20181014_AM
Source:BBC1: The Andrew Marr Show
URL: N/A
Date: 14/10/2018
Event: Coverage of IPCC report in Sunday papers: only "One story, page 6 of the Observer"...
Credit: BBC1: The Andrew Marr Show
People:
- Andrew Marr: Journalist and political commentator
- Siân Berry: Co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales
Andrew Marr: Siân, the reason I wanted a Green Party representative on the sofa this week was that at the beginning of the week, there was a huge amount of stories about climate change, the IPCC saying there's 12 years to save the world - it sounded absolutely catastrophic, lots to talk about. And in today's Sunday papers, there is almost no mention of this at all.
Siân Berry: Yes, so last Monday - this is the first Sunday since we had the IPCC report that gave us 12 years, not more years that we were expecting, to really get to grips with climate change. It was the starkest possible warning they could have given us. We're way behind in the UK - we're doing things like starting fracking, which is going to undermine all our climate targets - and yet in the Sunday papers we are not seeing what you would expect with a big announcement like that.
Andrew Marr: Lots of coverage...
Siân Berry: Lots of coverage, lots of analysis -
Andrew Marr: There is one single piece in the Observer...
Siân Berry: Yeah, you'd expect the review sections, the comment pieces to be looking at the failures of government over the years. We've got what's called GB Green Week coming up this week, supposedly celebrating 10 years of the Climate Change Act, that's very embarrassing for the government - no comment on that at all. What I have found -
Andrew Marr: - is a single story.
Siân Berry: One story, page 6 of the Observer, and it's a really big one because it's got James Hansen, the leading climate scientist, writing directly to Claire Perry the Energy Minister about fracking and about how absurd it is to be starting fracking when we absolutely need to be switching to renewables. He says, you know, we need to be phasing out the fossil fuels as quickly as possible, starting with the unconventional, very dirty things like tar sands and fracking. He likens government policy to Trump, and I think that is really embarrassing for the government.
Andrew Marr: So, from your perspective, how difficult is it? Because we have this agenda. If climate change is what we think it is - if it's real, if the scientists are right, it is by far the biggest problem facing mankind at the moment. And yet we spend - we could have diverged from it within a matter of minutes of this kind of report, we're back to Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit...
Siân Berry: If importance and long-term impact determined column inches, the papers would be climate change first and Brexit second. And those two things are both really important for the future of our country but climate change is not deserving of just this amount of coverage on a Sunday, after we've heard that from the IPCC.