Weapons of Mass Influence
Weapons of Mass Influence
Like last week, I have spent most of my time this week interviewing prospective students from Hong Kong who wish to enter United World Colleges in September this year. And like last week, I loved every minute of the interviewing, but I was exhausted at the end of each day. However, I did take an hour last Sunday afternoon to go for a much-needed 12 kilometre bicycle ride, and when I returned, I took some time just to sit and relax and take in my beautiful surroundings here in the New Territories of Hong Kong. The result is this week’s image, taken just outside my front door.
It is always fascinating to listen to the opinions of articulate, thinking, reflective young people, as I have had the privilege to do again this week. On this year’s student application form, one of the questions that applicants were asked to answer was ‘which global issue worries you the most, and why?’. I would estimate that almost 90% of students this year chose global warming as the issue to discuss; last year the proportion of students identifying global warming as their issue would have been only about 10%. Clearly, something significant has happened in Hong Kong this year to shift young people’s thinking.
At first, I suspected Al Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, might be the awareness raiser. However, very few of the students I spoke with had actually seen that film - and many were embarrassed that they had missed it, even though it has been available as a DVD in Hong Kong now for about four months (and a bit longer than that, and at a cheaper though less legal price, in Shenzhen). Most students claimed that they had become aware of global warming through the newspapers they read.
At one level, that is great - young people are reading newspapers! Some concerned students were even aware of the recent articles about Al Gore’s home consuming 20 times the average US domestic electricity, and felt that this undermined the integrity of his otherwise excellent arguments. At another deeper level, though, it highlights the media’s capacity to influence public opinion. As a few students pointed out, when we read the news we are really reading what Rupert Murdoch and a small handful of other extremely wealthy businessmen want us to know. And the newspapers in Nazi Germany were instrumental in persuading the German public what wonderful policies Adolf Hitler was implementing! For Hong Kong’s newspapers to shift the opinion of youth so radically in one year is both exciting and frightening - it shows that newspapers are surely what Timothy Garton Ash described as “weapons of mass influence” in his article in The Guardian in November last year.
As Ash commented, a cluster bomb can kill or maim thousands of people but this weapon (the media) can bring millions to allow their rulers to start new wars. Newspapers, radio, television, blogs, webcasts and text messages can shift public opinion more powerfully and more quickly than ever before. Let’s face it, the 9/11 attacks only became powerful at a global scale because the media allowed half of humanity to watch it happen on television, and then re-watch it over and over through the internet. Most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because the media publicised the US government’s rhetoric, and many others still believe that Iraq was in some way connected with 9/11 because of the way they interpreted the information presented. Perhaps the tools of the media are more than ‘weapons of mass influence’ - could they be ‘weapons of mass persuasion’, or even as one movie alleged, ‘weapons of mass deception’? Hopefully, on the issue of climate change at least, the answer is a resounding “No!”.
Several of the students I interviewed this week want to become journalists in order to bring the truth to the public - I wonder how much freedom they would really have to do that when and if they ever realise their dream!
And yet I am encouraged that the media seems to have played such a positive role in informing - or maybe less positively - alarming - young people about the potential hazard of global warming. When I studied Geography at university in the early 1970s, including courses focussing on resource use and climatic change, the great fear was not global warming but an imminent new ice age. In fact, as I recall, the newspapers of the day carried articles about the perils of a new ice age almost every week, illustrated by images of snow-covered wastelands in Antarctica or Iceland, or perhaps Alaska. The fear was that high-flying airliners (especially supersonic ones) would deposit ozone in the stratosphere, which would reflect incoming solar radiation, leading to a cooling in the earth’s atmosphere. Ironically, the same gases and the same (or similar) aircraft that are now being blamed for global warming were seen then as potential triggers of an ice age. To me, this really highlights the responsibility we all have to understand the information we are fed and not simply accept the authority of so-called experts of whatever persuasion.
For example, even though I am deeply concerned about global warming and its impact, I worry when I read media articles (as I have several times recently) urging people to “offset” their flights , their car mileage and even their home air conditioning by sending money to “buy” an equivalent carbon saving. The money goes to any one of a myriad of organisations that promise to neutralise an individual’s carbon emissions, some by planting trees which they claim will absorb an equivalent amount of CO2, others by providing cleaner energy to poor countries.
I admire the concept and the idealism, but I worry about the naïveté. How does a person know exactly where the money is going? Does the tree or the wind turbine actually exist? What regulations govern the operation of such funds? Is this the new equivalent of Nigerian e-mail scams that we all endured half a decade ago?
Late last year, one of my colleagues mentioned one such website to me - www.atmosfair.de/index.php?id=9&L=3 . If you visit the website, it will calculate the amount of CO2 you will be responsible for through flying, and it will calculate the cost. You can then make a donation for a variety of projects that work towards reducing CO2 emissions. Finding out how much CO2 a trip home to Australia would generate was a real eye-opener!
However, as someone who can't avoid doing quite a bit of flying for my work, but who also has a deep concern for the environment, I did some more research. As I did so, I found I had to question the accuracy of the figures. I used the example of a one-way flight to Australia, and the website claimed that the weight of CO2 generated would be 856,000 kg (Boeing 747, economy class, carrying 400 passengers). However, the empty weight of a Boeing 747 is about 162,000 kg, and the maximum take-off weight of the plane, fully loaded with all passengers, fuel, cargo etc is about 350,000 kg. I struggled to see how 856,000 kg of gas (even a "heavy" gas like CO2) could be generated by a metal aircraft that weighed much less than half of the weight of the gas apparently produced, even when fully loaded.
A chemist may attempt to provide an explanation. For example, another website (www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/co2.shtml) tries to do so - presumably it is a reliable site, but after what I said earlier about accepting information from “authorities”, how can I be certain??? Anyway, this website explained it like this:
It seems impossible that a gallon of gasoline, which weighs about 6.3 pounds, could produce 20 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) when burned. However, most of the weight of the CO2 doesn't come from the gasoline itself, but the oxygen in the air. When gasoline burns, the carbon and hydrogen separate. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to form water (H2O), and carbon combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2). A carbon atom has a weight of 12, and each oxygen atom has a weight of 16, giving each single molecule of CO2 an atomic weight of 44 (12 from carbon and 32 from oxygen). Therefore, to calculate the amount of CO2 produced from a gallon of gasoline, the weight of the carbon in the gasoline is multiplied by 44/12 or 3.7. Since gasoline is about 87% carbon and 13% hydrogen by weight, the carbon in a gallon of gasoline weighs 5.5 pounds (6.3 lbs. x .87). We can then multiply the weight of the carbon (5.5 pounds) by 3.7, which equals 20 pounds of CO2!
A fully laden Boeing 747 from Hong Kong to Australia will carry about 91,000 kg of fuel. Even if I accept the chemistry from the website above, I still don’t see how this fuel can produce 856,000 kg of carbon dioxide! Even accepting the logic of the website, there should be about 289,000 kg of CO2 produced at the most, not 856,000 kg. Hopefully the folk who developed the atmosfair website are sincere people who are concerned about global warming. It is possible that their chemistry is better than mine, but I have struggled and struggled to accept their figures - and quite simply, I can’t!
Offsetting carbon emissions is a useful way to get people to think about their carbon footprint. But offsetting is not really the answer to climate change (especially if there is spurious information out there alarming sincere people for whatever motive). Addressing climate change can only come when we find permanent ways to use less energy that do not condemn less economically developed countries to perpetual poverty.
Maybe this could be the media’s ‘cause’ during the coming year - I am certainly looking forward to discovering next year’s “global concern” from the student applicants in 2008. And I wonder what role the media will have played in the development of whatever this global concern is found to be.
Meanwhile, carbon offsetting notwithstanding, I have taken another flight since I wrote this blog. When you read this, I will be in Phnom Penh in Cambodia with a group of 10 students doing service work in two orphanages in association with the Happy Tree Foundation and GCAT. I am really looking forward to this experience, and I hope to report on this project in Phnom Penh in next week’s blog.
Sunday, 11 March 2007