This was my complaint to the BBC about the way they muffled the impact of their Panorama programme on the impacts of climate breakdown with a fake counterposition. You can complain similarly here.

Monday’s Panorama had many good aspects in showing the current reality of climate impacts, their enormous costs (£60 billion a year) and the sheer despair of the scientists studying them at the slow pace at which they are being mitigated.

However, the absurd framing that climate investment is COUNTERPOSED to living standards was left unchallenged as a classic BBC “on the one hand this, on the other hand that”. This is a fake counterposition. The programme itself made it clear that the cost of living crisis is being driven partly by climate impacts themselves (food/poor harvests) and the rocketing costs of fossil fuel energy; which is driving the vast majority of energy price rises.

And you didn’t look at the new reality that the fossil fuel energy costs crisis from the wars in Ukraine and Iran have actually accelerated the transition away from them, because they are now more expensive than renewable generation in most cases and places. That’s true for countries, where a majority have now passed peak fossil fuel use, and also for individuals, as demand for EVs and domestic solar panels have shot up since Trump’s attack on Iran.

An exploration of this process would be a valuable use of Panorama time. As would an objective analysis of North Sea oil and gas reserves, which are too depleted to be economically retrievable. I’m not sure how you would square either of those with the US drive for “global energy dominance” based on doubling down on fossil fuels, which is the driver behind the Trump mini me Parties like Reform or those that bend the knee to him like the Conservatives, which is the elephant in the room in this argument.

Still, “duty to educate and inform and all that”…