The Scotsman should be ashamed of itself for its climate conspiracy theories
Today the Scotsman has publish an article which not only goes to great lengths to avoid engaging with the global scientific consensus on life on earth but actively argues against it using tangential and spurious non-reasoning. This is irresponsible behaviour on the part of any newspaper which seeks to present itself as 'journalism of record' and fails the whole nation.
The article uses a number of tangential arguments to argue that net zero is not only a policy pursued on a whim by a group of people with ulterior motives (those motives are not set out), it actively argues that net zero policies are entirely unneccessary.
What this article fails to do, from beginning to end, is to engage with climate science in any way whatsoever. The entire argument against the massive, overwhelming global scientific consensus contained in the article is the sentence “Is carbon dioxide really the root of all evil?”. That is not a valid comment for publication in a newspaper that aspires to seriousness.
It is also filled with both misinformation and the deliberate omission of crucial information. It claims, without offering any evidence, that the recent electricity blackout in Spain and Portugal is the result of 'too many renewables'. The most that any credible voice has said so far is that the prevalence of solar energy on the grid may have been a contributing factor (among others like three out of seven nuclear power stations being offline at the time).
In fact it is only this week that a major taskforce has been set up to try and establish what happened, first by gathering the necessary data. If there was a 'cascade effect' in the grid it by definition means multiple failures across the system.
But the bigger issue with this article is the omissions. This article is largely predicated on a report by the Tony Blair Institute which was net-zero sceptical. That report has been widely debunked, but none of that is referenced in the article. It is also widely known and reported that both Tony Blair and his Institute are heavily funded by oil production interests. It is hardly a neutral publication.
And still all of that misses the main point. This article predicates much of its diatribe on the awfulness of people in Spain being without power for a few hours, which it intentionally misattributes to net zero. What it fails to do entirely is to address what happens if the overwhelming scientific is correct.
To be clear, the disruption caused by an electricity grid going down for a few hours is paltry in comparison to the impacts predicted for global warming. In fact, not just predicted, visibly happening now. To put these things in perspective; the cost of the blackout in Spain and Portugal to its economy (including all effects) is estimated to be in the order of £2 billion to £4 billion.
The cost of the damage inflicted by climate change in 2024 is at least £175 billion. This is going to get worse and worse. The impact on life is of course impossible to put a value on, but scale is important. There appear to have been three deaths in Spain and Portugal linked to the power outage. Last year there were 11,500 deaths directly related to extreme weather events which have been attributed to climate change.
There is a very extensive debate to be had about how to approach the mitigation and prevention of climate change. For example, many in neoliberal economics believe Carbon Capture and Storage is a key technology (despite the empirical evidence to the contrary) and Common Weal is very sceptical.
The pace at which we need to reduce emissions in what sectors and how to do that in each is all up for debate. Climate science is not uniform and certain public policy responses to climate science is not and cannot be monolithic.
It is important that the media acts as a host to constructive debate. But if you are to present yourself as respectable media and not a conspiracy-soaked YouTube channel, you must be expected to accept basic factual and scientific reality. This article implies that 'new science' is coming along to disprove all the actual existing science. It isn't.
There would be outrage if a once-great title like the Scotsman was printing knowingly false anti-vaccine propaganda during a pandemic; there should be outrage over such a publication printing anti-scientific climate change denial in the middle of a climate crisis.