The Daily Background

Uhhhhhh… Check your calendars, everybody. It’s not April fool’s day, right? Read this:

In one of the most unexpected conversions since Saul of Tarsus hit the road to Damascus, Rupert Murdoch is turning into a green campaigner. He is making the whole of his worldwide operations carbon neutral and setting out to “educate and engage” his readers and viewers about global warming.

He believes his companies’ “global reach” presents “an unprecedented opportunity to raise awareness and to stimulate action around the world”. A former sceptic who confesses to having been “somewhat wary of the warming debate”, he laid on his first global webcast for all his employees on Wednesday to tell them that he was “changing the DNA of our business”. He added that he had started with himself, buying a hybrid car.
[…]
News Corporation has a carbon footprint of at 641,150 tons a year and will now aim to be carbon neutral by 2010. News International, which publishes his British newspapers, and the publishers HarperCollins will achieve this goal by the end of the year and all books published by the imprint Fourth Estate are to be printed on recycled paper from 1 July.

But the main thrust of the campaign will be “to inspire people to change their behaviour” through films, television productions and news operations. It will aim “to weave this issue into our content, make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun”. As a start, MySpace is launching a channel devoted to climate change, and Fox television is developing “a solutions-based campaign”.

Holy crap. Did Al Gore finally get through to him? Does this mean we won’t see any more climate change deniers on Fox News anymore?

Filed under: War on Science, Environment Related, Z-TDB Blog