Australian sheep cause climate change

 A particularly useful and detailed analysis of a recent story in this week's edition of Briefings for Britain:

An environmental story with little substance was picked up by Sky News, repeated by The Guardian, City AM, the BBC, The Times, the Labour Party website and given substantial airtime on Newsnight, why? Because it gave Pro EU supporters an environmental reason to scupper the UK Australia trade deal.

 

For the EU and its supporters, climate change is the new Trade Barrier du jour...[that is, they erect barriers ostensibly on climate grounds, while hypocritically dealing with major polluters and polluting themselves]...If either the UK or the EU were actually interested in reducing carbon emissions in trade deals, they would buy the meat from Brazil, the US or Canada, not the animal feed.

Of particular interest for this blog , was the way Newsnight managed the debate. First former Labour leader Miliband appeared in the studio passionately claiming: 

‘You have got to put pressure on the big emitters, so you don’t do dodgy deals with Australia.’ ... ‘you don’t do a trade deal with Australia and say you can drop your temperature commitments from your trade deal.

The B for B article notes that 'in 2018 the world’s big emitters were all in the Northern Hemisphere... the EU...[was]... the world’s 3^rd biggest CO2 emitter' [The USA and China are the top 2].

Of course there has to be 'balance' so  the BBC also included an online contribution from a Conservative MP, but 

'the Newsnight anchor, Emily Maitlis, lined up Dunne’s contribution with the highly emotive: "We’ve bowed to Australia on what they wanted on climate change, … we have changed what we said over the Paris Climate temperature goals because we didn’t want to scare off Australians over a trade deal"....

City AM joined in with the headline: Scott Morrison confirms climate targets dropped from UK-Australia trade deal, but the first line of the article actually said ‘Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has today confirmed the UK-Australia trade deal will not include binding commitments to climate change targets from the Paris Agreement because it “wasn’t a climate agreement, it was a trade agreement”....Why is the media claiming that a specific temperature [target] has been ‘dropped’ from the FTA? 

I conclude this manufactured activist outrage against Australia is for protectionist reasons rather than for environmental ones. This is simply another attempt by the #FBPE supporters to scupper the UK Australia trade agreement as it is the UK’s first completely new trade agreement outside the EU.

 Showing how moral panics build:

Once published the story was picked up by other ‘news’ organisations and repeated without any of them reading the published FTA Agreement in Principle – easily found on the internet. Equally at fault were the ambitious politicians and activists trying to score points against the Government (and given large amounts of airtime by the BBC) but not bothering to research the world’s largest CO2 emitters nor how that list overlaps with the UK’s present trading partners. At least the EU re-joiners, have their motivation spelt out on their hashtags, unlike the others who jumped on this bandwagon. But most worrying was the small amount of press given to Liz Truss’ denial [she had said ‘the stuff you are repeating is simply fake news’]. The first page of a google search only produced one article, all the rest were articles pushing the fake story.

NB #FBPE is an old support group Follow Back Pro EU. It appears to have been divisive. Surely it can't still be active? I wonder myself if this is not just an attempt to shift pnb energy into the old rival cause to Remain, especially as it is contemporary? It's just cultural politics  again.