MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

February 3, 2005


MEDIA ALERT: SILENCE IS GREEN

The Green Movement And The Corporate Mass Media


Lethal Dreams

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 airwaves filled with endless talk of 'going green', BBC
presenter John Humphrys declared he would flush his toilet less often
to save water; Marks & Spencer's posted green placards in their
stores that read: "Please return your trolley - protect your
environment."

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, people like Bob Williams - a consultant
to the oil and gas industry - were clarifying industry's real
priority:

"To put the environmental lobby out of business... There is no
greater imperative... If the petroleum industry is to survive, it
must render the environmental lobby superfluous, an anachronism."
(Williams, US Petroleum Strategies in the Decade of the Environment.
Quoted, Sharon Beder, Global Spin - The Corporate Assault on
Environmentalism, Green Books 1997, p.22)

Since then the eruption of global mass consumerism has been awesome
to behold, with elites in China, India and elsewhere lunging at their
slice of the Western dream. In the two decades since 'sustainable
consumerism' hit the headlines, epidemics of obesity have broken out
everywhere from Australia to Brazil to Spain to Britain, as the
affluent have gorged themselves like never before.

Humanity has chosen to floor the consumer accelerator just as
warnings of imminent catastrophe are piling up. Consider the impact,
for example, of "global dimming" - the phenomenon by which tiny
airborne particles of soot and other pollutants reflect sunlight back
into space. The cooling effect of dimming, it seems, has offset the
impact of global warming caused by industrial emissions of greenhouse
gases. But with atmospheric particulate pollution being brought under
control, this man-made break on climate change is being released.
Scientists now believe temperatures could rise twice as fast as
previously thought, with catastrophic and irreversible damage just
twenty-five years away. ('Global Dimming', Horizon, BBC2, repeat
broadcast, January 15, 2005;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml)

As the world heats up, reservoirs of frozen methane at the bottom of
the ocean could melt, with consequences that would be terminal for
human life:

"At this point, whatever we did to curb our emissions, it would be
too late. Ten thousand billion tons of methane... would be released
into the atmosphere. The Earth's climate would be spinning out of
control, heading towards temperatures unseen in four billion years.
But this is not a prediction - it is a warning. It is what will
happen if we clean up pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse
gases. However, the easy solution - just keep on polluting and hope
that Global Dimming will protect us - would be suicidal." (Horizon,
ibid)

To read the rest of this alert, please go to:

http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm

Best wishes

David Cromwell & David Edwards
The Editors



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