Blame the media for climate woes: analysis Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service
Published: Sunday, August 05, 2007 Article tools
* * * * OTTAWA — Mainstream U.S. media are to blame for stalled international efforts to reach an agreement to fight climate change, according to a new analysis released by a media watchdog group.
The report, in the latest edition of a magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said there are multiple examples of major American media organizations watering down recent warnings from peer-reviewed scientific literature about the consequences of global warming and the human-produced pollution that is causing it.
The watchdog group based its analysis on a comparison of American and British headlines and articles about the release of a series of international reports that assessed the latest peer-reviewed on climate change.
"Where U.K. media generally presented climate change as an urgent crisis that requires immediate action, in the U.S. it’s still widely portrayed as an unresolved debate," says the article, written by Neil deMause in the July-August edition of Extra!.
The coverage is helping to prop up U.S. government policies which suggest aggressive action to tackle climate change could be economically costly, deMause said. For example, he explained that many Americans were unaware of a British government study by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern that warned the cost of doing nothing would be much worse than immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
end of excerpt.
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And this is where
The Alliance for Climate Protection comes in and why I support their three year plan and Mr. Gore's way of doing this now, because this must be countered in order to see the groundswell necessary from people in order to filter up the urgency to make changes in business and government. This unfortunately is where the battle still is. It is also where it will have to start as the sustainability window closes and we in this country are still debating whether humans are the cause of it because of the arrogant, narrow minded, self righteous, self serving, greedy attitudes of those in this country for whom responsibility is not part of their vocabulary nor the ability to see a moral imperative through the dollar signs in their eyes.
When Al Gore stated that more people are aware environmentally, but that we aren't yet close to being where we need to be to tip the political scales, he wasn't wrong. His premise behind An Inconvenient Truth and most recently The Assault On Reason is this very problem within our country. Without Democratic dialogue based on truth and reason rather than fear and propaganda, we will not be able to address the climate crisis as it must be addressed now. And not just on a political level, as this is a moral issue. This must begin with us, with us demanding change from business and government at all levels.
And that unfortunately will take time which is why this three year plan should be supported as education is imperative to change the perception of this crisis as 'not dangerous' as has been put forth by denialist spin doctors working for corporate benefactors who in turn use their influence on the media to skew the facts for their own benefit. This is s systemic flaw in our perceptions as well as our government.
Just today I was speaking with someone about the climate crisis, and they admitted to me that they were afraid of changing their lifestyle. I then told them not to see it as a change but as an improvement. You will still light your lamps as you always have by flicking the switch, but having a CFL bulb in place of an incandescent one improves your life and your planet. I hope they got the message, but again, this is the uphill battle we must face now as Mother Nature waits for no man.
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