Another COP has concluded in Brazil, with petrostates and their corporate allies ripping up the global road map leading us away from fossil fuels, encouraged by the absence of the USA and with China failing to take the opportunity to step into the vacuum. President Lula’s hope that the nearby presence of the lungs of the world (otherwise known as the Amazon) might focus the minds of attendees proved forlorn. The fire which broke out in the final days of negotiations said it all.
Australia was reportedly not even present at some of the key meetings, focused instead on side meetings lobbying for the next COP, which will now be held in Türkiye, the location of this country’s favourite military failure, Gallipoli.
Chris Bowen will be COP’s President of Negotiations, which Anthony Albanese says will bring ‘attention to the existential threat climate change poses’ to the Pacific region, while his government pushes on with fossil fuel developments large and small, in a state of blissful hypocrisy.
Disinformation
The whole thing was a victory for disinformation, which was also the subject of our own parliament’s recent Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy, championed by outgoing Tasmanian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, in what is likely to be his last hurrah before he retires from politics in disgust.
Senator Whish-Wilson battled to get News Corp Australia’s representatives and others to show some contrition and tell the truth about their role in telling Australians the sky is pink, while two senators with strong links to the coal industry, One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts and the Nationals’ Matt Canavan, did their best to sabotage the whole enquiry from within.
The Deputy Chair of the Committee, ALP Senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah, sought intermittently to keep proceedings on track.
News Corp executive Michael Miller said the whole thing was social media’s fault, describing these platforms as ‘the true monsters at our gates’. He refused to accept the premise, from both external critics and insiders, that his own organisation championed climate disinformation across its ‘news’ outlets.
Senator Whish-Wilson pressed on: ‘Why do you repeatedly platform climate sceptics across your newspapers?’
Mr Miller responded: ‘I hope you’re not suggesting we should censor them’.
News Corp’s Campbell Reid then denied that they were operating a coordinated denial machine, despite all evidence to the contrary. Digging deeper, the News Corp men refused to admit that their own masthead The Australian had an agenda-setting power, suggesting that each News Corp publication set its own editorial course.
A discussion followed about the misinformation propagated by Andrew Bolt on Sky News and elsewhere that wind turbines kill whales, thoroughly debunked, but repeated as recently as this week by the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce.
Senator Canavan then waded in and said ‘Greens don’t care about whales any more’.
Senator Whish-Wilson pressed him for evidence of his assertion that wind turbines had caused an increase on whale beachings on the eastern coast of the USA, before Canavan belatedly admitted that he ‘didn’t know’ about the issue.
What is the media’s responsibility?
Matt Canavan attacked the News Corp reps for running occasional positive stories about net zero and defended the indefensible coal seam gas industry in Queensland, before Senator Ananda-Rajah attempted to pin Murdoch’s executives down on their long history of climate misinformation, saying ‘I would put it to you that you are abrogating your responsibility as a major media organisation to actually do your job.
‘It is not good enough to say, others will debunk our misinformation and our claims and our sloppy work because that’s how democracy works… You don’t get a “get out of jail” on this. I put it to you that you need to do better. What kind of processes have you put in place to ensure that this kind of thing is minimised going into the future?’
The News Corp representatives said they didn’t agree with her conclusions, and would take her question on notice.
Read it and weep
Having been deluged by submissions, the Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy has just been granted an extension, and will now present its final report on Tuesday, 24 March 2026.
The complete transcript of the hearings is already available here for anyone who wants to see the degree to which Australia has been taken over by fossil fuel interests and their useful idiots in the parliament and media.
Speaking of useful idiots, Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt is ramping up the pressure on non-Labor members of parliament to support his regressive changes to environment laws this week, while Lismore’s own Kevin Hogan, who is apparently the new ‘retail politics’ man in the Nationals, made a series of appearances on social and conventional media advancing the myth that the hopelessly compromised net zero idea will somehow cost Australians more than doing nothing about the climate crisis.
Goddess help us.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
You can find more of his writing at Patreon and Gumroad.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
