Right-wing newspapers are blaming Europe’s blazing wildfires on anything but climate change and its human-made causes. As almost every scientist (>99%) agrees, fossil fuels primarily cause climate change.
But that doesn’t stop the likes of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Times, Telegraph, or Daily Mail from deflecting beyond parody. (As a reminder, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns the first two of these.)
Europe is burning, badly
As wildfires spread across Europe, hundreds of thousands are evacuating homes. We’re on track to see 500,000 hectares burned within weeks. The fires have killed at least 32 people, but the heat is the real killer.
In Britain, some 2,700 died early from excess heat. The heat has also created drought conditions, dry forests and critical pre-fire vegetation loss. This will likely see some over 20 million tonnes of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere. It’s been called the “worst wildfire year on record” for the EU, but not by the Murdoch press.
Climate change missing from most UK media reports on June heatwave
Murdoch press shifts the blame on climate change
Dr Simon Evans at Carbon Brief won the Press Gazette‘s Energy and Environment Journalist of the Year award in 2022. His work exposes the corporate press’s role in facilitating climate breakdown. More recently, he has highlighted how right-wing media are shifting attention and blame away from fossil fuels.
Evans highlights how the WSJ ran a dramatic front-page recently, depicting the horrific scenes in Europe. Meanwhile, however, its six-figure-salaried editorial board ran a psy-op around the same time, titled:
How green policies fuel fires in Europe
Its reasoning for the latter article? Simply that:
Burned areas are disproportionately nature-protected lands.
Their answer to nature-destroying wildfires, apparently, is to rail against protecting nature in the first place. As if that’s somehow better. How are we to make sense of such an absurd position?
Evans highlights the Times as another example, with a recent front page reporting on a wildfire in Suffolk near a nuclear plant. This was joined by a comment article arguing, bizarrely:
Wildfires suggest rewilding needs a rethink … Green enthusiasm for ignoring the old-fashioned thinning and clearing of land does create habitats – and kindling.
Except that we know how grouse moors – playgrounds for the hunting elite – dry and drain peat bogs, which ought to be wet moorland.
Right-wing media will kill us all
Evans continues his analysis with the Daily Telegraph. It ran this front-page story, same as the Times:
Wildfires close in on Sizewell [nuclear plant]
Also in the paper was this article, accurately titled:
As wildfires rage, Britain isn’t ready for its boiling hot future
But the same publication also ran a recent string of fossil fuel agitprop pieces:
Rewilding blamed for Suffolk wildfire …
Net-zero crackdown on farming ‘raises risk of wildfires’ …
Disappearing villages leave Europe in era of fire – The emptying countryside means land is unguarded and becoming vulnerable to blazes
None of these articles takes aim at the root of the problem: human-made climate change and global heating. Nor, of course, do they articulate the cause of that: overwhelmingly, fossil fuel combustion. Instead, they try to paint the solutions to climate change – regrowing nature and cutting emissions – as the problem.
We truly live in a topsy-turvy era, spoon-fed to us by these destructive right-wing rags.
Reality inversion
Next comes the Daily Mail – without which no corporate reality-inversion would be complete. The Mail ran this double-page spread, dramatically (if somewhat goofily) titled:
Evacuate! ‘Out of control’ wildfire triggers holidaymaker exodus amid fears for Sizewell
In typical Mail fashion, the paper also hosted this op-ed in its lead comment slot:
Why the flames of Britain’s wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather
This was authored by none other than Matt Ridley, described by Global Energy Monitor as a
a coal baron, science writer and AGW denier (lukewarmer variety) on the Academic Advisory Council of the denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Ridley is a landed aristocrat who earns an estimated £4.1 million each year from opencast coal mines on his Blagdon Estate with income guaranteed until 2020.
Polanski slams climate inaction as heatwaves cost us billions
Corporate media vs actual science
Matt ‘King Coal’ Ridley isn’t alone in possessing blatant, conflict-of-interest links to the fossil fuel industry. In fact, almost the entire corporate media world is up to its neck in filthy oil.
Murdoch himself was labelled a “climate villain” for using his mass-media empire to sow climate division and doubts over decades. Naturally, he has investment ties to Genie Energy, which produces oil and shale gas. His Talk Radio aired anti-climate attacks a whopping six times in a day in 2025.
Likewise, GB News owner and bankroller Paul Marshall co-founded a hedge fund firm, Marshall Wace, which has investments in fossil fuel industries. His show frequently hosts climate sceptic voices and has panels led by fossil fuel lobbyists like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage. The former has fossil investments through his Somerset Capital Management; the latter’s Reform PLC is bankrolled by the industry.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the right-wing media bullshit, is hard scientific data. Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, has made clear what science tells us about the actual causes of wildfires:
The science on the cause is unequivocal: global heating, driven by humanity burning colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas, is making protracted heatwaves, severe floods and violent mega-storms more frequent, more intense and more costly.
The awful costs of this climate crisis – both human and economic – are now reaching national emergency levels. What needs to be done is equally clear: leave coal, oil and gas behind faster, scale up renewables and protect people where the impacts are already hitting hardest.
Polanski backs Fire Union as climate-stoked wildfires ravage UK
Featured image via @drsimevans
