This isn’t normal, is it?

One of my biggest challenges – and motivations – in building Charlie and its associated apps is trying to redress our culturally-suicidal approach to public interest news.

If you’re British, and whatever your political or ideological standing, you won’t have failed to notice the recent take-over of our news cycle by a pronounced climate denier in a new crusade, ostensibly about his banking arrangements.

What is less obvious to most is the fact that the woman at the heart of the fight – the country’s first female banking CEO, incidentally – was putting Natwest firmly on the path of becoming a green bank.

“We’ve been clear we will phase out lending to coal and our exposure to oil and gas.” – Alison Rose, former CEO, Natwest.

To me, the last few weeks serve as a stark reminder that our propensity to become distracted with drama … and our press’ skill in exploiting that weakness for its own short-term economic gain … allows a tiny cabal of shouty men, closely tied to big industry and even bigger oil conglomerates, to control the trajectory of humanity, the climate, the planet and almost every living thing upon it with an imeassurably long time horizon.

To be clear – this is not a commentary on the individual or his politics.

I could pick virtually any country in any part of the world and cite similar examples of the abject perversion of any kind of rational, humanity-scale decision making by narcissists who steal the conversation.

This post is also not really about climate either – though I will say, if you leave this page trying to rationalise that chart and go on believing that you don’t have an important role to play in driving forward a solution then you’re wrong. We all have a vital responsibilty as both a voter in our democracy and an economic unit with the power to shape corporate policy. We must not keep abdicating that responsibility.

But this post is really about highlighting the clear and present danger posed by our news and social media and the advertising duopoly that props it up.

By allowing itself be constantly misappropriated and perverted by overly-dramatic individuals, our system of news is condemning us all, especially our children, to a life of war, famine, flooding, violent and desperate migration, catastrophic habitat loss and most-probably: societal collapse.

.. and while you may disagree with me on the scale of the crisis I doubt, very much, that you will disagree with the fundamental premise of my argument.

… and that, really, is my point.

While we should be having a social conversation that settles our agreement on the fundamentals of climate change in the first five minutes … and goes on to allow us to debate the particulars of the solution … we are, instead, distracted. As such, we are sleep-walking towards disaster.

The full might of our human ingenuity should be laser-focused on solving both our environmental challenges and the underlying socio-economic challenges that keep us from changing our dangerously polluting habits: excessive consumerism and all the agricultural and industrial damage done to support it.

But we are not focused. At all.

Instead: the few who have the most, being frightened of having less, simply send their jesters out to distract us from our inevitable fate.

Our news media acts as the amplifier for their misdirection and prevents society at large from discussing – or even identifying – the inequity being protected at our expense.

If you care about the environment – or for that matter about education or health – then you must agree that we must first change the way we manage public and political discourse in this country before we try and change anything else.

We cannot solve any problems while we cannot properly identify, understand our debate the matter at hand. Our system of news simply does not allow that to happen…

… and I’m sorry, but until we fix the news, no amount of hand-wringing or scary charts or environmentally-minded bank CEOs is going to change the inevitable and catastrophic social-economic and environmental disaster that is thundering down the road towards us.

When it hits us, rest assured, we will still be fawning over the latest irrelevant escapades of the cretinous fools we think we’ve put in charge…

… and we will be damned, not by them, but our own apathy alone.