Renewable Energy Sources vs Fossil Fuels – Solar and Wind Power Ahead in Australia

Australia’s Murdoch led NewsCorp media and Koch Network think tank promote climate science denial talking points, especially the IPA Institute of Public Affairs (founded by Murdoch’s father), with fossil fuel and mining players, have been denigrating transition to renewable sources and their reliability, for decades; now playing the need for nuclear to delay transition.

However, the reality is different, like elsewhere, the take up of renewable energy sources is accelerating (though not as fast) away from fossil fuels, while Australian governments of the centre left following climate science become electorally wedged by the same Murdoch media and think tank talking points.

Fact is, renewable sources whether solar or wind, plus EV’s or electric vehicles, work economically and effectively as has been shown elsewhere, while supporting economic growth. 

From Renew Economy Australia:

‘Renewables hit record high in Australia, as green energy transition rolls on

Renewable energy hit a record high of 72.9 per cent of total generation on Sunday, as a wave of wind and solar across Australia’s main grid sent coal output and operational demand to new lows.

The new peak of 72.9 per cent on the National Electricity Market (NEM), the country’s main grid, was reached for a five minute interval at 12.45pm (AEST), according to data collectors at GPE NEMLog2, beating the previous peak of 72.5 per cent set late last month (October 24).

The bulk of the renewable energy came from rooftop solar from households and businesses, which accounted for around 44 per cent of total generation. Utility scale solar and large scale wind had shares of just over 14 and 12 per cent each, while hydro played a minor role with just over 1.1 per cent.

The new peak for renewables was especially noticed in Victoria, where the share of variable renewable energy (wind and solar) hit a new record high of 95.7 per cent earlier that day (10.10am AEST), well beyond the previous peak of 88.5 per cent set on October 22.

The new peak just happens to correspond to Victoria’s renewable energy target for 2035 (95 per cent), although that will be measured on an annual average basis, rather than a single five minute dispatch period. But the trend is clearly there.

NSW has the biggest fleet of coal generators in Australia, with 8,200MW of coal fired capacity, but coal output hit a new low of just 1633 MW at 9.15am (AEST), more than 100 MW below its previous low, highlighting the assault on its business case and “baseload” assumptions.

It also reflects the fact that one third of its units were out of action for maintenance and upkeep, and the second unit at Mt Piper also wound back to zero on Saturday.  Coal power accounted for just 16.4 per cent of the state’s demand when renewables hit their peak at 12.45pm on Saturday.

Network demand also hit a new low in Victoria (1724 MW), while battery discharge hit a new high in NSW (209 MW), indicating the early but accelerating shift to different forms of dispatchable energy.

On Friday, as GPE NEMLog’s Geoff Eldridge reports, a bunch of solar output records tumbled across the grid, with the gap between solar power and coal output stretching to nearly 10 GW at one stage.

Australia’s target renewable share is 82 per cent by 2030, based around the modelling of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan.

Across the last 12 months, the NEM has average 38.7 per cent renewables, so it needs to more than double that share in the next 6-7 years.  Across the last 30 days, the average share of renewables has been a more promising 45.8 per cent.’

For more blogs or articles on Australian Politics, Climate Change, Economics, Environment, EU European Union, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Koch Network, Media, Political Strategy, Science Literacy and Vehicle Usage click through

Libertarian Nativist Lobbying Against EV Electric Vehicles in Support of Fossil Fuels

Posted on September 20, 2022

Not only is Australia out of step with the developed world, including the US, but another example of how fossil fuel, road, traffic and transport lobbies have been effective in avoiding or limiting environmental regulation and standards, using libertarian economic arguments as promoted by Koch Atlas Network think tanks e.g. the IPA Institute of Public Affairs.

What has been missed is the white nativist ecological NGO influence of the US Tanton Network linked to Sustainable Population Australia, with the latter based on and replicating the US fossil fueled ZPG Zero Population Growth, promoted by media and politicians of both left and right, blaming humanity i.e. immigrants and population for environmental issues, to deflect from fossil fuels and climate science.

French Farmers, Truckers and Covid Freedom Rallies Astroturfing vs. Science, Environment and EU European Union?

Posted on March 5, 2024

Farmers protesting in France and probably elsewhere are more about astroturfing by Big Ag to oppose the EU European’s Union Green Agenda, threats to CAP Common Agricultural Policy, pesticides and fossil fuels; does not seem to be a genuine issue of small farmers especially with indirect support of Le Pen?

Further, not only have similar protests occurred on the border of Poland and Ukraine, and other points, with allegations of Russian influence, there seems to be resonance with the US fossil fuel Koch Network ‘freedom rallies’ globally against Covid science, vaccinations and health mandates vs. centrist governments.

Degrowth Economics – Greenwashing Fossil Fuels and Nativism for Authoritarian Autarky?

Posted on March 13, 2024

Is ‘degrowth’ genuine economics theory or astroturfing for greenwashing the status quo i.e. by demanding degrowth that leaves already wealthy or <1% with existing economic and social mobility or status, but precludes upward mobility for 99%> of future generations?

Why? Creates confusion and delay for the economic, industrial and fossil fuel status quo of over a century to transition away from carbon to renewable sources.

Although not cited by either The Conversation or Grist below, the degrowth, steady state and autarkist constructs are not new, see 1930s Italy and Germany, then fast forward to the Club of Rome which promoted the construct ‘limits to growth’; good things like technology grow linearly vs. bad things like emissions and people grow exponentially. 

COP28 Climate Science Denial – Avoiding Transition to Renewable Energy Sources

Posted on December 10, 2023

There were recent comments by the COP28 President in UAE denying climate science around fossil fuels, hence, no need to transition from the same; but no credible support for his claims?

These talking points are very common across right wing media for ageing and less educated voters to support fossil fuel right wing policies, often with ‘Koch Network’ in the background, but simply promoting deflection and conspiracies?

Financial Times: Opinion Data Points. Economics may take us to net zero all on its own The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions.

AC Grayling on the Need for more Educated and Informed Citizens

When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices, they are averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?

Not understood that across the Anglosphere and Europe mostly ageing voters dominating, with politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.

However, in the ByLine Times article excerpts below from AC Grayling, his explanation of how we arrived here cites education as the issue; though this ignores amongst older dominant voters who are informed by activist right wing legacy media, influencers and including US fossil fueled think tanks versus younger who are outnumbered; not education now but the past?

Further, there are attempts through influence and lobbying to dilute education standards from the same fossil fueled Koch Network think tanks, in support of far right policies now adopted by ‘conservatives’ including more Christianity or religion in schools vs. attacks on supposed ‘woke’ or LGBT friendly policies.

However, this masks concerted efforts in the Anglosphere replicating education curricula from less developed authoritarian states including teaching, curriculum syllabi and content e.g. more religion &/or nationalism, less analysis, less maths/science and basically avoiding the hidden curriculum i.e. developing essential soft skills a la Bloom’s Taxonomy and well rounded citizens.

There is a collective need to avoid attempts getting at young people in preparation for when demographics balance out, neutering the dominance of less educated but more active above median age voters, especially in regions.

From ByLine Times:

‘Who or What to Blame? Education, Education, Education’

Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways due to failings in how we conceive of ‘education’, writes 

AC Grayling  2 August 2023

Let us ask why so much influence has been exerted by a dishonest and ultra-partisan media owned by non-dom billionaires with a vested interest in destabilising the country so that their preferred version of anarcho-capitalism can flourish. And let us ask why social media has found the British population such a plastic, malleable, easy playground for its bubble-creating, conspiracy-promoting, false-fact-spreading downside.

And then let us reflect on the answer: because well-informed and reflective people would not be so easily duped by either a dishonest press or unreliable and distorting social media, it must be that enough of the British population is insufficiently well-informed and insufficiently reflective – more bluntly: ignorant enough and unthinking enough – to be ripe for serving as their dupes.

How has this happened?

The Need for Active Enquirers

The fact remains that, in 2019, 43% of those who voted chose Conservatives, and enough Uxbridge voters – blaming a Labour London Mayor for Tory policies on the environment – voted Tory in a seat formerly held by Johnson. What explains them? Indeed, even supposing half of these were principled, loyal, Conservatives who had thought hard about the Government of the past 13 years and somehow liked what it saw – what explains how they could?

From among a plethora of answers let us focus on one very central one: the failure of our education system to achieve a good standard of active intelligence in enough of the population.

By ‘active intelligence’, I mean the useful general knowledge and the constructive scepticism that prompts people to test claims and promises made by those who want their money or their votes.

The price we pay is careless voters exploitable by a system and its career politician operatives into putting someone as grossly unfit as a Boris Johnson into Downing Street – to say nothing of the inadequacy of the compeers such an individual surrounds himself with.

To educate – not merely to train in enough basics of literacy and numeracy to qualify as a squaddy in the economic infantry – classes need to consist of fewer than 10 pupils, so that teachers have time to work with the individual grain of each pupil’s mind and personality.

Pupils should be active enquirers, not just passive learners sitting behind desks in a classroom: that means getting out and about, doing, travelling, finding out, making.

The value of musical education and art on general cognitive development, enhancing its capacities for success in maths and applied sciences, has been all but lost in the English education system.

Historical and geographical ignorance, and wholly inadequate levels of competence in a second and third language – plus frequent and active travelling in the countries where they are spoken – make for narrow, parochial, limited mindsets. 

I defy anyone to claim that the level of achievement represented by GCSE today is comparable to that of the ‘O’ levels of yore – and even the ‘O’ levels of yore did not pass the test of what is necessary for the informed and thoughtful populace that is the minimum requirement for any version of democracy.

Democracies are being made to fail all round the world today because increasingly larger portions of already significant percentages of populations are too easily taken for a ride by the political and politically-motivated agencies which benefit from their incapacity.

This problem with education means that efforts to explain why some claim or promise does not stack up simply go over the heads of enough people to make it possible for those who claim or promise to get away with it. This happens all the time.

As we know too well, serious newspapers and current affairs programmes get little traction because they speak to tiny minorities only, while tabloid media cleave to the parochial interests and prejudices of their consumers because that is what makes money – with little if any concern to inform or engage beyond the usual sodden fare of celebrity gossip and whatever is the hysteria of the moment.

The landscape of our democracy is accordingly a dismal one indeed. Its poverty and barrenness have been cruelly exposed by Brexit – arguably inconceivable in a better-educated nation (look at Scotland) – and its emblems will forever be Johnson and the gang of coarsely unsuitable appointments he has made over the past three years. 

Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways, and a large part of the reason for this is that our education system is too poorly funded to achieve in enough cases the kind of intellects that would be more resistant to such exploitation.

I argue that the systemic failure of our political order, for which this insufficiency of education is responsible, led to Brexit: and that Brexit is the ultimate condemnation of both.’

AC Grayling is a philosopher, Master of the New College of the Humanities, and Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University

For more related blogs and articles on Adult learning, Ageing democracy, Conservative, Critical thinking, Demography, Koch Network, Media, Populist politics, Science literacy and Younger generations, click through:

Trojan Horses – Ultra Conservatives Disrupting Education Curricula to Influence Youth

Libertarian Curricula – Science and Culture Wars vs. University Maths Teacher Training

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Skills of Critical Thinking

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Fake News, Politics and Society

A prescient article from Ines Eisele at Deutsche Welle (DW) which is very relevant to the Anglosphere and elsewhere as people struggle to understand the world around them whether politics, science, economics or otherwise, with suboptimal or even ‘gamed’ media.

Especially important currently with climate & Covid science denial, Putin’s Russian invasion of Ukraine and right wing political parties, which all share similar strategy and tactics, i.e. astroturfing media and politics, to then gaslight society, that may not produce beneficial outcomes e.g. Brexit and Trump.

The article touches on cognitive distortions, negative content triggers (pollster Lynton Crosby has said negativity moves voters, positives do not), personal benefits of beliefs versus facts, desire for attention and approval, finally solutions for resilience.

School curricula need to include both embedded and overt ways of avoiding fake news, junk or pseudo science etc. for empowered citizens, but adults in general also need the same training; age, experience or education are not sufficient.

‘From DW:

‘Fact check: Why do we believe fake news?

July 8, 2023

Fake news have become a real threat to society. How do psychological and social factors influence whether we fall for them or not? And what can we do against it?

Whether it’s the war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic or gender issues, more and more fake news have been circulating on the internet in recent years, especially on emotional and controversial topics. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Other times, they are easier to recognize.

But not for everyone: Some internet users are more likely to accept misinformation and fake news as true information than others. In this DW fact check, we look at why that is.

Cognitive distortions fool us

A term that comes up again and again in this context is “cognitive bias.” It describes faulty tendencies in human thinking from which we find it difficult to free ourselves.

Among other things, our views, and our preconceived worldview, also called “partisanship” or “confirmation bias” in some specialist articles, play a major role in why we fall for fake news. 

Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky from Bristol University explains the phenomenon: “If I hear something I want to hear because it is in line with my political opinions, yes, then I’ll believe it even more.”

So we are always biased. For example, those who are convinced that Germany is taking in too many refugees are more inclined to believe news stories that report on local authorities being overburdened or generally say negative things about this group.

Another important “cognitive bias” is that we often simply trust our intuition. It seems unnecessary to us — and is probably too much of a nuisance — to check something again before we internalize it, comment on it, and forward it. Thus, many users only read the headline of articles, but not the actual text.

The Science Post and NPR, for example, tested this by posting misleading headlines. Readers only learned that the whole thing was an experiment if they clicked on the links — which most of them did not do.

Negative content triggers us the most

The “bandwagon effect”also misleads us: According to this phenomenon, people have a tendency to follow the opinions or behaviors of others rather than forming their own opinion. In relation to fake news, this means that we are more likely to believe information if others do so as well.

When we see a social media post with lots of shares and likes, we tend to trust swarm intelligence just like everyone else. As already mentioned most of them share and like without taking a closer look at the content.

Our memory is also not very helpful when it comes to correctly storing what we have seen or read, also described as “persistence of inaccuracy.” We often do not recall whether something was true or false. It is not uncommon for people to claim that a false piece of information was true, even if it was later corrected, for example in the form of a fact check.

Apart from these biases, fake news works so well because we are guided more by emotions than we realize. The fact that false news spreads six times faster than true information is due precisely to this emotionality, Lewandowsky says. “Fake news tends to create outrage in the receiver, the recipient of the message. And we know that people, whether you like it or not, are engaging with outrage, provoking information… That makes it more likely for them to go viral.”

The question of personal benefit

A study conducted by the University of Würzburg last year, in which 600 participants were asked to assess the truth of various statements, also revealed that dark personality traits and so-called post-factual epistemic beliefs make us more susceptible to fake news.

“To find out about respondents’ beliefs about knowledge and facts, we asked them: ‘Do you trust your intuition when you encounter information? How much value do you place on evidence? Do you believe there is such a thing as independent facts at all?,'” the study’s lead author, psychologist Jan Philipp Rudloff, told DW.

The evaluation revealed that the participants found it more difficult to distinguish true statements from false ones the more they relied on their gut feeling and the less they believed in the existence of facts.

“And then we also looked at the ‘dark factor of personality,’ sort of the core of all dark personality traits, such as narcissism or psychopathy,” Rudloff said. “They’re called dark because those are related to behaviors that we don’t socially approve of.”

For people with a strong dark personality factor, he said, their own advantage is the most important thing. Everything else — and that could be the truth in some circumstances — becomes subordinate to that.

“The question then is not whether a piece of information is true or not, but whether it benefits them, plays into their cards, serves as justification.” Dark personality traits and a problematic understanding of knowledge and facts often go hand in hand, according to Rudloff, and usually manifest themselves at a young age.

The desire for attention and approval

Joe Walther, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, points to another important aspect that promotes the spread of fake news. He sees liking, commenting and spreading information on the internet primarily as a social interaction: “I think people often engage in social media (behavior) in order to feel like they’re participating and to be recognized for it.”

“So if I send you a crazy story that research has found that short people are more susceptible to fake news than tall people. I doubt such a thing is true, but I think you would appreciate that I sent you that crazy, funny thing and I think people use social media in order to be liked by others, in order to get attention, to be recognized, validated,” he said.

At the same time, this example helps to illustrate that users don’t share fake news necessarily because they fall for it. Rather, they simply want to entertain and amuse themselves and others. Or they share content precisely because they do NOT believe it to be true.

What can we do to become more resilient?

The reasons why we believe fake news are complex. Among other things, they have to do with our personality and our attitude toward knowledge and facts. Fake news is also an appealing vehicle for networking with others and enjoying attention and approval. There are also various cognitive mechanisms that distort our perception.

The question is: How do we become more resilient? The first step is to become aware of how susceptible we are to manipulation and to be aware that we can never be entirely objective. Jan Rudloff advocates providing students with more meta-level knowledge regarding facts and science.

“Ultimately, in science, it is always the case that you can only find a consensus, a kind of agreement among as many experts as possible. But as new information comes in, what was previously considered fact or consensus can shift.”

This is very complex, he said, and it gives some people the impression that facts are arbitrarily determined by politicians and scientists. An example of that is the claim made during the corona pandemic that children would not spread COVID-19 as much — and then it turned out they did.

An approach that goes in a similar direction is the so-called prebunking. With information about fake news and disinformation at their disposal, users can be sensitized even before they encounter it. One idea of that would be to provide an information campaign ahead of an election where a lot of fake news is expected to manipulate voters.’

For related articles and blogs on Adult Learning, Critical Thinking, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Learning Theory, Media, Science Literacy, Soft Skills and Statistical Analysis click through:

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Covid Misinformation – Gut Instinct & Beliefs vs. Science & Critical Thinking

Skills of Critical Thinking

Anglosphere Nativism and Eugenics in Political  Media – Language and Social Discourse

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

Covid-19 Coronovirus Data and Statistical Literacy

Conspiracy of Denial – COVID-19 and Climate Science

Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories and Radical Right Libertarians

Covid-19 Climate Science Vaccination Misinformation PR and Astro Turfing

Anglosphere Nativism and Eugenics in Political Media – Language and Social Discourse

Public language, linguistics, discourse and vocabulary are important factors of influence in the public sphere and politics through narratives of think tanks, NGOs, media, politics and society, both positive and negative, in reinforcing perceptions and attitudes of society.

ByLine Times has a timely article of Dan Clayton ‘Swamping’ ‘Cockroaches’ ‘Invasion’ How Language Shapes our View of Migration, describing and explaining language used in politics and media; this week The Sun and Jeremy Clarkson have been highlighted on the language used towards Meghan Markle.

In recent decades the language of eugenics has been used politically for nativist messaging and dog whistling a la ‘dead cat on the table’ strategy of Lynton Crosby et al. to deflect from substantive issues, and reinforce eugenics of race and class by far right wing conservatives (in Australian context, a older generations informed by ‘white Australia policy’ which ended same time as US migration restrictions, in 1960s).

The EU referendum naively called by former Tory PM Cameron was a US radical right libertarian coup via Tufton Street Koch Network think tanks, to avoid EU constraints on fossil fuels, finance, labour standards, mobility etc.; described in Orwellian terms as ‘taking back control’ for ‘sovereignty’.

However, although prevailing on economic issues, the vote swung away from Remain to Leave due white nationalist arguments on ‘sovereignty’ versus Europe, refugees, immigrants etc.. These were produced by a Tanton Network NGO, also at Tufton Street, informing Dominic Cummings, UKIP Farage et al., both tabloid and serious media; replicated in the US by the Trump campaign and Steve Bannon.

‘‘Swamping’ ‘Cockroaches’ ‘Invasion’ How Language Shapes our View of Migration

Dan Clayton – 16 December 2022

Dan Clayton looks at a rising tide of martial, dehumanising and manipulative metaphors over asylum seekers and migrants in the UK

When, back in those halcyon days of January 2016, David Cameron stood up at Prime Minister’s Questions and accused Jeremy Corbyn of hanging around with a “bunch of migrants” in Calais, and supposedly telling them that “they could all come to Britain”, there was some discomfort about this apparent coarsening of discourse around immigration.

There was clearly something off about the use of the phrase “a bunch of…” that many people couldn’t quite articulate. It sounded vaguely derogatory but then using it to describe some flowers, bananas or grapes was hardly problematic. So, what was it about the phrase that set teeth on edge and activated many people’s offence sensors? 

Perhaps it’s the company that the expression keeps and how we, as language users, are primed to expect what follows.

Straight after Cameron’s words hit the headlines, I checked the British National Corpus (a huge digital database of language in use) to see if I could put my finger on why the expression felt wrong. For every reference to fruit, there was another reference to troublemakers; for every bunch of lads, friends or junior doctors, there was a bunch of morons, thieves or maniacs.

These collocates (literally, words that exist next to other words, that co-locate) are a clear sign that some expressions feel bad because they keep bad company. And as the old saying has it, go to bed with dogs and wake up with fleas.  

Fast forward another six years and we don’t really have to head off to a corpus to investigate the nuances of the language being used by Conservative frontbenchers to describe immigration.

In October 2022, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman described the small boats crossing the Channel as “an invasion on our southern coast”: a metaphor so crass and bellicose that it went far enough beyond a dog whistle as to become a foghorn. You don’t need a very sensitive offence sensor to pick that message up…

And if you’re feeling particularly strong-stomached, just venture online and have a look at the replies to almost any news story about small boat crossings, tweets from the RNLI about their work, or proposed changes to asylum policy and you’ll see how vicious and dehumanising much of the language is.

As Sian Norris highlighted in Byline Times, some of the language previously associated with the far-right has become normalised, in Parliament as well as beyond, and Savan Qadir noted the escalation of rhetoric used by Braverman and its potential impact. 

Mobile Metaphors

Like so much language, context plays a huge part in how meanings are constructed and the timing of Braverman’s comments was extremely significant. Just a day before Braverman’s speech, a man had driven to a “migrant-processing facility” (a phrase worthy of some analysis in itself) near Dover, attacked it with firebombs and then apparently taken his own life.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that when leading politicians are using the language of war to talk about the movement of groups of people, some impressionable members of the public take them at their word and adopt a war footing, taking the supposed battle into their own hands and to the “invaders”. In a world where discourses of “replacement” have moved from the neo-nazi fringe to centre stage, it’s a dangerous rhetorical game to play and one that some have likened to a form of stochastic terrorism. 

But consider too the wider context of the times we’ve been living through where war metaphors (of which “invasion” is one) have been successfully used by leading politicians during the Covid-19 pandemic to mobilise the public against a deadly threat.  It’s a metaphor that works and leads to action in the real world. And that’s dangerous. 

Metaphors like this are not new and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with metaphors themselves in the context of political discourse: they are often a very effective way of helping people conceptualise complex ideas in a way that makes sense.

We often see what linguists call a “target domain” – such as life (or even just a brief run of appearances on Strictly or X-Factor) – being described using a “source domain” such as a journey.  But the choice of metaphor is hugely important, not just because it reveals a great deal about the political stance and outlook of the person using it but because of the impact it can have on the listener and the ways in which it fits into the wider jigsaw of the culture wars being waged around us. 

Linguists have been looking closely at metaphor for a long time and many people beyond the field will no doubt have come across the ideas in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal Metaphors We Live By, if not the 1980 book itself.  But some of the most recent work on metaphors for Covid (waves, spikes, tsunamis) and measures to use against Covid (including ways to describe the vaccination programme – roll-out, firefighting metaphors) carried out by Professor Elena Semino at Lancaster University suggests that they can be powerful tools for shaping public opinion.

As Semino observes, war metaphors can be excellent ways of mobilising collective public action in the face of a common enemy, and “increase people’s perceptions of problems as serious and urgent, and their willingness to modify their behaviours accordingly” but might lose their appeal later as the “war” drags on and combat fatigue sets in, even fostering resentment that “wartime” powers are being imposed for too long.

Equally, in work done by Semino and many others on the power of metaphor in discussing cancer and its treatment, the war metaphor has mixed reactions. On the one hand, it can lead some patients to feel that they haven’t fought hard enough – or can’t, in the face of such a cruel opponent – while on the other, it might lead some to feel energised about facing down an enemy. 

Language Matters

When we start to look at the language used to describe migration, we can see the war metaphor front and centre among the ways that migrants are “othered”.

Words like horde, enemy and invasion (that one again) occur repeatedly. Dr Charlotte Taylor at the University of Sussex has used several corpora, including material from parliamentary debates and newspaper text, to explore this in her 2021 paper “Metaphors of Migration Over Time”, noting that many of the metaphors are “historically rooted and conventionalised”. In fact, some of the references she examines go as far back as 1820.  

It will probably come as no surprise that the mainstream (ie largely right-wing) press in the UK has hardly covered itself in glory over the last hundred years – take The Daily Mail’s 1938 headline “German Jews Pouring into This Country” as a case in point – but the patterns that Taylor observes do suggest some degree of variation over time. 

The “immigrants as water” framing that we see with words like pouring, wave and swamping (thank you to both Margaret Thatcher in 1978 and David Blunkett in 2002) suggests some form of inundation taking place and the movement of people being out of control.

Another key migration metaphor is that of animals, so nouns like swarm and flock (and the verbs associated with them) appear time and time again, adding a sense of agency, if not humanity, to the movement of people. It’s the same frame that Katie Hopkins infamously used when she described refugees as “cockroaches”. It’s still perhaps one step short of the war metaphor we’ve already seen, where migrants are cast as an enemy force to be repelled with deadly violence but it’s still pretty repugnant. 

Taylor also notes a pattern of migrants represented as objects or commodities across the language data she has analysed, and here we can see a recurrent picture of migrants as something to be used, traded and exploited, and – central to so much of the recent government discourse around migration – people to be trafficked as part of organised crime.

In her 2022 PhD thesis, Tamsin Parnell of the University of Nottingham notes that “migrants are constructed as victims, “evil traffickers” as villains, and “Britain’s Royal Navy, National Crime Agency and Border Force” as institutional heroes. This simplicity arguably deprives migrants of agency and obscures the multiple, complex reasons why a person might choose to travel to a European country through non-conventional routes.” 

But how does any of this matter? Surely getting hung up about a few words and phrases is not really going to do anyone any good when it’s political action that gets things done?

Well, language matters. We aren’t – as one particularly cynical commentator claimed – getting obsessed with “hurty words” but trying to unpick the values of the language that we use and that has been used before, and to find ways to describe the world around us.

Healthy, democratic societies need to be able to discuss migration: it’s been an everyday fact of life for millions of people for thousands of years and is likely to increase as parts of the world become uninhabitable due to climate collapse. But behind this language are people – both those on the move and those welcoming or rejecting them – and the conversations we need to have can’t be constructive until we think more carefully about the language we’re using and how it both represents and shapes the world around us.’

For more related blogs and article on Ageing Democracy, Australian Immigration News, Conservative, Demography, Economics, EU European Union, Eugenics, Global Trade, Immigration, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Media, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian, Tanton Network & White Nationalism click through:

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Mainstreaming Extremism – How Public Figures and Media Incite Nativist Beliefs Leading to Violence

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Ghosts of Galton and Eugenics Return – Society, Population and Environment in the 21st Century

Hans Rosling – GapMinder – Factfulness – Human Development – Adult Education

Time to revisit the late but great Professor Hans Rosling of Gapminder Foundation on the need to for improved skills of analysis and critical thinking, as reflected in commentary round population linkages with environment, poverty and lack of education in the less developed world, amongst educated western elites who remain ignorant of both the outside world and the developing world.

Although Rosling did not then challenge the UNPD high end of century population forecasts, they have been revised downwards due to more demographic research on the ground in developing nations. 

More recent research is finding that fertility rates are dropping faster and later research by Bricker & Ibbitson released in ‘Empty Planet’ confirms this and many other researchers support the same; now Covid has accentuated further the rate of decline, hence, the global population does not seem able to get much past the 8 billion’ish mark? What is the issue?

From Gapminder Foundation:

Factfulness (the book)

When asked simple questions about global trends―what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school―we systematically get the answers wrong. 

So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.

Factfulness offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. It reveals the ten instincts that distort our perspective―from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.

It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think.That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is a new thinking habit that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to challenges and opportunities of the future.

“This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance…Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” – Hans Rosling, February 2017.

Related articles and links on Adult Learning, Andragogy, Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Environment, Learning Theory, Media, Population Growth,  Populist Politics, Statistical Analysis, White Nationalism & Word of Mouth.

Hans Rosling – The facts and ignorance about population growth

Population Growth or Decline?

NOM Net Overseas Migration – Immigration – Population Growth

Immigration Immigrants and Public Misconceptions

Global Warming – Climate Change – Eco-Fascism

Population Demographic Decline