James Murdoch, son of Rupert and chief executive of the UK media giant BSkyB, sticks his corporate neck out with this piece, making some good points about climate change and sparking some considerably emotional response (eg., “Why is a monster like Murdoch Jr. writing in the Guardian?).
It shows, first of all, how manageable climate change could be if everyone got on board and started celebrating what Murdoch calls “small victory upon small victory.”
It also shows how loyal we purportedly civilized humans are to our “teams” – how determined we are to stake out ground with a certain number of like-minded individuals and criticize everyone else.
It happens on the right, as ideologues who don’t really know much about climate change deny that it’s happening – in part because their antipathy to people like David Suzuki prevents them from seeing an evident truth. And it happens on the left, when a stray good word by (or about) someone in the corporate community condemns the speaker to a vitriolic attack for hypocrisy, naivety or both.
I’m all for criticizing those on the wrong team (the alert among you may already have noticied), but there should still be room to make common cause on issues of convenience. Let’s start, say, with saving our environment from the biggest anthropogenic threat in history (or perhaps just the biggest since we were plotting to anihilate everything but the cockroaches in a nuclear conflagration – you get the point).
