Q: What gets an even worse deal in the press than climate science? A: Renewable energy

Originally published on guardian.co.uk

A few weeks ago I blogged about the impact the Hackgate scandal might have on coverage of climate change. My thesis was that while News Corporation was a crucial pedlar of junk science in the US and Australia, its UK newspapers tended to be more enlightened on global warming than many of their competitors – such as the Daily Mail.

Since then, I’ve been sent some interesting and previously unpublished analysis of British newspaper coverage of renewable energy. Carried out by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC), the research confirms the Mail’s uniquely anti-green stance, though it also highlights the remarkable degree of negativity that renewable energy receives in the UK press more broadly – including in the Sun.

The analysis looked at coverage of renewables in July 2009, a time when the public debate about climate science seemed almost won and the emphasis was shifting increasingly to the pros and cons of low-carbon energy sources. PIRC examined renewables coverage in the highest-circulation tabloid, mid-market and broadsheet dailies – the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph respectively – and also included the Independent as a pro-environment counterweight. (Apparently the Guardian couldn’t be chosen because of lack of local access to printed archives.)

The results don’t make very happy reading for advocates of renewable energy. In the Mail, a staggering three-quarters of articles “centrally concerned with renewables” took a negative stance, and only 8% were positive. The Sun, to my surprise, came out almost as anti-renewables as the Mail – though largely thanks to the efforts of Jeremy Clarkson, who singlehandedly accounted for two thirds of the Sun’s negative pieces, according to the research.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Independent was positive in almost two-thirds of stories focusing mainly on renewables and negative in just a few percent of cases (though the ratio isn’t so marked if you include stories only partly about renewable technologies). In between those extremes is the Telegraph, which was negative in 33–57% of cases, depending on whether you look at all stories mentioning renewables or just those with a more specific focus.

Although the ground might have shifted a little since 2009, I suspect these results broadly reflect the state of play today. They make for depressing reading partly because they suggest that potential solutions to global warming get an even rougher ride in the press than climate science itself – which is really saying something. Interestingly, the results also seem to fly in the face of the assumption among many green campaigners that the way to engage the press and public on climate change is to focus on the solutions rather than the problems.

Is it significant that more than half the coverage of renewables in the mainstream British press is negative? I think it is – especially in a country where planning obstacles are a major barrier to new renewable energy installations, and in which the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has warned that our 2020 clean-energy target may already be out of reach.

Of course, it’s sometimes argued that the influence of the press on public opinion is exaggerated – and there may be some truth in that. But I think on an issue such as renewable energy, where fairly small numbers of “antis” can block or delay major installations, every negative story or piece of misinformation about costs or technology counts. (And there’s no doubt that there is plenty of misinformation on this topic alongside all the legitimate opinion: to give just one example, the Mail recently made a big hoo-ha about the costs of renewable energy policies on household bills but inflated the true figure by more than 100% due to an almost laughable number of deliberate or accidental errors in their calculations.)

Anyhow, as PIRC researcher Tim Holmes points out in his intro, press coverage is important because it can influence not only “what people perceive and believe” but also “what politicians think they believe”. Indeed, politicians take the temperature of public opinion partly through the barometer of the press, and consistently negative coverage of renewables will doubtless “limit the perception of political space and impetus for political action”, as Holmes puts it.

As for what Hackgate could mean for all of this, that depends how the scandal plays out from here. On the one hand, ex-readers of the green-by-tabloid-standards News of the World might get picked up by the Mail on Sunday, which in my experience is just as anti-renewables (and anti-science) as its Daily stablemate. On the other hand, there is a happier scenario in which a post-scandal News International suddenly becomes positively pro-renewables. All that’s needed, the PIRC research suggests, is for Jeremy Clarkson to unexpectedly join the ranks of Hackgate’s Chipping Norton casualties.

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Hackgate: good news or bad for the climate?

Given how fully the phone hacking scandal has been dominating the news, I’m surprised that, so far, there’s been very little discussion in the environment sphere of what any of it might mean in terms of climate change. The indefatigable James Murray at Business Green made the good point that anyone who cares about the planet should probably be grasping the opportunity of impending regulatory reform of the media to call for stronger obligations on news outlets to publish prominent corrections following factually dodgy reporting. So far, however, I haven’t seen anything about the other obvious aspect of all this: how changes to the media landscape resulting from this debacle may affect mainstream reporting of environmental issues.

It’s hardly surprising that most greens are, as George Monbiot tweeted it, “dancing a jig around their desks” as they watch the most powerful media empire of our age crumble under the weight of its own corruption. That’s not just because people who care about climate change happen to find Murdoch vile on issues ranging from the Iraq war to the demonisation of refugees; it’s also because News Corp has put out lots of disinformation on climate change.

In the US, News Corp owns Fox News, which has a long record of dodgy reporting on climate change – including a time last year when the station’s Washington bureau chief demanded that sceptic views featured within minutes of a science story about record high temperatures. In a very different corner of Murdoch’s US operations, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has for years given a platform to lobbyists seeking, as Jeffery Sachs put it, to “confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm”.

Over in Australia, too, where News Corp controls a large slice of the news media, the company has often taken a climate-sceptic stance – so much so that some commentators believe that it has been highly significant in slowing political progress on climate protection. Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, recently described some Murdoch papers as “hate media” over their irresponsible treatment of issues such as global warming.

With all this in mind, a full-on collapse of News Corp, which is something that looks increasingly plausible as the scandal continues to run, could potentially be extremely good news for the planet. But what’s notable, when you stop to think about it, is that the company’s UK operations don’t score so badly on the environment front.

True, News International gives space to a few anti-green commentators – not least petrolhead and Chipping Norton Set member Jeremy Clarkson. Overall, though, it’s probably fair to say that News International titles are better, or at least less bad, on the environment than most of their competitors.

It’s the Mail, not the Sun, that seems to have made it a mission to sink any hope of solving climate change. The two papers’ respective stances on light bulbs is just one of many possible examples: the Sun distributed millions of low-energy bulbs to readers in a single day and ran accompanying editorial on energy saving at home; by contrast, the Mail campaigned to block the phase out of inefficient bulbs, pushed dodgy science about the risks of low-energy alternatives (see here for a flavour of their coverage) and even offered readers sets of old-fashioned bulbs via its hotline.

Further up the market, it’s the Telegraph, not the Times, that laps up the traffic from the endless stream of falsehoods put out by Christopher Booker and James Delingpole. And, further down the market, it’s the Express, not the deceased News of the World, that’s known for running splashes such as “100 reasons why climate change is natural” (a story, incidentally, that was also deemed worthy of mention by the Telegraph).

Last week, when I searched the now-defunct NotW website for the phrase “climate change”, most of the results pointed to the paper’s campaign to persuade readers to Go Green And Save. (At the time of writing you can still search the NotW via Google like this). Search the Express or Mail for comparison and you’ll find endless drivel about climate change being a global conspiracy or (the Mail’s current favourite angle) the terrifying threat of green taxes.

Thinking about all this reminded me that, a couple of years ago, the Sun was even all set to be an official partner of the 10:10 carbon-cutting campaign, in an unlikely marriage with the Guardian. We held joint events in summer 2009 to help persuade businesses and other groups to sign up to the campaign and rapidly cut their emissions. In the event, though, the Sun dropped out just before launch – around the same time, we couldn’t help noticing, that the Guardian started turning up the heat on phone-hacking at a certain Sunday tabloid.

So why would the Murdoch empire have pale tints of green in its UK outlets but take a climate sceptic stance in Australia and the US? If, as one media commentator said last week, the Murdoch media tends simply to reflect the mood of a nation back to that nation, perhaps the discrepancy can be explained by the UK being a little further ahead in terms of environmental awareness than the US or Australia.

Another plausible explanation, however, is that UK is the territory of James Murdoch, who, unlike his father, has a reputation for being green-minded. James is credited with driving the environment agenda at BSkyB, which was one of the first big companies to publicly announce its aim to become carbon neutral back in 2006 – around the same time that it starting running a Green Week of environment coverage and even gave every staff member a mini book (which I wrote) on climate change and carbon cutting. When James took over control of News International a few years ago, he stressed his ambitions to improve that company’s environmental standards, too.

I have no idea whether James’s interest in climate change stems from a deeply held concern or simply a keenness to add a veneer of ethical credibility to his various companies. Certainly it would be foolish to think that he’s some kind of crusading environmentalist who has been chomping at the bit to inherit and green-up Fox News and the other unenlightened outposts of the family empire. Whatever the truth, in between dancing jigs around our desks, anyone concerned about the climate should probably pause for a moment to consider the potential downside of the phone-hacking story: millions of NotW readers getting picked up by the fervently anti-green Mail or Express, and a News International that could live another day under the leadership of a freshly imposed News Corp executive much less sympathetic to environmental issues than James Murdoch. In other words, a Sun that looks more like Fox News on climate change, and a Times that looks more like the Wall Street Journal.

Not that I want to spoil anyone’s fun, though. I did only say a pause. Now back to that jig …

 

Posted by Duncan Clark, @theduncanclark. This post can be reproduced elsewhere, provided it appears with a byline and a link back to this page.

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A carbon bubble? Let’s hope so …

This week has seen a new green meme bubbling up: the idea that investment in high-carbon companies is creating a “carbon bubble” that could leave the world exposed to another huge financial crash. The catalyst for this newly prominent discussion is a fascinating report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative that explores the obvious but usually overlooked mismatch between the world’s stated climate change targets and the market response – or lack thereof.

We’ve known for a long time that the world’s remaining carbon budget is tiny compared with the total amount of exploitable oil, coal and gas reserves. In other words, though issues such a deforestation and soot are important, our chance of tackling climate change mainly comes down to one thing: how much fossil fuel the world can be persuaded to leave in the ground.

Although that sounds obvious, it’s worth restating, because for all the crucial current debate over renewables and nuclear, it’s important to bear in mind that low-carbon technologies are necessary but not necessarily sufficient. Even if we had enough low-carbon power to match current energy consumption that wouldn’t in itself mean that the fossil fuels would stay in the ground; the world might simply use more energy.

Given that meeting the world’s agreed climate target – limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius – will almost certainly require huge quantities of valuable fossil fuels to be left untouched by their owners, it’s surprising that the environment community hasn’t been quicker to flag up what that might mean in terms of business risk for fossil fuel companies. If most oil, coal and gas reserves are effectively “unburnable”, could the primary assets of the world’s biggest energy companies be as toxic as the dodgy mortgage debts being traded in the run-up to the 2008 financial collapse?

Thanks to the Carbon Bubble report, we now have some better numbers to help us grapple with that question. Based on research by the Potsdam Institute, the report suggests that if the world wants an 80% chance of staying within the two-degrees limit, we should avoid emitting more than 565 gigatonnes (GT) of CO2 by 2050. That equates to just a fifth of the world’s total proven fossil fuel reserves, which contain enough carbon to produce a massive 2795GT of CO2, the report estimates.

Of course, a large proportion of the world’s fossil fuels are controlled by state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco. But even if these states could somehow magically be persuaded to leave all their oil, coal and gas in the ground for the greater good, that wouldn’t solve the problem because, according to the report, even just the top couple of hundred private energy companies listed on world’s stock markets have significantly more carbon assets that the world can afford to burn. And yet fossil fuel companies – which are heavily invested in by our pension funds, as well as by private investors – are generally considered among the safest companies to put money into.

So what’s going on here? I’m not a financial expert, so apologies for the broad-brush assessment, but it seems there are four scenarios that could explain the apparent mismatch. The first is that the markets are in fact working properly and the cost of energy investments already reflect the considerable risks of unburnable assets. However, this doesn’t seem likely given that until the Carbon Bubble report came out there wasn’t even an easily available reference to compare the carbon content of reserves with the acceptable carbon budget. More fundamentally, it doesn’t seem likely when you consider that the big energy companies are openly prospecting for new reserves: if they and their investors really believed they were going to have to leave some of their existing fuels in the earth, why would they be spending large sums of money looking for new ones?

(The most recent BP annual report is typical of the industry’s public stance on this question: it softly acknowledges that carbon regulation could increase costs and reduce growth opportunities but also states emphatically that “BP’s future hydrocarbon production depends on our ability to renew and reposition our portfolio”.)

If that scenario doesn’t stack up, what about the next possibility: that the markets understand the big-picture risks of unburnable assets but believe these will be obviated by the development of technologies that allow us to inexpensively capture the CO2 released by fossil fuels – either at the point of use or through a massive rollout of ambient carbon scrubbers. But this doesn’t seem likely, either, given the painfully slow rate of development of all kinds of carbon-capture systems.

Which leads us to the two other possibilities: that the market is acting irrationally or on bad information and, as the report suggests, gradually inflating a carbon bubble; or, conversely, that the market believes simply that the risks of unburnable carbon are small because the world shows no sign of taking the two-degrees target seriously. The really worrying thing, I think, is that the second of those two scenarios seems just as plausible as the first – and will remain so until the UN process shows some progress on legally binding emissions cuts at the global level.

In other words, let’s hope that there does indeed turn out to be a carbon bubble, because at least a bubble can burst. The alternative – that the markets are correctly predicting there will never be enough political will to impose the two-degrees temperature limit – is even more worrying.

 

Posted by Duncan Clark, @theduncanclark. Also appeared on guardian.co.uk.

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Global water stress interactive

Just posted this. Was interesting to explore Google Fusion Tables for the first time in order to merge two datasets and create the map, with banded shading and custom labels, etc. It’s an impressive set of tools and that I hope to play around with much more in the coming months.

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Bring your own wine (bottles)

My post on the Guardian today about a new scheme in my part of London which offers good wine very cheaply if you bring your own bottle. Does seem a bit wrong that it’s currently higher-up on the most read list than the serious stories on the EU emissions budgets and the decline of pollinators. But, hey, what can I say.

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Solar panel price collapse

Just had the odd experience of sitting in a café in Paris (first foreign holiday for ages) and the guy next to me opening up the Guardian on my story, filed a few days before, on the collapse of solar prices:

Prices of solar panels are falling so fast that by 2013 they will be half of what they cost in 2009, according to a report from Ernst & Young that argues solar electricity could play “an important role” in meeting the UK’s renewable energy targets.

The average one-off installation cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels has already dropped from more than $2 (£1.23) per unit of generating capacity in 2009 to about $1.50 in 2011. Based on broker reports and industry analysis, the report forecasts that those rates of decline will continue, with prices falling close to the $1 mark in 2013

The thing I didn’t have time to explore in the story is that most analysts agree that the price decline is linked to oversupply of panels – and that the oversupply is in turn linked to a downturn in the level of support given to solar via feed-in tariffs in key and potentially key European countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.

It’s hard to know exactly what to take from that link, policy-wise, but it’s clear that the price of the technology and the support it receives and/or deserves are bound up in a complex way. When I interviewed energy minister Greg Barker last month, he said the feed-in tariffs were in crisis in the UK partly because of the unexpected price fall of solar PV technology. And yet the price fall, it seems, it partly related to the collapse of the feed-in tariffs in other countries.

I don’t have time to explore that right now, but I hope to write something more extensive on solar prices in the next month or two. From reading and writing quite a bit about solar recently, it seems everyone has a view on solar costs but very few commentators have bothered properly exploring the assumptions underlying any estimate of how different energy technologies compare on price. More to follow.

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