The Guardian has been speculating whether the BBC’s committment to reporting climate change is lessening. And earlier in the week, as I noted here, the Daily Telegraph suggested that new BBC editorial guidelines would force more balanced coverage of the topic. I have news for them both. Nothing has changed, and if anything the climate alarmist fervour is getting worse. The evidence? Yesterday, a reporter called Tom Heap presented a programme on Radio 4 in the Costing the Earth greenie strand called “Can Lawyers Save the World?”. It is the most outstanding piece of partisan propaganda I have heard in 11 years of monitoring BBC output for a living. I urge you to listen to it, if you have the stomach to do so.
It was so astonishingly one-sided that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But the theme was that governments are not doing enough to save us from being poisoned by carbon, or from flooding, or from heat, so the fate of the world is now in the hands of wonderful environmental lawyers who are battling heroically to save us all. Seriously, folks.
Mr Heap treated all these greeedy, chancer nutcases with breathless reverence as one by one, they spelled out their strategy. His profiles included a legal warrior in New Orleans who wants money for his house that he claims was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, because that was unquestionably caused by climate change. This was followed by an outraged Inuit who wanted millions because the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising sea levels (not “seal” levels, as I previously had!: h/t Roland Deschain). Next stop was Europe, where a hero legal-eagle was invoking the chilling EU Aaarhus ruling to ensure that every green activist who believes they are affected by climate change can sue whomever is held responsible.
Mr Heap followed with a UK woman who has blown £150,000 of her own money heroically fighting a court battle to stop a cement works being built because it plans to use nasty fossil fuels for power. The programme then took on an almost surreal air as environmental camapigners entered the frame. There was an interview with a woman from an organisation called Gaia, who wanted legal rights for trees, and an end to the Western tradition of law because it did not recognise that Mother Earth needed its own charter so that in future, nothing could be done that could be seen to cause harm to ecology. And finally, there was a British lawyer who is campaigning relentlessly to bring in a new international law called “eco-cide”, to stand alongside genocide in seriousness. Under it, anyone who transgresses against the environment will be put on trial in the Hague, or wherever, just like the Nazis. She stopped short of calling for the death penalty for offenders – but that was clearly on her mind.
In this 30 minutes of eco-buffonery, Mr Heap never once questioned any element of the claims about man-made climate change. It was an unmoderated, unsubtle, one-sided, preposterous pitch in favour of lawyers becoming all-powerful in suing, jailing, and generally nailing everyone and anyone who commits an eco-crime. By giving them such a platform, he clearly supported the idea that those affected by climate change should be awarded billions of pounds in compensation, and for lawyers to have instant powers to jack boot us all into nature worship. Under this regime, any burning of fossil fuel, any cutting down of trees, any human action that was deemed to interfere with nature would be punishable.
The so-called climate experts (all warmists, naturally) he called on to confirm that damage is being perpetrated, and to show how it might be calibrated, did concede that everything they did is based on modelling, and that precise measurements of the actual impact of climate change were therefore difficult. But Mr Heap cheerfully glossed over this little difficulty and told us that it would no doubt be overcome in the near future.
This was a full-scale pitch of the BBC eco-creed. They may not be sending an army to Cancun, like they did to Copenhagen, but inside the corridors of Portland Place, Television Centre, White City and Salford Quays, they are clearly planning how climate sceptics will be put on trial, and all industrial activity involving fossil fuel will be suspended and so much bound in red tape that it will become impossible. And one thing is for sure. There will be whole battallions of BBC staff at the eco-cide show trials.
The hypocrisy of the loony-left really shines through when they start talking about actual conservation of the environment – instead of ‘global warming’ – as it conflicts with their pro mass-immigration agenda.
It’s important to remember that it’s these same people who accuse anyone who doesn’t want to see what’s left of rural Britain covered in concrete as ‘Nazis’ and ‘racists’ and ‘Fascists’.
Complete fools the lot of them.
The first public admission by the BBC ecofascist enablers this AM on the BBC toady show of the fact that windmills are bird and bat killers HOWEVER no numbers are mentioned and its the colour that attracts them to their deaths according to the toady and painting them a different colour would stop the mass killing of wildlife(wheres the RSPB?counting their payoff!) Huuuh? painting these bird choppers a different colour eh?
Anyway the truth leaks out at last albeit slowly. Thanks BBC thanks for the helpful news/
I have become very sensitive to the the tone of BBC programmes so I immediately switched this one off. My only defence from such rubbish polluting my mind.
I stumbled into room later with another radio tuned to R4 just as the Gaia disciple was rooting for trees. I hit the off button again.
Your posting has done wonders for me. I am now certain that : –
1. My judgement is perfect.
2. The BBC is suffering from a collective form of insanity.
3. Their political philosophy and positioning has become such that they do not even want to hide it – they are loud and proud about it.
4. Their condition has now gone beyond treatment – only execution will terminate its progress.
PS – I am just a little bit surprised that it has not yet been discovered that the Chilean mining disaster was caused by AGW.
In answer to your PS, they are still looking for the Capitalism angle to blame for the Chilean mine event, no doubt they will mix it with AGW when they find one.
give them time-some idiot will probably try that one
“…the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising seal levels.”
I can see how that would be inconvenient. But think of the tourist attraction if they can all be trained to balance beach balls on their noses.
“…the Alaskan coastline is being inundated by unquestionably rising seal levels.” Yeah its really flooding like a tsunami of 1-2mm per year and slowing fast Oooooh Noooooo! We will all be “innundated” in a couple of hundred years so run for the hills while you can.
Excellent excellent excellent post, Mr Horbury.
The programme – an entire programme – was exactly as you state – a pack of propaganda and lies and craziness – all promoted and never in the slightest questioned by the BBC presenter.
I have never heard such sustained biased rubbish on the BBC.
Journalists should follow the adage – “If someone says your Mother loves you – you still need to check it out”. The presenter in the programme broke every rule in the book of journalism. There was not the merest hint of journalistic balance.
The whole programme – on and on the nonsense went – was an utter OTT disgrace. The presenter should be sacked – but in the BBC bubble he is probably being praised for his stupidity and bias.
‘They may not be sending an army to Cancun’
Indeed not. As noted…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/oct/14/chilean-miners-bbc-cancun-climate-talks
..in a paper hard to reconcile as the usual suspect minority (well, it does have lower ABC’s than some) claimed here…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/10/bbc_news_coverage_of_san_jose.html
It was a huge point of difference with other broadcasters…. The cost – and some of the difficult choices we now have to make about what future stories we may have to pull back from to recoup the cost – has also drawn some press comment.
That ‘come comment’ being that they, despite an inept series of senior management internal PR ra-ras, have lost the plot.
‘some’… must. get. coffee.
As I posted on WattsUpWithThat yesterday…
“…Watch my lips – “There will be NO discernible change”.
Too much at stake, dyed-in-the-wool advocacy, and a pension fund to think about. They’ll not give up that easily, even if they pretend to. The BBC requires at best privatisation, at worst disassembly. pretty soon, too..”
if ever there was a case for a law dealing with crimes against sanity, this bunch of money grabbing imbeciles would be it
I’ve seen saner locked up in psychiatric wards
I commented yesterday that this was a spectacularly bonkers program. But I keep wondering why. I remember a couple of years ago, when this same Tom Heap on this same program did an absolutely masterful piece-by-piece destruction of wind power, complete with toe-curlingly unanswerable questioning of the minister then i/c the environment (don’t think it was Miliband E). It was actually a brilliant piece of journalism.
So we know Mr Heap has it in him to do a good job.
Yet this program was, truly, an unrestrained and globally-source exhibition of derangement and the deranged put on for our entertainment. A bit like visiting Bedlam in the 18th century, perhaps. One can only imagine the damage it has done to the causes it seemingly sought to indulge.
I think it unimaginable that Mr Heap didn’t have some inkling about how this exhibition of freaks, weirdos and Wiccan Warriors would play with his audience.
Frankly, it’s easier to believe that the repeated scandals engulfing the climate computer modellers has ‘turned’ Mr Heap and he is now an unacknowledged agent provocateur.
After all pro-warmist bias across the board in BBC programming, here is a delicious MSNBC interview with Arthur Robinson, a scientist who disputes MMGW, and has other “crazy” ideas such as nuclear power is good – he is standing for election in Oregon.
The interviewer is Rachel Maddow, as far left as you can get. Robinson makes mincemeat of her, largely takes control of the “interview” away from her, shows her to be trying to fling mud all the time – and avoiding the real issues of the election. Like – its the economy, stupid.
If only Coalition spokesmen would fling it back at the BBC like Robinson does to Maddow. Pure poetry, a real palate cleanser.
http://www.breitbart.tv/rachel-maddow-loses-control-of-her-own-show-in-wild-contentious-interview/
Hate to say it, but it did to me rather come across as two wrongs making a whole other set of wrongs.
But yes, the woman had a clear agenda, and was tripped up on it, showing herself to be as inept as she is agenda driven.
If they have a version of Newswatch there, I am sure she’d be on this weekend saying she ‘got it about right’ and, now her nemesis is long gone,using selected editorial her team has poured over subsequently to ‘prove’ it.
Here’s a radical idea: why doesn’t the BBC attempt to show nothing more than a commitment to reporting events accurately and impartially and in full context ?
‘Can lawyers and courtrooms become the frontline in saving the environment’.
‘Reports from the front line in the battle to save the world have made some pretty sombre reading of late.’
‘Time for a new hero – the lawyer’.
‘Increasingly robust scientific evidence’.
Tom started his career at Sky News as a (wait for it) soundman.
Bupendra listened to the first ten minutes of thie Heap of Doodoo so you don’t have to.
Bupendra – taking one for the team.
I have to say, if one is starting to feel the heat of public opprobrium, it’s a masterstroke to reach out and show yourself to be cheek by jowl with… lawyers.
Maybe, as the shark joke goes, it’s just professional courtesy.
green is the new red
or is that the old red just tarted up in the emperor’s new clothes?
I’m not sure there is any need to worry about Costing The Earth. It’s a programme made for and listened to by a freakish minority. As long as they pay their licence fee such oddballs are entitled to have a few low profile radio programmes made to represent their point of view. After all, the BBC is supposed to be the nation’s broadcaster, with something for everyone.
Of course, such courtesies are not extended by the BBC to other minority licence fee paying wackos like members of the the BNP.
She stopped short of calling for the death penalty for offenders – but that was clearly on her mind.
Why call for a trial, when Franny’s box with a red button, is far more entertaining, and gets the job done with minimal cost.