Misdirection
Read the three updates at bottom: UK Coal, North Sea greenwashing & Monbiot’s best piece yet on the status-quo
This follows on the previous post on Extinction Rebellion, and follows in the next post on re-evaluating colonialism.
My Climate Emergency is addressed via Medium posts and Story Maps — even started a non-profit to help address isolation and education issues in East Anglia in that context as well as now the pandemic — let’s look now at misdirection, “… a form of deception in which the performer draws audience attention to one thing to distract it from another” (Wikipedia).
Fossil Fuels
I participated in divestment campaigns, demanding that University of Cambridge Colleges divest from fossil fuels, as a protest against that industry’s contribution toward the current Climate Emergency, against the background of sea level rise encroaching on Cambridge if nothing is done about it (video). In the process I ran across Michael Mann’s work.
Known for his hockey stick graph and drawn into ClimateGate, he recently said this in an interview about his new book:
I use whole bunch of “D” words to describe this: deflection, delay, division, despair mongering, doomism. To start with, there is an effort to deflect attention away from systemic solutions. They are trying to convince people that climate change is not the result of their corporate policies but of our own individual actions. I mean BP [a multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London] was instrumental in the whole idea of a carbon footprint. They introduced the carbon footprint calculator to help get people to think of this as an individual-responsibility issue.
This is misdirection pushing industries’ responsibility onto individuals.
COVID-19
The world is waking up to the mental health issues emerging from fear and isolation stemming from the pandemic. And while COVID vaccination deserves the good news coverage, is it not like manna from heaven for governments to avoid the Climate Emergency? And while the issues and complexities are a significant challenge for everyone across the world, everything else around it is being ignored — a UK Parliamentary Bill on Climate and Ecological Emergency has stalled as Parliamentary readings are cancelled due to COVID— against this backdrop, calling issues arising from COVID a mental health issue, while correct, appear to push the issue away from the perpetrators — industry and government — onto the individual.
I fear that while well-intentioned and necessary, this is another misdirection.
Update 1
UK Coal and COP26: My local MP, Anthony Brown lambasted “the green lobby” in general and Extinction Rebellion in particular in The Times, touting UK’s record on decarbonisation. In fact he cherry-picked the lower right-hand corner of both CO2 emissions data standards, the BP Statistical Review (1965–2019) and the US DOE ESS/DIVE (1950–2016) in these graphs:
While it’s true that UK emissions dropped below the rest of Europe and China (BP) or only China (DOE) in the last five years, it historically exceeds all per-capita measures except the USA, including all of the rest of Europe combined! Not only is that nothing to be proud of contrary to what Brown said — watch for an Extinction Rebellion rebuttal — but here the harbingers of denialism:
- cherry-picking data that suit their argument ignoring the big picture
- misdirection again, that “all is well” against the general climate emergency
In tandem with a government report discussed as an update ending the next installment, is this Conservative MP not posturing for COP26 to be hosted by the UK this fall?
Update 2
A sterling example of fossil fuel rebranding from across the North Sea:
twitter.com/KetanJ0/status/1415237689905979392
Update 3
Read also about misdirection around plastics and carbon footprint calculators halfway down:
Capitalism is killing the planet - its time to stop buying into our own destruction
Update 4
Here is an excellent re-evaluation of the end of the Roman Empire — it faded away rather then fell, that misdirection having been propaganda by the Eastern Roman Empire to justify attacking the Western one — and the lesson for Americans in the article applies for Brits today just as well:
Rome stopped being a nation the moment its elements and its rulers turned upon themselves. And this is the real lesson for America: You are not likely to perish from outside enemies, but from your own politicians spinning a story for their own gain.
