On Global Warming Australia Gets Plenty of Bad Press

Sorry to have let the blog posts drop off during October. I’ve been pretty busy working on some restoration projects (more about this in later blogs).

            Anyway, I noticed this story yesterday in the Guardian. An analysis of Australia’s press coverage of global warming reveals that one third of that nation’s news media rejects the science of climate change. This is head spinningly astounding. The Australians have always impressed me as being particularly reasonable folks. But the Guardian explains that:

A study of 602 articles in 10 newspapers found that 32% dismissed or questioned whether human activity was causing the climate to change. The articles were analyzed between February and April in 2011 and again in the same period in 2012.Significantly, newspapers based a small fraction of their coverage on peer-reviewed science, instead relying heavily on comment pieces penned by writers without a scientific background.

If there is someone or something blameworthy here, the Guardian lays it squarely with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has increasingly treated the subject of global warming in opinion pieces rather than straightforward news coverage. The report, which was conducted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, a non-profit organization based at the University of Technology in Sydney, said that, “By turning climate science into a debate, skepticism occupies space in Australian non-skeptic media that might otherwise be given to articles covering climate science.” Murdoch also owns Fox News in this country, which is pretty infamous for their questionable coverage of global warming.

Of course, things like this have consequences. Perhaps this had something to do with Australia’s last elections, in which the electorate voted out the Labor Party and replaced them with a two-party center-right coalition, whose leader, Tony Abbott, voiced as one of his objectives the end to Australia’s carbon tax.

Knowing this about the press coverage in Australia, the election starts to makes sense. If enough folks read in their newspapers that global warming is at best an iffy proposition, they will vote to rid themselves of a carbon tax. There is much more to the election than this one tax issue, but I’m certain that it played some part in the outcome.

The World Warms As Australia's New Government Promises to Drop National Carbon Tax

For global warming there are two competing truisms. The first truism is that the most efficient and effective means of reducing carbon emissions is through a carbon tax. The basic economic rule is that people buy less of something when it’s more expensive. And a tax on carbon would make all things reliant on carbon emissions—gasoline, electricity, etc.—more expensive. Folks would buy less of this stuff and there would be less carbon thrown into the air.

            The most common approach around carbon taxes is levying them on industries that are heavy users of fossil fuels, mostly the electric utilities, with the increased costs passed on to consumers. These taxes can be finessed, with rebates going to lower income individuals to mitigate their hardship from these taxes. A good thing about a carbon tax is that the revenue can be used to promote cleaner and greener energy options.

            The other truism is that people hate to pay taxes. It doesn’t matter what sort of tax it might be, an income tax, a carbon tax, a sales, tax, folks hate to pay taxes.

            We just saw the clash of these truisms play themselves out in Australia, where the recent elections delivered a whopping blow to the Labor Party that had been in power for the past six years. The new Prime Minister-elect, Tony Abbott, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that one of his prime objectives once he is in office is an end to Australia’s carbon tax.

            Down under the carbon tax has not been around a long time, only about a year. In its short life it proved to be, as with all taxes, unpopular. It was one of the issues that Abbott used to hammer the Labor Party in his campaigning.

            This was not a single-issue election. The Labor Party might have been voted out anyway. In power, the Labor Party was unstable and prone to internal bickering, although their popularity increased when Kevin Rudd, who had been Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, replaced Prime Minister Julia Gillard in something of an internal party coup in the past few months.

            The death of Australia’s carbon tax is nonetheless disconcerting. The planet, and humanity, will be in a lot better shape if human beings reduce their use of fossil fuels, but we’re not going to magically do that sort of thing without being prodded to do so. Despite the good that a carbon tax might be able to do for us, we just don’t like being prodded.