CBC Energy Coverage is Faulty

Imagine coverage of major tobacco companies that didn’t pay much attention to cancer and trusted the word of premeditated liars…

In a summer of runaway wildfires, CBC News has chosen to focus on LNG, gas, and oil projects with very little to no coverage in those stories of the climate costs or faulty economics of building out new oil and gas infrastructure (even when there are no private sector proponents).

This has been accompanied by a general lack of climate and renewable-positive research voices, to balance oil and gas voices, in coverage from our public broadcaster. This is irresponsible, it’s biased reporting, and it’s delusional in the face of a worsening climate crisis and cheap, affordable, renewable options that are better for our sovereignty. We hear repeated fallacies about renewable power being intermittent, despite the fact that we now have solutions for energy storage from wind and solar we could start rolling out tomorrow. Renewables are actively framed in reporting – not covered, framed – as expensive despite the fact that 81% of renewables offer cheaper energy than fossil fuels.

Enough is enough, we have been very patient with the CBC hoping their editors would inform themselves. We do love our public broadcaster, there are exceptions, but the general standard for energy journalism has sunk so low it now requires we write in.

Please take a moment to email the CBC to let them know you want to see coverage that is less biased against renewable energy and which adequately covers the critiques of oil and gas expansion both economically and in terms of climate change.

• You can email Brodie Fenlon, General Manager and Editor-in-Chief for News at CBC here: brodie.fenlon@cbc.ca
• You can also contact the CBC Ombudsman.

CBC still largely ignores climate organizations in energy coverage. We can easily refute the claims being made in energy coverage, but the CBC generally prefers to contact oil and gas lobbyists – despite those lobbyists’ decades long history of being premeditated liars.

That’s what we’re hearing from local environment groups across the country too: oil and gas advocates get contacted, but even in New Brunswick which had one of the largest anti-fracking movements in the country CBC has little interest in talking to local environmental or citizens groups. At best their voices feature as a short line at the end of an article or a snippet on radio.

That’s not unbiased coverage, that’s framing, and as the world goes renewable it’s framing that’s dangerous to Canada’s well-being. We should not let ourselves be left behind.

We’re well past ‘fool me once’ and we left ‘fool me twice’ in the dust a long time ago. Oil and gas corporations have lied about climate change for decades, they’re still lying and actively funding climate denial right now, and that’s not to mention their close ties to the U.S. Administration and general ties to authoritarianism. Why anyone would think oil and gas interests wouldn’t lie about the economics of oil and gas expansion is hard to explain.

Global demand for oil and gas is set to peak this decade and then decline, and there are enough projects already underway to meet that demand. Plastics alone would never sustain the oil and gas industry in terms of anything close to current demand. Forecasts that predict a shallow decline in oil and gas demand are based on unrealistic scenarios, ignore the most recent research from the authoritative voice on energy, the IEA, and even a shallow decline spells trouble for global markets (even a shallow decline can dump prices).

As a result of the coming decline in demand, global oil and gas corporate exploration budgets are already shrinking and oil and gas investment is shifting to short term gains.

As one energy writer put it recently:

“Every fossil company everywhere wants investors, governments, and citizens to think, even against the thinnest of evidence, it will be the last one standing as its business steadily crashes…. The problem is that citizens, rather than fossil companies and their shareholders, might be stuck picking up the tab.”