How can News Corp call its gas splash an ‘exclusive’ and a ‘special report’ when it’s paid for by industry?he big news on Monday morning was that the story splashed across the front of News Corp’s biggest-selling tabloid newspapers wasn’t news at all. It was an advertorial paid for by a fossil fuel industry. Not that readers glancing at page one of the Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier-Mail or Adelaide Advertiser were let in on this secret.
The second paragraph was particularly unsubtle, saying industry leaders were “eager to tackle the looming deficit, but to have any hope of success they say that politicians and regulators must end lengthy project approval delays”. In other words: please let us extract more gas. But from there things get more complicated. Not everyone with expertise agrees with the industry view that the answer is more extraction alone.Gas is basically methane – a potent fossil fuel that plays a significant role in driving the climate crisis. More than 20% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions come from extracting and burning it.
Australian governments have released gas basins to companies and claimed relatively little back in return for the gift of these resources. The companies have done what companies do – sell the product for maximum profits, in this case mostly overseas. This has been a problem because, unlike Western Australia, the east coast has not required that a percentage of gas be set aside for domestic use.
There is one other gas constituency not mentioned so far in what News Corp has billed as a “week-long series explaining the critical importance of stepping on the gas to head off a crisis” – industrial users that rely on it for high-temperature industrial practices and don’t yet have a viable alternative.