Backward Priorities
The recent passing of Queen Elizabeth has completely taken over the UK media, sparking conversation about the royal family and its legacy. The media is keen to pad out their whitewashed, historically illiterate narrative of the queen’s life by reminding us of her corgis and how she was a great mother, etc.
Yet they conveniently ignore a legacy of imperialism, stolen wealth (from both the colonies and UK taxpayers), intervening in the UK legal system, paying to settle Prince Andrew’s legal case out of court, and the enormous amount of money spent on them.
Millions of people elsewhere are suffering as flooding is destroying Pakistan; the worst drought in four decades leaves 20 million people at risk across the horn of Africa; and famine rages across Afghanistan, aided by the disastrous US and EU sanctions that target the poorest and most vulnerable in the nation. A recent UN report has highlighted a rise in forced labour globally since 2017. 26.7 million people globally are victims of slavery. And another recent report, by Oxfam International, has revealed that extreme hunger has "more than doubled" in ten countries noted as climate change hotspots over the last six years. It is more than clear that we are facing an unprecedented set of crises that are overlapping and reinforcing others. It is even clearer that climate change is a major component.
Photograph of flooding in Pakistan. source
This is barely scratching the surface of ongoing global events yet the entire UK media has decided to focus on the death of a 96-year-old woman. I could go over, in detail, the worst of the queen’s legacy and what her family represents, but I'd rather focus on the reasoning behind the media failing to address important issues.
George Monbiot, who has written extensively about the atrocities of colonial Britain gives an excellent summary of some here.
Even here in the UK, a cost of living crisis leaves millions struggling to make ends meet and face the choice between heat for their homes or food this winter. Now we will spend billions on a lavish funeral, coronation of a new king, a bank holiday, changing the appearance of our money, and cancelling events. A surge in tourism will recover some of the money, although, I doubt it will be enough to justify such obscene spending at such an inappropriate time.
The queen is dead, which is not going to change - we should now focus on real issues that are in no short supply right now as we've seen. And, if the royal family can find millions to back a sexual predator, they can be left to finance their funerals.
"Blah Blah Blah" and Flooding in Pakistan
The COP26 meeting last year gave developing countries the opportunity to argue for the highest polluters to help as the impacts of climate change tear through their nations and leave millions to suffer from increasing droughts, extreme weather, and scarcity - in terms of their frequency, intensity, and duration.
Despite 25 failed COP meetings that preceded COP26 with little to no action, the failure of the Millennium Development Goals (especially on its environmental targets), and the Achai biodiversity goals, the media presented COP26 as a major shift towards real action.
Previously, wealthy nations pledged $100 billion per year to developing countries, which attracted attention leading up to the event. Why? Because it was a broken promise. Another example of lip service over real action. I haven’t even mentioned yet that huge amounts pledged took the form of loans rather than aid for the countries most affected by (and least responsible for) climate change. According to Oxfam, climate financing amounted to around $20 billion annually in real terms. A far greater amount of money is spent on financing climate change mitigation, however, the issue of aiding developing nations to adapt to disasters remains neglected.
Graphic outlining the rank in fatalities from extreme weather events vs. emissions in 2019. There is a clear pattern showing those at greater risk emit less. Source
Climate change is not a future problem - it is already a problem faced head-on by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. 1.2 degrees of warming since the onset of the industrial revolution has already occurred. Yet the pleas of nations have continuously fallen on deaf ears. COP26 was no different. The event was flooded with hundreds of oil lobbyists, military emissions were memory-holed from any public scrutiny, and documents were delayed from release as the language was altered to be more vague and nebulous. Ultimately, this just gives politicians more room for plausible deniability when politicians miss their goals.
Less than a year later, Pakistan has been abandoned as flooding, fuelled by an extreme monsoon and rapid glacier melt from the mountains, tears through the nation. Where poverty is rampant throughout Pakistan, this flooding has a profound impact. Incidentally, this poverty is largely a result of colonisation by the British Empire.
It should be common sense that the nations who have benefited most from industrialization, and are best equipped to adapt to a changing climate (and so will be the last majorly impacted) provide sustainable aid to nations that played a negligible role in the crisis. But clearly, the pledges to help have just been, as the Fridays for Futures movement calls it, “blah blah blah” from the politicians of wealthy nations.
Slavery, colonization, unequal exchange, debt, and sanctions have all been weapons used to subjugate and hold back the developing world. And the developing world couldn’t even throw them crumbs of $100 billion a year, a fraction of a percent of the G7 nations’ GDP., making our collective failure even more criminal.
So far the flooding has displaced 50 million people and caused over 1000 deaths, with far more expected as the destruction of farmland leaves the nation exposed to famine. Malaria outbreaks are on the horizon and economic devastation will compound every vulnerability experienced by the people.
Is Climate Change to Blame?
Anthropogenic climate change can't be blamed for any single extreme weather event. However, we can confidently say that warming increases the likelihood of events such as the Pakistan floods. Much like how we know smoking increases cancer risk, we can’t definitively say that any lung cancer death is due to smoking. Many people smoke their entire lives without getting cancer, while some who are rarely exposed to cigarette smoke are unfortunate enough to get the disease.
The same logic applies to climate change, as it is linked to extreme weather by risk and probability. Warming has increased the likelihood of flooding by increasing the amount of glacial meltwater flowing through the rivers and intensifying monsoon rains. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s geography and natural factors leave the nation at high risk but it is also their economy that compounds the issues so much. Other high-risk parts of the world, such as Australia, have more funds available to adapt while Pakistan relies on aid, which is sporadic and unreliable.
Scientists carry out attribution studies to quantify the relationship between climate change and extreme weather. They can determine the likelihood of extreme weather events today compared with the 1.2 degrees cooler planet during pre-industrial times (an excellent explainer of attribution science can be found here). A recent, early attribution study in affected parts of Pakistan has found that the maximum rainfall over a five-day period was “about 75% more intense than it would have been had the world not warmed by 1.2 degrees”.
What we can say regarding the current flooding is that climate change has made it more likely and that delayed action has caused us to face an uphill battle to curb emissions. This battle avoids helping nations adapt and reduce vulnerability, but rather focuses on reducing emissions from escalating the crisis even more. The result is a catastrophe for those in the firing line of climate disasters which will become more regular.
The Media Failure: Worthy and Unworthy Victims
This year, there has been a great example of success in the media engaging people with a foreign war. The Russian attack on Ukraine has been a constant news story, with governments unifying their aid efforts to provide billions in weapons and support Ukrainians defending their land.
We can expect a positive response in the case of the Ukraine invasion since the enemy also happens to be a geopolitical enemy of the US. The media outcry and political/economic support are entirely justified in the case of Ukraine, but where has it been for the victims of climate change-driven floods, or the victims of the multitude of other global problems? Non-profits have been left to cobble together funds and deal with flooding and famines killing far more people than Russia ever could in Ukraine. And the media has barely aided their efforts to raise awareness.
It should be the main focus of the media to inform its audience and hold those in power responsible for their actions. Here, the lack of coverage of the floods has been a stark reminder of how they have become a mouthpiece for those in power to selectively downplay inconvenient narratives and failures to act on their promises. The Pakistan flooding should be receiving far more attention now than it is to highlight the impacts of climate change and to push for the issue to be addressed in a meaningful way beyond the usual underwhelming or non-existent support. With eyes on the news reaching astronomical numbers in the UK, it would be an excellent opportunity for the news media to give some attention to global affairs. Instead, they choose to focus on the death of a 96-year-old and squander any chance to do their job.
In response, we need to support outlets that are honest about our past and dedicated to informing us on global affairs while highlighting the disproportionate contributions of climate change. An enormous overhaul in how media works will be needed for the climate change movement as it continues to be an abject failure in every way imaginable. A good starting point is to support smaller, independent outlets free from corporate investments, advertisers, and political conflicts of interest.
There is nothing new in pointing out this failure of the media, but it is becoming more important now to give these issues a long overdue emphasis. It is worth noting that The Guardian has been excellent in reporting the crisis and is consistently using its large platform to document the floods and where note where other outlets have failed. As I write this, The Guardian has two front-page stories on its website dedicated to the crisis, while The Daily Mail, BBC News, The Independent, and The Sun do not have a single one between them. While there has been some reporting by these organisations, it has been completely buried.
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