Consciousness of Sheep
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Reporting on BP shareholders’ decision to ditch renewable energy, BBC business editor Simon Jack – the man who a few years ago jetted off to the Mediterranean to report that it is warm there in the summer – is now telling us that:
“There is simply less money in renewables than in oil and gas and some BP shareholders have become angry and impatient as they watch Shell produce double the returns they have seen while Exxon investors have received four times as much.”
What is interesting here is less the subject of the report and more the tone in which Jack has reported it. Until now, the BBC has been a cheerleader for climate alarmism – famously painting its weather maps blood red and reporting any weather event at the upper end of normal as a product of global warming.
A year ago, I imagine the BBC would have started this story with an attack on BP by climate scientists and activist groups. But in Jack’s article these concerns are given little voice at the bottom of the article:
“Many groups say that long term BP and others are pursuing a no-win strategy.”
Might this be an early example of what has been more broadly labelled “putting the woke away” in relation to climate coverage? Certainly, the massive increase in energy prices (which are rising again by 6.4% in April) have undermined the promises made around net zero. And there is, perhaps, some recognition that the UK (along with Germany) is making itself a laughing stock – if we turned the lights and the central heating off entirely, we wouldn’t even lower global carbon emissions because the loss of our one percent would be eaten by China and India’s growth in coal-powered electricity generation anyway.
With the economics and the politics of energy policy going in the opposite direction, a BBC which lost more than half-a-million licence fee payers last year – and which just lost its USAID funding – may have decided to take a less alarmist tone on climate issues… we can but wait and see.
As you made it to the end…
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