Well, the cracks are starting to show. Rupert Murdoch is now all over the global news because of his shuttering of News of the World due to a phone hacking scandal that is mushrooming into a viral plague within his media empire, which includes the formerly venerable Wall Street Journal. This while heat wave after wave, drought and flood are climatological plagues in the midwestern and eastern United States. Positively biblical.
Where this truly comes to rest is highlighted in an article from Treehugger, which shows Murdoch giving his initial speech to the WSJ staff after acquiring this conservative news organization. While positioning himself as a green campaigner, he has done far more to place articles discrediting climate change in his media empire than to provide any science on global warming or reporting on the impact of the global climate summits. His global holdings are firmly positioned to serve as the corporate megaphone to protect polluting and extractive industries from any incentive to reduce their destructive impact on the planet. Everyone else can just pay for that and suffer the consequences.
With his control over conservative media now becoming discredited, proactive environmental organizations have begun to get the word out in a refreshingly informative way. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a science-based nonprofit, has partnered with Earthwatch Institute to put up an interactive Hot Map to get people involved with the realities of global warming and the implementation of solutions to it. They note that in particular, The National Academy of Sciences has released a series of reports (2010) emphasizing the urgency of climate change and why the U.S. should act now to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. "The longer the nation waits to begin reducing emissions, the harder and more expensive it will likely be to reach any given emissions target." The deadline for these emission and carbon reduction goals is to meet the 2030 Challenge to go to zero.
Also ramping up their efforts to meet these critical action deadlines is a new public engagement effort from Al Gore, RePower America. Acting through the Climate Protection Action Fund, it is launching a new public action project called Climate Reality on Sept. 14th. This is another effort to start grassroots action in a direct, urgent change movement in the face of corporate profit protection.
This climate awareness is seeping into communities and companies all across our now global network, and the 2030 Challenge to reduce the impact of building industry practices has become its practical measure.
Update 6/12/18: The Wall Street Journal keeps peddling Big Oil propaganda
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