I know I shouldn’t be posting similar material twice but the last time I wrote on this subject, I don’t think many people saw it. (Living across the water in Scotland, I post at the wrong time of day.) So here goes. Because it’s important.
We all know that Fox News is home to a lot of unsavoury characters. It’s the bastion of climate change deniers: people like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. How they love to trash anyone who tries to tighten their weak grasp on reality.
Well, now we’ve got a new ally in the war against climate disinformation.
Rupert Murdoch.
The chairman of News Corporation – and Fox News’s ultimate owner – has experienced the effects of global warming for himself... and announced that his corporation will join international efforts to avert catastrophe.
Australia's Herald Sun has the story:
Saying [his] global media empire produced 641,150 tonnes of greenhouse gas last year, the News Corporation chairman and CEO last night pledged to go
"We could make a difference just by holding our emissions steady as our businesses continue to grow, but that doesn't seem to be enough," Mr Murdoch said. "We want to go all the way to zero," he told News Corp's worldwide employees.
Under the plan, all News Corp businesses, including News Limited, publisher of the Herald Sun, will be carbon neutral by 2010.
Mr Murdoch said this goal would be met by slashing energy use, switching to renewable power sources and, as a last resort, offsetting unavoidable emissions.
News Corp will today join other multinational businesses in the Climate Group, a non-profit organisation that works to reduce greenhouse emissions globally.
Now this seems to me hugely significant. News Corporation remains the home of climate change denial - most especially in its most powerful outlet, Fox News. Yet now we have a chance to call the 'sceptics' out by citing Rupert Murdoch himself.
Make a record of the following quotations from Murdoch's speech. DISSEMINATE and USE THEM next time Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter mouth off against reality.
"Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats," Mr Murdoch said. "We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."
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A couple of months ago, I met the Australian novelist Deborah Robertson at a publishing party. We talked about her Prime Minister, John Howard, and the pathology of denial affecting Australia even as it suffers its worst drought in 1,000 years. We agreed that, historically, Rupert Murdoch's media empire has done much to foster this pathology. However, Deborah told me that Murdoch's son, Lachlan, who lives in Australia with his family, had been trying to persuade his father to take climate change seriously. Al Gore, too, has been lobbying behind the scenes to persuade Murdoch of the reality of the planetary emergency.
Well, there's nothing quite like direct experience for focusing the mind. Rupert travelled to Melbourne and was appalled by the drought conditions that have prevailed there for a decade:
Mr Murdoch, who grew up in Melbourne, saw on recent visits the effects of the devastating Australian drought.
He said Melbourne's 10th consecutive year of below-average rain had made clear the risks of climate change.
The greening of Rupert Murdoch (remember: the Herald Sun is one of his many papers) is big news. It represents one more tilt in the tipping point. But we, as global citizens, have to be vigilant and ready to sock it to the conservative pundits whenever they try to weaken society's resolve. The grandaddy of Anglo-Saxon conservatism has got real on global warming. It's time the White House and its cheerleaders followed suite.
The following may stink of hypocrisy to most of us. But it's an irrefutable weapon in the progressive arsenal:
"The unique potential -- and duty -- of a media company is to help its audiences connect to the issues that define our time," Mr Murdoch said.