Why Journalism Matters
Special focus on the climate crisis: investigative journalists vs the fossil fuel industry. Plus the last chance to free Julian Assange
5 minute read
Investigative journalists prioritise getting Big Oil to face accountability for the climate crisis that threatens us all
“Climate change is by far the biggest story we’ve ever had to cover because it’s by far the biggest thing that human beings have ever done by orders of magnitude larger than anything else.
“And so there are an almost endless number of places to go poke and look and examine. The most obvious is money.”
— Bill McKibben, author, leading climate journalist and campaigner, 2023 Global Investigative Journalism Conference
Is there anyone left in the world who doesn’t look out of their window fearfully every morning to witness a dramatic change in climate unfolding before their eyes?
Here in eastern England spring appears to have arrived almost a month early. The welcome sight of clumps of snowdrops and daffodils is tempered by days of relentless rain that have swollen rivers, now pouring out on to the land, creating vast lakes of floodwater.
In Australia there are wildfires and in the Amazon rainforest there is unprecedented drought which threatens to unleash record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere as plants, trees and animals die.
Although everyone can see that complacency is not an option, perversely, humanity continues to speed in the opposite direction by burning record levels of fossil fuels, roughly doubling since the 1980s.
Of course, this situation is not lost on the world’s investigative journalists who continue to report on this threat to the future of humanity on the planet.
Last year the Global Investigative Journalism Network(GIJN), the world’s leading forum for investigative reporters convened a workshop The Investigative Agenda for Climate Change Journalism which brought together 80 top names in climate journalism from 35 countries. This meeting, was held before the bi-annual the GIJN global conference in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The conference formulated the priorities that investigative journalists should pursue in getting to grips with this crisis.
The first priority is to focus on ‘the fossil fuel industry and its vast network of enablers and related industries’ adding that ‘accountability is at the heart of investigative or watchdog journalism.’
The meeting also took a view on how difficult the challenges are including gaining access to good data and human sources, and how the power structures around the world avoid transparency and thereby escape accountability.
Complicated situation
The situation is complicated by the fact that many of the largest fossil fuel companies are state enterprises, often based in authoritarian regimes who allow minimal press scrutiny and opaque access to public records.
They also noted the overwhelming need to stimulate public engagement in an environment where there is widespread climate news avoidance and distrust driven by constant dis-information and misinformation.
“What we’re engaged in here in this room right now is of global consequence,” Matthew Green, global investigations editor for DeSmog, told the conference. “We are witnessing the systems that sustain life on this planet literally being dismantled in front of our eyes. And we are part of the immune system that is arising in response.”
A report on the conference for GIJN led by the network’s Program Director, Anne Koch details what has now become a substantive body of evidence that the fossil fuel industry accumulated their own alarming research many decades ago. on global warming. This provided clear evidence that their products would adversely affect the climate which they chose to ignore—and then deny—when climate change became a major public issue in the 1990s.
Koch and colleagues write: “Investigative journalists have played a leading role in exposing the fossil fuel industry’s lies about climate change. A series of investigations by news outlets in 2015 revealed that fossil fuel companies knew for decades that oil, gas, and coal were warming the planet, all while publicly denying it.
“Journalists worldwide have documented the consequences. Yet, with trillions of dollars of reserves still buried in the ground, the industry has found innovative new ways to ply disinformation, often with remarkable success – and devastating impact, as global temperatures reach record highs and large swaths of the globe catch fire.”
In January 2023 the prestigious journal Science published a peer-reviewed analysis entitled Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections studying the discrepancies between the company’s own climate research and what it was saying in public.
Causative link
The report begins: “For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain. Supran et al. show that one of those fossil fuel companies, ExxonMobil, had their own internal models that projected warming trajectories consistent with those forecast by the independent academic and government models. What they understood about climate models thus contradicted what they led the public to believe.”
The journalists who have been covering the fossil fuel industry are under no illusion about the challenges they face.
“The fossil fuel industry will do, apparently, anything they can to delay the transition to clean energy,” said author Bill McKibben, a pioneer in climate change journalism. “So the job of figuring out how they’re using their political power to prevent the change that we desperately need is enormously interesting and enormously important.”
Damian Carrington, environment editor at the Guardian considers investigating the industry a formidable task. “The fossil fuel industry is a fearsome adversary — and what I mean by that is it’s probably the richest industry in the history of the world. That gets you a colossal amount of political power and influence. And so they are tough to fight against.”
Reference
GIJN investigative climate conference report
Science: Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate research
Job One for Humanity: The Deception Decades
4 minute read
Investigating chinks in the armour of the fossil fuel industry
There are not many aspects of the current situation that give hope to those who are trying to battle against the power and wealth of the fossil fuel industry.
But even though the major oil companies still manage to evade judgements that require them to actually cut oil and gas production around the world, there are signs that the writing is on the wall for this rich and overwhelmingly powerful industrial sector.
(NB many readers may be shocked and surprised to learn that this enormously wealthy industry receives an utterly spectacular $USD 7 trillion in subsidies per year from world governments, which has increased by $2 trillion over the past two years. This state of affairs is so unbelievable and out of sync with what the world needs to face the perils of the climate crisis that it has even raised the ire of the International Monetary Fund which sits at the heart of the world’s financial system. In a blog post on the IMF website they say that ‘Scaling back subsidies would reduce air pollution, generate revenue, and make a major contribution to slowing climate change’.)
But there is now hope that this seemingly invincible Goliath may be prone to weaknesses that will bring it under some kind of control. One is the fact that the number of legal cases brought against the major oil and gas companies around the world has mushroomed. The number of cases focused on the climate crisis globally has doubled since 2015, bringing the total number to over 2,000 according to research carried out at the London School of Economics.
These cases include those brought by more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil, alleging the fossil fuel industry knew for decades about the dangers of burning coal, oil and gas, and actively hid that information from consumers and investors.
Last year The US Supreme Court enabled these cases to go forward with rulings that struck down oil companies’ attempts to move such lawsuits from state courts to federal courts.
Research has also shown that legal action taken against oil companies is affecting their share value.
In a report in 2023 the Guardian revealed that climate litigation ‘poses a financial risk to fossil fuel companies because it lowers the share price of big polluters’.
The research has been published by the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute.
The Guardian report by Isabella Kaminski states: “The researchers hope their work will encourage lenders, financial regulators and governments to consider the effect of climate litigation when making investment decisions in a warmer future, and ultimately drive greener corporate behaviour.
“The study… analysed 108 climate crisis lawsuits around the world between 2005 and 2021 against 98 companies listed in the US and Europe. It found that the filing of a new case or a court decision against a company reduced its expected value by an average of 0.41%.”
Statistically significant
“Although modest, the researchers conclude that the drop in the value of big polluters is statistically significant and therefore down to the legal challenges.
“We didn’t know before if the markets cared about climate litigation,” said Misato Sato, lead author of the study. “It’s the first evidence supporting what was suspected before; that polluting firms and especially carbon majors now face litigation risk, in addition to transition and physical risk.”
Andrew Coburn is the CEO of the climate risk company Risilience. He says that major lawsuits are not perceived well by the stock markets. He told the Guardian: “Risilience’s analysis suggests that damages could amount to 5% or more of a company’s revenue in the event of climate litigation.”
Coburn was also encouraged by the increasing willingness of regulators across the UK and Europe to clamp down on perceived greenwashing attempts to mislead the public about a company’s true commitment to mitigating climate change.
He said:“This demonstrates additional financial risks for firms failing to present credible, ambitious and realistic climate-transition plans underpinned by transparent data”.
The second factor that is creating a growing challenge to the fossil fuel industry is the evolving trend towards disinvestment which has exploded over the past decade, and which continues to make inroads into the underlying financial stability enjoyed heretofore by the major oil and gas companies.
The Fossil Fuel Divestment Commitments Database, the leading source of information on the subject calculates that 1613 organisations with assets worth $USD40.63 trillion have either made or are pledged to make divestments from extracting fossil fuels from the earth.
These initiatives are led by faith-based groups and educational institutions but governments and pension plans are taking action as well, spurred on by campaigns like Retire Big Oil which seeks American pension savings to be channelled away from investments in fossil fuels. Currently pension funds represent 19% of all fossil fuel investments.
Reference
Fossil Fuels Divestment Database
Guardian report on fossil fuel share price
3 minute read
Last roll of the legal dice to free Julian Assange before extradition to US
The long running drama surrounding the extradition of Julian Assange from the UK to the US on espionage charges is drawing to a close in a London Court this week.
As WJM goes to press, the UK High Court is considering the final application of appeal for the extradition of the Wikileaks founder and publisher.
Reporters without Borders (RSF) has been championing Assange’s case for many years and will be present in court for what they are calling ‘Day X’. Yet again RSF has restated the urgent call for the US government to drop the case against Assange and for his release from high security detention in the UK.
RSF has also repeated its warning that the prosecution of Assange would have alarming implications for the future of journalism and would represent an unprecedented blow to press freedom.
On February 20 and 21 the court will hear the final arguments before issuing a judgement, expected in the coming weeks. There will be no further leave for appeal in the UK for this case.
Belmarsh Prison
Assange faces 18 criminal counts in the United States for his alleged role in unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to national defence, including evidence exposing alleged war crimes.
He has been detained in the UK since 2019, where he is currently being held at Belmarsh prison. He potentially faces a sentence of 175 years if convicted.
Assange’s detention and the attendant court cases have generated a great deal of interest and sympathy around the world from free expression and human rights communities, to journalists and media organisations, to policymakers around the world, including in Assange’s home country of Australia.
But despite the forthright support for Assange from many quarters he is also condemned by others such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who said that ‘Assange must pay for what he is done’.
“I think it is clear from the indictment that came out it’s not about punishing journalism, it is about assisting the hacking of a military computer to steal information from the United States government,” she said.
(Wikileaks released a trove of hacked emails from Clinton’s election team in 2016 during the US presidential campaign. It was claimed the emails were provided by the Russians in an attempt to influence the outcome of the election.)
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr Alice Jill Edwards, is the latest to add her voice to the call for the UK to halt Assange’s imminent extradition, citing the serious risks to Assange’s mental health and the risk of suicide.
RSFs director of Campaigns Rebecca Vincent has been a long-time advocate of Assange’s case and explains in a statement that the US could end this ordeal by dropping the 13-year case against him.
She writes: “All eyes are on the UK High Court during this fateful hearing, but it remains to be seen whether the British judiciary can deliver some form of justice by preventing Assange’s extradition at this late stage.
“Regardless, none of this is inevitable – it remains within the US government’s power to bring this judicial tragedy to an end by dropping its 13 year-old case against Assange and ceasing this endless persecution.
“No one should face such treatment for publishing information in the public interest. It’s time to protect journalism, press freedom, and all of our right to know. It’s time to free Assange now.”
Reference
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