Who is the saboteur? Who can wield this amount of power?
The retreat represents a win for climate deniers in Australia who dismiss the looming dangers of climate change and the science behind it. (It's "absolute crap," claimed Abbott, echoing Tea Party-type rhetoric in the United States.) It's a win for energy and mining interests who claimed the Australian tax was too burdensome
The retreat also signals a victory for Rupert Murdoch, the Australian native whose media empire, News Corp., did everything in its power to elect Abbott last fall and to attack the tax. Days before the repeal vote, Murdoch spoke out again against climate change science, telling an Australian interviewer it should be treated with great skepticism. Murdoch's dismissal stands in stark contrast to his 2007 proclamation that "climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats."
Well one can only assume that he thinks that "catastrophic threats" are a business opertunity.
This is why citizens united was such an appalling decision especially when they own a media empire spanning many countries.
That wasn't the only way Murdoch weaponized his hometown media for an information war. His national daily, The Australian has "promoted 'misleading' stories giving credence to climate denialist views, outnumbering those accepting climate science by 10-to-1, according to a report in the Quarterly Essay," Salon noted.
Additionally, media analysis conducted by the University of Technology in Sydney found that "negative articles about the proposed carbon emissions tax in Murdoch's newspapers outweighed positive ones 82 percent to 18 percent,
This is pure propaganda, and goes against the reality.
Of course in his Shill Street Journal[Wall St Journal] they publish such delectable items as this:
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
About the authors
Joseph Bart and the Heartland Institute
Heartland Institute questions scientific opinion on climate change, arguing that global warming is not occurring and, further, that warming might be beneficial if it did occur.[19] The institute is a member organization of the Cooler Heads Coalition, which describes itself as "an informal and ad-hoc group focused on dispelling the myths of global warming.
MediaTransparency reported that Heartland received funding from politically conservative foundations such as the Castle Rock Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[49] In 2011, the Institute received $25,000 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.[17] The Charles Koch Foundation states that the contribution was "$25,000 to the Heartland Institute in 2011 for research in healthcare, not climate change, and this was the first and only donation the Foundation made to the institute in more than a decade
Roy Spencer is a
well known misinformer.
In this case, one of Dessler’s figures shows very clearly how Spencer and his co-author Danny Braswell left out of their analysis all the data that didn’t fit with their hypothesis. It’s so clear that even people who don’t know much about statistics can see the problem. There is no running from this one–no claiming that Spencer is being persecuted–unless he wants us to believe he’s being persecuted by his own data.
So now Australia is done Murdoch can now concentrate on
fucking up the US and UK
He loves newspapers for the visceral connection to them he feels as the son of a newspaper executive; for the mass audiences the tabloids give him; for the ability to shape elite discussion with his prestigious papers; and most of all for the influence he derives with leading politicians because of both kinds of papers. A chief executive with a stronger affinity for the bottom line would have jettisoned those newspapers a long time ago.
One man can indeed fuck up the planet.