Guardian: “Choose your news” Media is Contributing to Climate Inaction

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… If there’s no common framework, there can be no consensus commitments. …”

Parts of Australia are suffering another devastating drought, but you wouldn’t know it in the cities

Van Badham
Wed 11 Jun 2025 17.09 AEST

It’s not so much that rural and metro communities hold different opinions about climate change but rather they are holding completely different conversations

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There’s been a record-breaking drought that’s been afflicting the states of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and parts of New South Wales for over a year, but depending where you live – and how you get your news – you may not know much about it.

This represents a problem Australia desperately needs to confront.

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Australian farmers have adapted their agricultural methods and listened to science to prepare for unpredictable conditions, but no one was prepared for this. Now, 18 months after farmers began trucking water and hand-feeding their animals, stockpiled feed is running out. Shipping in more pressures the farmer to front the capital for its purchase – a burden that’s pushed many to sell off animals and sell off land. The bush telegraph in rural communities like mine has been relaying stories of abattoirs so full with the unsustainable stock that some farmers are left with animals that will simply – pointlessly – have to die.

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When it comes to environmental policy, gaining “social licence” is an omnidirectional struggle – not because rural communities are climate deniers or that climate activists are self-appointed moralisers or even that governments steamroll communities into policy decisions. An overwhelming majority of Australians believe in climate change, but evidence suggests communities are no longer holding different opinions so much as they are holding completely different conversations, and I suspect the pick-and-mix, choose-your-news nature of modern media may be contributing to a terrifying problem at the worst possible time.

If there’s no common framework, there can be no consensus commitments.

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Where and how that honest community conversation takes place is now the challenge. It demands a cultural humility the internet is unlikely to encourage. Overcoming the silos between rural experience, urban attention and the policy bunkers of government is hard, but it has to happen.

We once valued the ABC as the instrument for this kind of national discussion, but as the broadcaster sheds shared forums like The Drum and Q+A, we’re staring down the reality of environmental disaster understood as niche programming.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/11/parts-of-australia-are-suffering-another-devastating-drought-but-you-wouldnt-know-it-in-the-cities

Clearly the real problem is a lack of water where it is needed, not climate change.

Think about what is happening on the ground – farmers in Victoria, South Australia and parts of New South Wales are being forced to truck water in and hand feed what is left of their cattle herds.

But it isn’t dry all over Australia – in Queensland, a thousand miles North of Victoria, much of the state was inundated by dozens of inches of water which fell over four weeks from the end of January to the end of February this year. In my home in South East Queensland, it was raining on and off since the floods right up to a few weeks ago.

It wasn’t just this year – New South Wales also endured major floods in 2023 (see the picture at the top of the page).

Why do farmers need trucks to move that water from reservoirs in the North to their parched southern pastures?

Because government after government squandered billions of dollars of tax money on renewables, and never invested sufficient resources in large capacity long distance water pipelines. Government water budgets are in the 10s and hundreds of millions of dollars, not the 10s of billions of dollars which could have made a real difference. There are not enough large pipelines, in many cases no large water pipelines, which can transport the water from where it falls to where it is needed. And there are not enough dams and reservoirs to capture the water which falls, even if there was sufficient pipeline capacity.

For a fraction of the money which has been wasted on wind turbines and solar projects, we could have had a large capacity pipeline running from Queensland to Victoria. Science Direct estimates the Gulf of America oil and gas pipeline network cost around $3 million per mile to construct. A 1200 mile water pipeline of that capacity, using Science Direct figures for oil and gas pipelines, would have cost US $3.6 billion, which is a lot of money until you compare it to the 10s of billions of dollars which have been wasted on renewables and renewable electricity infrastructure.

Major investment in pipeline infrastructure would have saved a lot of water truck miles.

But you would never learn from the Guardian we need dams, reservoirs and long distance pipelines more than we need wind turbines. Aussie governments, urged on by legacy media, have squandered 10s of billions of dollars on failed renewable schemes, yet despite Australia’s growing population flood mitigation and water security continues to be woefully underfunded.

It is not just the lack of water infrastructure. Australian roads are falling to pieces through neglect. If you ever visit Australia and plan to drive more than 20 miles from the coast, you should seriously consider hiring an off-road vehicle, because there are a lot of places just off the main motorways which are a disaster for normal road vehicles. The stretch of road in the video below is the Wide Bay Highway, an important connecting road between Australia’s main coastal highway and our main secondary road travelling north from Brisbane.

Perhaps it is just as well the town square nowadays has a plurality of voices, when legacy media outlets like The Guardian are getting it so wrong. True freedom, truly open forums where people can speak freely, might lead to us making some progress on solving real issues, instead of returning to the days when big media moguls controlled the public conversation, the days when an artificial “common framework” consensus based on silencing independent voices could rule unchecked, driving the squandering of billions of taxpayer dollars on public foolishness.

As for the demand for broader, more inclusive conversations, I find this call less than credible given how vigorously Guardian moderators seem to delete any climate skeptic comments posted to their articles. Perhaps Guardian contributor Van Badham means she wants more inclusive conversations with people who agree with her, while continuing to censor anyone she thinks doesn’t conform to her vision of a “common framework”.