Australia's Fossils Can't Flat-Out Deny Warming, So They're Offering Greenwash Bullshit As "Policy"

[hatrack]

For climate change in Australia, 2021 was the year of the bullshit absolution narrative. The wide grin of a promise of good, with a bag of sinister held behind the back. This was 2021’s grubby climate through-line.
The first tactic deployed to protect the fossil fuel industry, organised denial of the science proving the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global heating, was terribly impactful. Though we’ve stamped that out, the space has been filled by a more effective and insidious problem: climate delay. This refers to a suite of spurious arguments used to justify not reducing emissions at all, or reducing them at as slow a rate as possible. You’ve heard these before – they include pleas to wait for better technology, redirecting responsibility to others or emphasising the downsides of action.

In Australia, in 2021, governments, corporations, lobbyists, media companies and marketing firms engaged in a weird kind of convergent rhyme. They each realised that a deeply concerned citizenry must be distracted, and the people power that emerged in the 2019 climate marches defused. So, they poured their efforts into figuring out how to best lie about acting on climate (instead of the easier and cheaper option of actually acting on climate).

EDIT

Running defence for the political delayers and Australia’s worst corporate emitters was News Corp, who wrapped their verifiably awful record on climate in a veil of revisionist greenwashing. Mirroring both major parties, articles like “What polluters are doing to help” serve as the public relations engine of this wider narrative of fabricated action. Rarely acknowledged is the group of marketing and public relations firms getting paid eye-watering sums to churn out climate delay, exposed jointly by CommsDeclare and Clean Creatives. I know we were broken down by an exhausting decade of climate denial. But that exhaustion has created a hopeful credulity. A vulnerability to under-interrogating these glossy stories of reformation. Stop fighting, we asked. Please, end the “climate wars”. Well, they did. Both major parties and industry are in peaceful agreement to fail badly on domestic emissions while extracting planet-wrecking quantities of carbon so it can be burned overseas.

The future can only lie in kicking big, destructive holes in the wall of false reassurances and disinformation used to delay climate action. It was easy to spot wide-eyed climate deniers. Can you spot a net zero target packed with backloading and offsets? You need to. I know that Australia’s politicians and fossil fuel executives watched the gut-wrenching black summer bushfire crisis, the same as I and much of the world did. They watched the deep-red skies in the shaky smartphone footage, and the exhausted firefighters collapsing on the streets. Maybe their hearts dropped in their chests when they briefly came face to face with the consequences of unbridled emissions and a heating planet. Two years on, we know for sure that their only real, lingering response was to scramble to figure out new ways to lie about the damage they’re doing. In 2022, we need to reignite the climate wars and fight back against the deadly cult of delay.

EDIT/END

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/30/in-australias-climate-wars-delay-and-deception-are-the-new-denial

[Mickju]

1. News Corp

Has any one man caused as much damage to the Earth and its citizens as Rupert Murdoch?