Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Murdoch to Take News Corp Carbon Neutral

The world's top media company, News Corporation, will slash its global carbon footprint to zero under a bold plan revealed by its chairman, Rupert Murdoch.

Saying the global media empire produced 641,150 tonnes of greenhouse gas last year, the News chairman and CEO last night pledged to go green.

Under the plan, all News Corp businesses, including News Limited, publisher of the Herald Sun, will be carbon neutral by 2010.

Mr Murdoch said this goal would be met by slashing energy use, switching to renewable power sources and, as a last resort, offsetting unavoidable emissions.
That plan sounds pretty ambitious. But it goes even farther as he wants to use News Corps influence to push this agenda.
"We can set an example and we can reach our audiences," he said.

"Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours -- that's the carbon footprint we want to conquer."

Mr Murdoch said News Corp's newspapers, television stations, magazines, books, internet media and films could inspire readers and viewers across the world to change their ways.
Holy crap, does this mean the boss is going to force Fox News to say that global warming is caused by humans and we need to do something about it? Can't wait to see if that is true.

Now that conservatives like Murdoch, ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and political pollster Frank Luntz believe something needs to be done about global warming, I think the writing is on the wall that the Republicans are about to come to this position and the political debate on global warming will truly be over.

via The Herald Sun

2 comments:

Audacious Epigone said...

Until we enter another inevitable cooling period, which for all of human history has posed an infinitely more terrifying existential threat to humanity than warming ever possibly could be.

And the emissions increases in China and India will outweigh Western reductions by a magnitude of at least six.

Fat Knowledge said...

AE,

I agree with you that cooling is much worse that heating, but with elevated greenhouse gases I am not sure it is inevitable.

I also agree with you that China and India's emissions will dwarf the reductions in the West in the short term. But, there is no way we will get them to look at slowing down the growth unless we take it seriously in the US. And hopefully over the longer term, we will be able to create alternative energy technologies that are cheap enough that China and India can afford them.

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.