Is Media Coverage of the Climate Crisis Overshadowing the Ecological Crisis?

Guest blog by Tom Valovic | Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Is the climate crisis becoming the latest example of media-driven reality distortion? I find myself increasingly concerned about pronouncements coming out of the corporate sector and mainstream media echo chamber that seem questionable. Over the years, I’ve learned some hard lessons about the process of co-optation and how good ideas get distorted and twisted into confusing or false narratives by clever corporate PR campaigns. Now that government and corporate power have merged into one unseemly multi-headed hydra, it seems like everything we hear and read about is put under some kind of microscope for a reality check. Even if you’re a journalist like myself, it’s hard and tedious work.

The climate crisis is clearly accelerating but apparently many governments have not gotten the memo — at least not really, in that a kind of bureaucratic paralysis seems to have set in. So, it’s clear that not enough is being done or attention being paid to accelerating weather-related disasters around the world. The warming and weather instability is serious, real, and it deserves our utmost attention. But what I’d like to discuss is something else entirely: how the climate crisis seems to be subtly or not so subtly overshadowing another aspect of planetary change that deserves just as much of our attention — the ecological crisis.

I find it distressing that the climate crisis is continually reduced to a matter of human CO2 related activity i.e. so-called greenhouse gases. The global warming picture is, in my opinion, far more complex than this narrative suggests. While the degree to which human activity is responsible for global warming is still debated (despite media assurances that it’s “settled science”), it seems clear that the increasingly consumer-driven way of life that humanity has adopted, especially in the last 50 years or so, has gone in directions that work against the ability of Planet Earth to sustain us. This is a very different issue from climate change per se.

The initial warnings were clear and strong in the 60’s and 70’s. Unfortunately, many were largely ignored because they were often coming from either marginalized thought leaders in the counterculture or ahead-of-their-time scientists. Since that time, out of control Earth-unfriendly consumerism, corporatism, technological overkill, extraction-based approaches to precious and finite resources, all primarily based on the “more, better, faster” values of Western scientific materialism, have continued to advance this ecological crisis. This pattern involves species extinction; the poisoning of the food chain with chemicals, microplastics, and other toxic materials; and, as a result, the deterioration of the biosphere life support systems in a rather astonishingly rapid period. So it seems important to ask: why do we now hear so much about CO2 and the climate crisis and so little about the ecological crisis? Applying Occam’s Razor, the answer seems clear enough: because government policies and their alignment with profit-driven corporate folly have significantly contributed to it.

The Limits of Science

Many scientists and the mainstream media now discuss the incredibly complicated factors associated with climate change with great certainty. Putting aside the dangerous and often unethical work still being done by corporate profiteers involving genetic engineering, it needs to be noted that the current capabilities of science and technology are beyond impressive. However, as a former futurist and research analyst, I can say fairly confidently that predicting the future is not in any way shape or form a scientific process.

Science can describe physical phenomena in the present very well. To a lesser extent, the same applies to validated historical data sets. But, by definition, the work of science is descriptive in nature. How can it describe something that doesn’t yet exist? Our current climate science has built-in limitations based on the reality that past data is not necessarily predictive of future outcomes and computer modeling also has its limits. This is not to devalue the important work of climate scientists about where things might be headed, which is welcome and useful. The area of concern is the tendency to posit the current body of science as absolute or all-encompassing truth with little room for questioning.

One climate scientist, Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, has noted a huge margin of error in IPCC climate predictions. She points out that, contrary to media reports, there is also considerable uncertainty about how much humans have contributed and not enough scientific understanding of solar influence in climate change including solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In terms of how much human activity is responsible, viewed from the perspective of deep history, planetary upheaval and instability of the global ecosystem has happened many times in the past. This includes ice ages, extinction level events, continental instability and re-formation, and many other types of systemic disruption. With respect to the climate crisis itself (not the ecological crisis) the degree to which we humans are responsible is something that can’t in my opinion be scientifically established. This simply because so many factors and unknowns are at play although continuing scientific analysis remains important. So, given these observations, it seems legitimate to ask: how accurate are the predictions of climate scientists as to what will happen 5, 10, or 20 years from now?

Downplaying the Ecological Crisis

There’s a pressing need to restore balance and accuracy to climate crisis narratives. The constant emphasis in the media on CO2 and carbon reduction narratives has deflected attention away from the ecological crisis. Here we’re faced with the limitation of semantics. Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”. What special language might we need to describe something as outsized and existentially huge as the destruction of our planetary habitat by humanity’s collective actions? We necessarily struggle to describe it in the state of overwhelm that we call “polycrisis”.

Over-emphasis on CO2 and carbon narratives deflects from several important issues: 1) The still unexplained and poorly understood worldwide extinction of plants and animals, 2) the role of pollution including microplastics and nanoplastics as a major contributing factor in health declines worldwide, 3) the role of major corporations and the military in this extensive pollution, 4) the way that our Western-imported consumerist lifestyle now increasingly adopted in BRICs countries is a major contributor to both the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, and 5) The threat of AI to accelerate unchecked Western-style hyper-capitalism thereby accelerating all of these deeply concerning trends. AI requires the buildout of massive data centers which consume enormous amounts of energy. Microsoft, for example, will have exclusive use of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI farms. Largely because of AI, Big Tech giants are planning to triple the world’s nuclear capacity by 2025. These massive data centers will require the production of AI chips and yet more rare earth minerals both of which will lead to more mining and extraction further aggravating geopolitical tensions.

It’s hardly surprising that the government-capturing corporate sector has every reason to deflect away from giving the public a full and complete picture. So, they continue to harp on carbon reduction as the primary driver of the climate crisis. They do this, of course, while continuing with unsustainable practices that have known negative consequences to the Web of Life, especially large-scale pollution. Ongoing military actions in Ukraine and the Middle East have released tons of pollutants into the atmosphere with more to come — a fact that’s barely mentioned. Planet Earth is now clearly in a state of upheaval and indigenous cultures have warned us about this reckless path for a long time. This ancient wisdom has gone unheeded — in fact Western cultures have worked especially hard to ignore it — and now we’re all paying the price.

I could list many ways that other narratives have been hijacked via greenwashing. For example, there are now 8,000 new companies working on “solving” climate change mostly based on CO2 and carbon footprints. With some exceptions I’m sure, their emphasis of course will be on profitability and many of these efforts will take on a life of their own, meaning that any changes in the science will also threaten profitability. And there are several companies using AI-based genetic engineering to bring back long extinct species like the Wooly Mammoth and the Dire Wolf. Species extinction? No problem, we’ll just create some new and improved animals in the lab. Then there is the fact that the full story behind some “green” initiatives such as electric vehicles is not being told. The batteries needed for EVs, are highly dependent on earth minerals typically shipped thousands of miles. For example, lithium mined in South America is shipped to China where most electric-vehicle batteries are made, a voyage that emits large amounts of CO2 not to mention the environmental impacts of extraction.

Life comes at us so hard and fast these days that there’s a natural tendency to want to latch onto oversimplified narratives that explain complex realities. But whatever contemporary science has to offer, it still remains a work in progress because the empiricism that drives it has to be dynamic by its very nature. This means the possibility exists that scientific consensus can simply be wrong about certain climate issues and predictions. Unfortunately, humanity in the collective simply has no completely accurate idea about what the future holds in terms of the habitability and ecological transformation of the planet. It’s not beyond the realm of the possible that we might be heading for an ice age, a superheated planet, or even some kind of unexpected stabilization. Unfortunately, this also means that there’s no truly rational way to invest billions of dollars preparing for something that we’re still not sure about when there are such pressing needs in our polycrisis world. But this is not time to cede power to new entities that represent an unholy alliance between government and already overweening corporate power. A new locally oriented model for governance is sorely needed that rejects top-down and simplistic narratives and empowers planetary citizens with local grounding to build, rethink, and re-invent how we think our way forward out of polycrisis.

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Tom Valovic is a writer, researcher, and media analyst. He is the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. Tom has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. He has written about the effects of technology on society, the media, and on environmental issues for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, Annals of Earth, the Sierra Club Newsletter, Wisdom magazine, the Whole Earth Review, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner and many others. He can be reached at cloudhands5885@gmail.com.