Gaurdian of climate

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 06 Mar 2015, 16:42

This is probably the most important thing that Alan Rusbridger has ever written, and he's written some important things over the last 20 years at the Grauniad.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... rusbridger

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 06 Mar 2015, 17:23

The Guardian would fold(!) tomorrow if it did the right thing.

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 06 Mar 2015, 22:45

What, you mean if it stuck to its printsiples?

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 07 Mar 2015, 00:29

Whilst climate change is the biggest threat facing mankind, the Guardian is not choosing to put it "front and centre" for that reason. The reason it is choosing to do so is because, in doing so, it can maintain a veneer of radicalism whilst simultaneously choosing to side with the elites on all of the other contributory factors that make something like climate change inevitable.

Ultimately, the guardian, with a few noble and notable exceptions in its writers, is a reactionary bourgeoisie mouthpiece that seeks to change nothing fundamentally.

Much like with the BBC, I now have a fundamentally broken trust with anything the Guardian puts out following their coverage of issues such as Wikileaks, Ukraine etc.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 07 Mar 2015, 08:27

The trouble is that the sort of newspaper that we want doesn't exist, and if it did so few people would buy it that it wouldn't last long. The Guardian is thus the best of a bad bunch. Wikileaks wouldn't have got as far as it did without the paper's support and we now have the famously destroyed laptop about to go on display in that bastion of British cultural history, the Victoria and Albert Museum, a monument to Cameron's folly.

My own extreme radical/libertarian standpoint must have been influenced by my 40 plus years of reading the guardian, so it didn't do me any harm.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 07 Mar 2015, 09:37

Have you seen the Guardian this morning? Alan Rusbridger has done what he said. The front just has a minimal masthead, price and barcode at the top, the rest, spreading round the back, a picture by Antony Gormly, and a quote from Naomi Klein:

"We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. And we don't have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing"

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -needs-you

Little John · Post by **Little John** » 07 Mar 2015, 09:51

Q. What causes climate change?

A. Capitalism.

Q.What causes terrorism?

A. Capitalism and climate change.

Establishment papers like the Guardian, by ultimately siding with the capitalist elite's geo-political agenda, is a part of the underlying cause of both climate change and terrorism and a bit of green, liberal hand-wringing on the side does not mitigate that fact. Indeed, I would go further and suggest its unstated strategic purpose is to hide that fact irrespective of the noble intentions of many of the people involved in the effort inside this newspaper.

These phenomena do not stand apart

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 07 Mar 2015, 10:07

I'm at least as anti-capitalism as you are, but I recognise that other political/economic systems are also capable of emitting greenhouse gasses.

I think the removal of capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for sustainable civilisation.

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 07 Mar 2015, 16:48

I checked this out on the stand at our local news agents this morning.

The packaging is compelling and certainly looks good. However the faux radical effect is somewhat spoiled when you turn over the main section to be confronted by the crowded Travel (porn) section.

Here there abounds plenty of advertising for all sorts of ways for well off folk to treat themselves to very expensive, unnecessary and carbon intensive travels around the globe in the lap of luxury.

I am still waiting for someone to promote, with a straight face, luxury cruises and helicopter trips for concerned environmentalists to see for themselves just how bad the effects of climate change are in, say, the Antarctic including the grand tour of the Greenland glaciers.......

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 07 Mar 2015, 19:35

So what would you do, were you the editor? If you cancelled all the advertising from carbon-intensive industries (motor car ads are pretty dominant) then the paper would probably be bankrupt within the week and you'd be out of a job. I don't think a newspaper can save the planet on its own, though several newspapers have made a good fist of wrecking it over the years.

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 07 Mar 2015, 20:23

biffvernon wrote:
If you cancelled all the advertising from carbon-intensive industries (motor car ads are pretty dominant) then the paper would probably be bankrupt within the week..........

Would it? Perhaps this advertising could be foregone, and the organ have some real moral compass if the publication occupied less palatial premises in central London and the staff were paid less princely wages.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 10 Mar 2015, 12:36

Fair play to them for this line:

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels

This is something that is rarely stated as baldly. Usually, it's qualified by something like '97% of climate scientists believe...', turning into something you can believe in or not, as opposed to the inescapable fact that it is.

Biff, is the thread header spelling deliberate? Or has your 40 years of reading The Guardian given you a touch of dyslexia? All newspapers have typos. They'll get worse as job errr...'rationalisation'

continues.

Post by **kenneal - lagger** » 10 Mar 2015, 14:42

It used to be called The Grauniad in my youth as it was famous for typos.

As someone has said on the bank watch thread, I think it was, even the Guardian has been nobbled by HSBC over the latest scandal that is about to be exposed when the whistleblower finds a news outlet that will tell all about a £1 billion fraud perpetrated by that bank. The power of advertisers and of lobbyists is so great that even the regulator has been nobbled.

I was told by a friend last night that Rusbridger is retiring shortly and wanted to leave a "legacy" of his time at the paper and so is publishing this grandstand leaving present to the world to try to make up for any of his failings in the past. Perhaps he feels guilty about not outing the criminal activities of HSBC.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 10 Mar 2015, 14:54

kenneal - lagger wrote:It used to be called The Grauniad in my youth as it was famous for typos.

I'm aware of that and it might be a little joke of Biff's but if you wanted to search for 'guardian' as a thread, this one wouldn't show up.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 10 Mar 2015, 16:34

emordnilap wrote: but if you wanted to search for

Ha-ha I 'av deefeeted the breakers of internet security by the cunning use of spelling.