News Corp’s turnaround on climate crisis is a greenwash Ketan Joshi The company won’t change until it understands the grave damage it has done with its ugly legacy of denialist reporting News Corp Australia’s office in Sydney ‘News Corp has played a major role in ensuring a truly catastrophic track record for emissions in Australia over the past decade.’ Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP Tue 12 Oct 2021 16.29 AEDT Last modified on Wed 13 Oct 2021 09.51 AEDT Let’s be straight. The planet is heating because we’re adding gigatonnes of greenhouse gases into our habitat. The consequences get worse for every additional gram we displace from deep underground and send into the sky, through the dual actions of extraction and combustion. We know with certainty that the impacts – inflicted already and inevitably due if we don’t stop fast – are gruesome and visceral. As the world recovers from Covid-19, so too does fossil fuel use. It’s largely unsurprising, considering how little real work was done to decouple human existence from the burning of carbon. Not only do these gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the amount we add each year is itself increasing. That is to say: it’s getting worse quickly

Another example involves News Corp uncritically repeating the greenwashing campaigns of some of Australia’s most severe emitters. AGL Energy has openly decided to breach a 1.5C-aligned trajectory by keeping its coal plants open well into the 2040s. Ditto for Energy Australia and Alinta Energy, both justifying this on the grounds that shutting down coal would cause “blackouts”. It’s the worst of corporate climate delay, but it’s heralded as if it’s a grand turnaround on climate.

Source: News Corp’s turnaround on climate crisis is a greenwash | Ketan Joshi | The Guardian