Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

The media has a climate change blind spot

(Getty)

Are you someone who is delighted by the government’s eye-wateringly expensive commitment to deliver ‘net zero’ by 2035, or are you a dissenter on the grounds that its plans do not go far, or fast, enough?

According to the BBC and many other media organisations, you must surely belong to one of those two groups.

Somehow the widely held viewpoint to which I subscribe – that the weight of evidence suggests man-made climate change is a big problem but we should still scrutinise climate policies on grounds of proportionality, value for money and how they measure up against less idealistic alternatives – has been squeezed out.

Tuesday morning’s news bulletins on the Today programme provided a case study of how the debate is being framed. The top story concerned the government’s new net zero announcements, including a £450 million plan to subsidise folk getting rid of gas boilers and replacing them with heat pumps. The government, we were told, was aiming to end the sale of new gas boilers in 14 years.

On no mainstream news bulletin did I hear anyone offering any perspective based on efficacy or value for money of the policies

An extraordinarily radical approach, one might think. But the only alternative view to the government’s position was that this was insufficient. ‘Some green groups have warned the total funding is not enough and that too few homes will benefit,’ listeners were told.

The BBC’s ‘Environment Analyst’, meanwhile, told listeners that while green groups applauded the phasing out of gas boilers, they had calculated that the government’s budget was ‘£10 billion short over three years.’ Labour’s Pat McFadden said the world had been waiting for Britain to take a lead in advance of COP26 and the government’s announcement ‘failed that test of leadership’.

Questions directed at Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international trade secretary put up to defend the policy, included: ‘Why aren’t you going further?’, ‘If we’re leading it [the world] why aren’t we saying today that we will ban new gas boilers?’ and ‘Can you say today that we will in the year 2030 have achieved emissions being cut by at least 68 per cent compared to 1990 levels?’

Later that day in the Commons the shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband took the same line.

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