Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

I’ve now caught up with the latest #BluePlanetLive programmes, and they dismay me. Yes the BBC is talking about environmental issues. But there are two flaws so massive that they make these programmes worse than useless.
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Flaw 1. #BluePlanetLive carefully and deliberately avoids any collision with powerful interests. There’s not a word about the fossil fuel industry or the plastics industry (which are one and the same), and only fleeting references to the fishing industry.

There's no mention of who is cutting down the mangrove forests, or for what purpose. No mention of the massive lobbying effort that prevents effective regulation of fishing. No mention of the activities causing climate breakdown. It’s as if power does not exist.

Flaw 2. Almost all the solutions proposed are technological sticking plasters: coral seeding, rehabilitating orphaned seals, beach cleans, removing hooks from sharks etc. Not a word about leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
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.@ChrisGPackham did manage to squeeze in a sequence about excluding the fishing industry from some places. Fair play to him: he must have fought long and hard for it. But you could have blinked and missed it. In reality this is *the crucial marine conservation task*.

Otherwise, it was as if all we need are science and technology. Sure, we need science and technology. But the only answers big enough to address these massive problems are political and economic. The BBC *just will not mention them*.
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This is not impartiality, but the opposite. For example, we were told: “people are coming together to rid our oceans of plastics”. How? Through beach cleans! With the plastics industry engaged in a massive expansion, no amount of beach cleans will “rid our oceans of plastics”.

Instead of structural explanations and solutions, we get consumerist bromides, as in Blue Planet 2: “We can all play a part … by changing our plastics habit”. No, sorry, we need to stop the plastics industry in its tracks. And that needs political action.

The BBC's determination not to mention powerful interests leaves us powerless: gawping helplessly at the unfolding disasters, while hoping that heroic scientists will magic it all better. Sorry, but they can’t.

#BluePlanetLive is telling a gigantic lie: that we can make the bad stuff go away through rescue solutions. If they have any effect at all, it is tiny. Through its determination to avoid the subject, the BBC misleads us about the most important issues of all.

Only political mobilisation has any hope of addressing these vast issues: demanding structural and systemic solutions to structural and systemic problems. But the very thought is forbidden. It’s as if the censors have been through the script with a blue pencil.

All the #BluePlanetLive presenters are people I admire. But they are hobbled by the BBC’s censorship. You might think they’re on top of the world, but I genuinely pity them, as they are forced to mouth these pathetic lies.

#BluePlanetLive is so misleading that it would honestly be better if the BBC had not made this series. It is counter-educational.

For years I've been lobbying the BBC to make environmental programmes. Now, realising that it is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth, I wish it wouldn't. It is a menace to our understanding of the world.

Please RT this thread. We need to stand up to the BBC's censorship, and oppose these repeated lies about what is causing destruction and how it can be stopped.