK travel network (tube, train, bus) and, here’s a great example, on a London taxi.

The Artemis brand is moulded around this conceit of profit hunting as a mimetic analogy with profit as an animal in the natural wild, tracked down, hunted, by its investment specialists. Its advertising campaign uses a pastiche of 1930s Great Adventurers in hunting gear.

It’s not a metaphor, stupid
What astounds me is that the people behind this campaign, both client and ad agency, present the goal of capital profit gain at the metaphorical expense of the environment, when they must, surely, understand that what they are communicating is no longer, and never has been, simply a metaphor?

The animal itself, the profit, is a clever illustration that marries together a line graph profit and what looks like an extinct, or soon to be extinct, primitive bird that can’t outrun the smart investor/hunter.

I’ve been a reader of semiotics and deconstruction for some time now, and will develop the argument in detail, but in essence it’s not difficult to anticipate my position. The signification of these advertisements contributes to the cultural meaning-making that the environment is a resource for human endeavour, from which great profits will be plundered. Fair play to Artemis, they’re not exactly subtle about the evisceration of our planet by capitalism’s global financial racket, are they? In fact, any typical semiological analysis would be redundant faster than you could say “What’s that you smell boy, a profit up ahead?” But how can we address these ads as cultural objects? More »

Tags: advertising, Artemis, Barthes, greek myth, media, PHD, semiotics