Climate Change
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So what’s changed? By William Bowles
30 May 2007 It’s time for some plain speaking about the issue of climate change and capitalism and the progressive movement’s approach to the whole issue, at least in the so-called developed world. (Progressives in the developing world have more pressing needs right now which is why we have to get our act together.) Continue reading
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Capitalism first – climate last By William Bowles
I think it should be pretty clear to all by now that regardless that the ruling elites of the planet know what’s in store for humanity, they do not intend to take the necessary steps to reverse the slide toward chaos. Yeah sure, lots of hot air to add to an already over-heated atmosphere but… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Eating the Planet – Swallowing The Context Of “Earth’s Ecological Debt Crisis”
24 October 2006 — Media Lens The Bland Leading The Bland October 9 saw one of the Independent’s explosive front-page stories on the global environment: “Earth’s ecological debt crisis.” According to a new study, humanity is “putting an intolerable strain on nature”. Martin Hickman, the Independent’s consumer affairs correspondent, explained: Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Invisible Corporate Shadow
14 September 2006 — Media Lens The Australian social scientist Alex Carey summed up the evolution of political power in the last century as follows: “The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Beyond Propaganda – Climate Change, BP Greenwash and the Press
On May 25, one of us spent several minutes laughing on the phone with a friend of ours, an environmental journalist. We were looking at the homepage of the Independent website – a newspaper that has made huge efforts to present itself as a radical campaigning force for action on climate change. A February 17… Continue reading
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Climate of Fear By William Bowles
So finally, the reality of global climate change hits the media? The BBC for example, is blasting the public with blood-curdling doccies with titles like ‘Climate Chaos’, the series, and they’ve roped in the venerable David Attenborough to host, along with the predictable line-up of ‘experts’ suitably equipped with charts and computer predictions of impending… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Notes from a Dying Planet – The Media’s Aversion To Addressing The Juggernaut of Economic ‘Growth’
Last year we reported that Michael McCarthy, environment editor of the Independent, was “taken aback” at dramatic scientific warnings of “major new threats” in the Earth’s climate system. For instance, the West Antarctic ice sheet, previously considered stable, could collapse leading to a 5-metre rise in global sea level. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Curiosities Of Utopian Thinking
Sean O’Grady wrote recently in the ad-filled motoring supplement of The Independent: “in answer to the many letters we get criticising some of our coverage, we don’t make cars. We just write about them. […] We try to concentrate on telling our readers about the many many ways you can enjoy motoring without costing the… Continue reading
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Empire Redux – Climate Catastrophe and Capitalism By William Bowles
Awhile back I made reference to the idea that the two leading imperialist powers, the US and the UK had come to the conclusion that climate catastrophe was unavoidable and that steps needed to be taken for capitalism to survive the catastrophe essentially intact. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Climate Change– “Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!”
31 January 2006 — Media Lens The Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions “One fundamental goal of any well-crafted indoctrination program is to direct attention elsewhere, away from effective power, its roots, and the disguises it assumes.” (Noam Chomsky, ‘Deterring Democracy’, Vintage, 1992, p.303) Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Point of No Return – Where James Lovelock Meets BP
16 January 2006 — Media Lens Billions Will Die The Independent and the Independent on Sunday (IoS) pride themselves on their environmental coverage. No doubt their editors will indicate today’s dramatic front page as a case in point. The paper depicts the Earth from space overlaid by a dramatic headline: ‘Green guru says: We are… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Insane Society – Climate Change, Advertising, And The Independent
Fromm concluded that modern Western society was indeed insane and that this insanity threatened the very survival of the human species. If this sounds extreme, consider the media response to the most terrifying threat of our time – global climate catastrophe. In 2004 a paper in the leading science journal Nature warned that, as a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burning the Planet for Profit
Mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not really matter. Meanwhile, the truly vital issues receive scant attention to the point of invisibility: the parlous prospects for humanity’s survival and the root causes underlying the global environmental threat. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 2
The Independent – like the Guardian, a newspaper with supposed progressive credentials – noted blandly in a recent editorial that “Global warming is given little coverage by the US media.” (Leader, ‘The American consensus of denial is crumbling,’ August 19, 2005). True enough. But look at our own doorstep; at the wholly inadequate coverage of… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 1
Earlier this month, New Scientist reported the astonishing news that the world’s largest frozen peat bog, comprising an area the size of France and Germany combined, was melting. According to researchers who have been studying the permafrost of western Serbia, the bog could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Is the Earth Really Finished? Countering Despair with the Momentum of Hope
At such a desperate moment in the planet’s history, we could simply throw up our hands in despair, or we could try to reduce the likelihood of the worst predictions coming true. The corporate media has yet to examine its own role in setting up huge obstacles to the latter option of hope. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fears for a Finite Planet
According to Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business Industry, business is the only route to cleaner water, better healthcare, better education and better roads. “Have I heard that in Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, and how we have got to help… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Silence is Green: The Green Movement And The Corporate Mass Media
It is one of the great ironies of our time that, as evidence of environmental catastrophe has inexorably mounted, so the visibility of radical environmental movements has collapsed. In the late 1980s, public outrage at environmental devastation propelled the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Green Party onto the media stage. With… Continue reading
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‘Little boxes, little boxes … they’re all made out of ticky-tack’ By William Bowles
Without endless ‘innovation’, that is the creation of ‘new’ products, capitalist production stagnates, or more precisely, markets get saturated and the rate of profit falls, production stagnates except for a diminishing demand for replacement. Hence the need to create ‘new’ products, more often than not essentially the same product but with ‘additions’, what we euphemistically… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 