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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 me something of either a manicured garden or Capoeira - well managed and quite elegant to look at or watch, in its own way. If Bjorn and his team are not at present reclining in Lazy Boys in reality, metaphorically it seems they are. Perhaps that is the nature of self-selection for those who would be taking part in such a web chat.

The most interesting Q/A so far (6.32am) is this: More »

Tags: activism, alism, biness, Bjorn Edlund, campaign, capitalism, comment, economics, economy, environment, environmentalism, Foucault, greenwash, hegemony, jobs, language, media, news, politics, professionalism, programming, psychology, regulation, reporting, representation, research, sharing, Shell, students, training, US

Forum: climate change and violence

Last Friday I attended the first of seven ‘climate change and violence’ 1-day workshops attended by a network of academics, campaigners, government and faith groups (and others) interested in looking at climate change in a holistic manner, rather than from segregated disciplines or policy positions. The network is called Crisis Forum, set up and coordinated by Mark Levene and David Cromwell (of MediaLens), both academics in Southampton. More »

Tags: business, campaign, capitalism, convergence, Copenhagen, ecology, economics, environment, Guardian, jobs, kyoto, news, politics, regulation, research, training

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 make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

A couple of U.S. bloggers, notably Skeptics Global Warming, annotated the editorial with their own opinion as rebuttal.  For example, More »

Tags: America, comment, coverage, energy security, Gore, news, Obama, politics, scepticism, US

Pachauri’s blog and President Obama

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has launched his own blog.

It’s a curious thing for someone already so well known, well positioned, to do (hence the exclamation marks from Wattsupwiththat). It is also not that sophisticated as a portfolio site.

Perhaps the process of leading the IPCC through tortuous negotiations processes around the text of each IPCC report has been so painful that Pachauri feels the need to communicate without so many restrictions. If Pachauri thinks opening up a blog is anything of a nicer experience, he might want to think again.

The latest blog post from Nov 5 looks at President-elect Obama’s positioning on climate change. As chair of the IPCC, Pachauri’s views are worth accounting for: More »

Tags: barack obama, blogging, blogs, Canada, Congress, coverage, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, greenpeace, Guardian, IPCC, news, politics, reporting, science, US

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 it was a major moral panic that costs millions (and made some people millions), and took up a huge amount of column inches in newspapers and magazines worldwide. And at one minute past midnight on Jan 1, 2000… nothing happened. It was a fake story, blown up out of nothing. But that didn’t stop most major news outlets and governments acting as if it was real: check out this retro BBC map of ‘millenniun bug’ infected countries. For an even better BBC entry on the bug, the h2g2 website got it absolutely right… More »

Tags: BBC, blogging, blogs, churnalism, comment, Copenhagen, image, indtry, Journalism, language, Lomborg, magazines, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, reporting, research, science, sharing, US

Climate change bill passed (in the night)

Well I think I spoke too soon. There was very little coverage of the Climate Change Bill passing its commons stages. Perhaps this was due to the Brand-effect, or that most journalists are still deployed onto credit crunching topics. Prince Charles did make it into the papers yesterday talking about the ‘climate crunch’.

But so far I’ve found only two MSM reports on the passing of the climate change bill; a bill which is a world-first in setting legal targets for nation-state government:

• Historic, yet nothing has been done (The Guardian)
• Companies face mandatory CO2 reporting (The FT)

The same angle on companies reporting their CO2 emissions was reported in The Telegraph prior to the vote on the bill.

What’s the reason for such a low level of coverage?
There are probably a few. More »

Tags: business, campaign, Caroline Lucas, climate change bill, coverage, ecology, environmentalism, green, Guardian, news, reporting, scientists, WWF

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 my beliefs were as rigid as any “climate sceptic”.

One thing Picking Up Sticks noted in the piece was the lack of engagement across the networks; “deniers” and “believers” rarely talk. This is a currently recognised theme online, and not just around climate change: take the U.S. election, for example. The TV producer Adam Curtis described blogging self-selection in an interview with The Register last year: More »

Tags: advertising, blogging, blogs, censorship, comment, denial, deniers, education, environmentalism, Guardian, industry, IPCC, Journalism, magazines, McIntyre, news, PHD, politics, psychology, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, science, scientists, students, Sunderland, training

Guardian launches Fred Pearce greenwash column

Back in June I interviewed Fred Pearce for a book chapter (to be published next year). My first question was if coverage of climate change had slowed. No, he said, and his employers (magazines such as New Scientist) were looking for more stories from him. He also said that the Guardian was increasing its pool of freelancers and wanting more copy from him.

And so this week launches Fred’s new Guardian column: Greenwash. Fred has been writing on environment and cimate change for years (see his book Confessions of an Eco Sinner), and there’s probably no-one better to tackle this subject in the UK. This is why, in his own words:

My job is to keep a broad perspective of the science as well as the policy, and be a bit of a policy wonk I suppose, and be in place to blow the whistle if someone is talking rubbish. And that can be around climate change or biofuels or if maybe the IPCC aren’t telling us how bad it really could be. It’s my job to focus on the sniffing around and explaining the boundaries of the debate.

His first column looks at the greenwashing of energy companies and their eco-friendly tariffs which, Fred says, are nothing of the sort (at least not for the big players E.On, British Gas and EDF). This is the heart of the issue: More »

Tags: activism, coverage, environment, green, greenwash, Guardian, IPCC, jobs, magazines, news, science, scientists

More on the Daily Mail’s plastic love affair

Following my opinion piece over on Journalism.co.uk about the hypocrisy that would entail if the Daily Mail really were to win the Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards campaign of the year, I came across another link to a story, published by the Press Gazette, from last year.

My argument is that the Daily Mail’s “Ban the Bags” campaign was a co-opt of an already running and successful campaign that was building its own momentum. Other than that, of course, the DM’s coverage is so invidiously contradictory and generally anti-environment, particularly against legislation to combat climate change (the Kyoto Protocol, the UK Climate Change Bill), that any award would be tough to swallow; and particularly this award for the Ban the Bags campaign, as it has barely added anything new.

And so the link and quote is worth publishing:

Editor of the Mail on Sunday Peter Wright defended his newspapers’ use of covermounts and other promotions to boost circulation.

“When the history of newspapers is written, it may well be that the greatest innovation of our generation is the humble polybag,” Wright said.

And if that point is not clear enough, Wright continues:

“Any editor who wants his paper still to be here in 2020 needs to be constantly thinking about what he can add to his paper and what he can put into his polybag that will make his newspaper better value to the reader.”

How about a nice manufaturing-intense polyeurythane statuette of Janus for the average Daily Mail reader’s mantelpiece? (And before any criticisms of prejudice, I’m thinking here of my mother, who still buys the paper after working there as a clerk in the 1960s).

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, environmentalism, Mail on Sunday, news, newspaper, newspapers, Peter Wright, Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards

Blog action day: the road to academia

Today is blog action day, and this year’s theme is poverty.

As for La Marguerite, one of my favourite personal/public blogs on climate and human responsibility, I was thinking of blogging something close to home, maybe climate related. But much of the thought process at the moment is around writing a critical incident diary for my programme of study, a certificate in teaching and learning development, and poverty played quite a role in me entering into teaching.

I did grow up in a single-parent family, in a council flat, on an estate in London. We were relatively poor, and my mother worked two jobs. Similar to the new Minister for Higher Education, David Lammy, I was the first person in my family to come to university.

But only relatively poor. The moment of poverty I remember on the road to academia was in Zambia, one morning in April 2003. More »

Tags: blog action day, blogging, blogs, economy, education, jobs, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, research, students, Zambia