Social media is brilliant for keeping in touch with family and friends … but it’s also a fertile medium for the spread of disinformation. Studies have shown that false information spreads faster and further than accurate information, and is also more likely to attract attention.
With an average profit of £1.5m every minute for the last 50yrs, the fossil fuel industry has been well able to spread its climate change disinformation campaign and buy all the influence needed to successfully delay political interference that might limit its activities. Governments and regulators around the world have effectively been captured, which explains the International Monetary Fund’s calculation that the industry benefits from subsidies of around £9m per minute*. In part this is through not having to pay for the deaths and damage caused by air pollution, heatwaves and other impacts of global warming.

Four days of protests
Another, more subtle, form of media manipulation is to starve issues of the ‘oxygen of publicity’, as Margaret Thatcher described it.
On 22nd April I joined The Big One demonstrations in London, with a huge number of people who all spent the time and expense to travel to Westminster to express their growing alarm at the disastrous inadequacy of government action on the environment. It was great to see so many people of all ages and ethnicities, including families with young children, coming together peacefully to express the growing public disquiet at our politicians’ failure to safeguard our collective future.
Before the event, the media frothed with a totally bogus story about the London marathon being disrupted. It wasn’t – but in the end, the four days of demonstrations created minimal media publicity. Nothing to see here folks.
Climate change will affect us all, one way or another.
Cornwall and Devon still have hosepipe bans introduced last summer. Here in North Dorset a few intense storms this winter caused flooding instead of compensating for the long periods without any rain at all.
At a recent Dorset Council planning consultation meeting, I was pleased to see the seriousness with which the environment is now being taken – but we are still not taking sufficient action anything like quickly enough.
We simply cannot afford to ignore the urgency of the situation.
Ken Huggins,
North Dorset Green Party
*Oil sector’s ‘staggering’ $3bn-a-day profits
**Fossil fuel subsidies of $11m a minute

s someone who believes that the head of state should be elected, I will be politely declining King Charles’ invitation to swear an oath of ‘true allegiance’ to him on 6th May.
It’s not that I don’t like the man.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I have a deep respect and admiration for his commitment to the many environmental causes that he has used his position to champion and promote over several decades, long before it was considered fashionable to do so, or contentious not to.
I don’t have an issue with his choice of partner, as some do, nor do I sit in judgment on the way in which other members of his family have chosen to behave, either publicly or privately.
I also refuse to hold it against him that he will always be overshadowed by the example of committed public service set by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
I simply believe that if we must have a new King, he should be swearing allegiance to the people of this country and not the other way round.
While the Coronation weekend provides a welcome opportunity to spend time with family, friends, neighbours and others within our communities, it is also a political event. As such, it should provide the British people with a chance to reflect on how well our political institutions are really serving us.

What still remains
When the gazebos and bunting have all been folded away, we will still be in the middle of a cost of living crisis. There will still be growing wealth and social inequality, the NHS will still be in need of intensive care.
We will still be dangerously unprepared for the climate crisis. A feudal display of deference to an unelected head of state changes none of these things. Rather it legitimises the persistent failure of our political institutions to govern in the interests of the majority, and masks the reality that we really need to talk about modernising our democracy.
Pat Osborne, North Dorset Labour Party