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UK Heat Wave
Fires spread across the country in rural and urban areas alike last week as Britain reached its highest ever recorded temperature of 40.3oC, which beat the previous record by 1.6oC.
The London fire brigade declared a major incident in response to a huge surge in fires across the capital last week. It received more than 1600 calls for assistance on Tuesday compared to 300-350 on a typical day. This extreme heat showed that the risk to record breaking temperatures around the world may be even greater than scientists first considered, as most climate predictions didn’t expect temperatures to get so high so soon. The NHS struggled to cope with the impact of this extreme heat which led to hundreds if not thousands of excess deaths. There was widespread disruption to travel, health care and schools as roads were warped, Luton airport had a damaged runway and the lack of air conditioning in the vast majority of buildings meant staying inside them was almost intolerable. Trains even had to run at low speeds to ensure that the lines would not buckle. In Spain and Portugal around 1,900 died due to the heat wave. These high temperatures would be impossible without manmade climate change.
Much of the media joked about the hot weather and spoke of it as if it were something to look forward to. Especially the right wing press which notoriously prefers to ignore the impact of the world’s global warming. Many British conservatives still speak of sun spots and other potential causes for the rising average temperature of the planet, despite the scientific consensus and undeniable evidence of manmade climate change that now exists. In the US many people still deny climate change, Donald Trump famously said that it was “fake” during his presidency and climate denial is a huge part of the American right’s strategy to prevent action being taken to stop climate breakdown. In the UK instead of climate denial we have climate deflection where those who don’t want us to move away from fossil fuels change the focus to irrelevant issues instead of the action that must take place. The British media rarely focuses on our changing climate and don’t answer the questions of how we rearrange our economy and society to protect ourselves from it. We have fewer than 10 years to prevent the most harmful effects of climate change from coming to fruition and the media spends more time questioning protestors who try to force the government into action, than the oil execs who pushed us into this position.
The media’s awful attitude toward climate change is the result of years of campaigning by those who benefit from producing greenhouse gases. 30 years ago the fossil fuel industry decided to spread doubt about the coming climate change crisis to prevent the world from beginning its transition to green energy. In June 1992 the international community produced a framework for climate change action and the environmentalist Al Gore became vice-president to Bill Clinton. This new administration was clearly going to try to regulate fossil fuels. The Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an organisation which represented various industries reliant on fossil fuels such as steel, coal, oil and others, was conceived to help these industries work together to lobby politicians against limiting fossil fuel emissions. At the time the GCC was in search of a communications partner to alter how the world sees climate change. A meeting took place between industry leaders and E Bruce Harrison, a decorated PR consultant known as the ‘father of environmental PR’. He had worked for several of the United States’s largest polluters in campaigns to tidy up their image, including discrediting research on the toxicity of pesticides and a campaign against tougher emissions for the big car makers.
Harrison had fought reforms for the auto industry by reframing the issue around their pollution and would do the same to beat fossil fuel regulation. They would persuade people that the scientific facts weren’t conclusive and that politicians had to consider how action on climate change would negatively affect the economy. This was done using a media campaign full of opinion pieces, or ‘op-eds’ as they are called, and sometimes direct contacts with journalists. They later moved on to target experts who could garner more credibility such as scientists and academics. Climate sceptics were paid to give speeches and write op-eds, around $1500 per article. Those preaching the truth lost ground to these sceptics and the urgency of climate change was slowly lost on the population. The GCC successfully opposed an international attempt to negotiate emissions reductions at Kyoto in Japan, December 1997 as the US never implemented the Kyoto agreement. 44% of the US in that year believed scientists were divided on climate change when scientists had reached a consensus that global warming was human-caused. These methods for undermining the impact of climate change persist to this day.
Former Vice President Al Gore considers the action of climate denial to be the ‘most serious crime of the post-World War Two era’. And it should be treated this way. The consequences of climate breakdown will likely take hundreds of millions if not billions of lives over the course of the coming centuries and have already taken millions. Many in the media refused to listen to climate advocates as they demanded government intervention to stop Britain’s fossil fuel production. They downplayed the severity of the crisis so that action wasn’t taken as too many in the Western world don’t expect climate change to affect them but we’re seeing that it will affect everyone everywhere. The media must learn to speak out on issues like climate change that need and deserve our attention instead of simply talking about these extreme events in the moment when they occur. We have to understand how our current economic and political systems led us to this and how we can change them to save ourselves.
