Vice News: “Papers such as the Australian, the country’s equivalent of the New York Times, ran high-profile pieces attacking [then Australian Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an attempt to force companies to pay for the climate-warming carbon they release into the atmosphere, including a front-page story about an industry report claiming the policy would cost 23,000 resource sector jobs. And it worked: Australian Parliament eventually voted against Rudd’s carbon-reduction effort, his public opinion rating tanked, his own Labour Party led a coup against him, and he resigned in 2010. ‘If there was no Murdoch media here, or if, say, they only owned half the media instead of two-thirds of the media,’ Rudd told VICE News, ‘we would have a carbon price today.’
“What few people knew during all this is that the parent company of these Australian news outlets, Murdoch’s News Corporation, actually thought carbon pricing was a good idea. News Corp has meticulously documented its own carbon footprint since 2006 and sought to ‘take a leadership role on the issue of climate change’ by reducing it, according to hundreds of pages of publicly available documents reviewed by VICE News.
“Even as Murdoch-owned outlets tore down Rudd in 2010, News Corp was advocating ‘market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions’ in the U.S. and other places. This is according to documents submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit group that has for two decades catalogued and rated environmental reporting from more than 300 companies including Apple, Coca-Cola, and Ford Motors. No one forced News Corp to make disclosures to the CDP, which the group publishes in a database on its website. And far from altruism, News Corp’s disclosures are cast as corporate self-interest. In 2010, for example, a filing explained that doing so would give the company ‘valuable expertise when responding to mandated reporting requirements’ under a potential carbon pricing system, should any country implement one.”