Scientist Lord May attacks BBC’s rejection of Planet Relief day

Mark Henderson, Science Editor
The BBC gave in to a “ludicrous” concern about impartiality when it dropped a day of programmes intended to raise awareness about energy efficiency and climate change, one of Britain’s most senior scientists says.
Lord May of Oxford, a former President of the Royal Society and government chief scientist, said that the BBC had failed in its public service remit by withdrawing from last year’s Energy Saving Day (E-Day).
The BBC had originally planned to support the initiative to encourage energy conservation by staging Planet Relief, a comedy event modelled on Red Nose Day. It dropped out of the project, however, after a report that raised concerns about taking sides on environmental issues and poor ratings for the Live Earth concert of 2007.
E-Day was eventually staged independently last January, without BBC support, but made little public impact. The floodlights of St Paul’s Cathedral in London were turned off to open the event, but it had no effect at all on Britain’s energy consumption.
Lord May blamed the BBC’s withdrawal for the failure of a project that could have done much to encourage individuals to do more to save energy.
“Why the BBC pulled the plug is beyond comprehension,” he said. “They said it would have interfered with impartiality, which I find incomprehensible. The idea was there was to be one day where the BBC did an event like Red Nose Day, asking everybody to turn the lights off and be conscious about electricity consumption. The National Grid would monitor it and you could see the impact on a website, and the BBC was going to be in your face about it all day.
“The whole idea behind the concept was climate change is real, and there’s a lot the individual can do about it.”
Lord May blamed a “ludicrous report on impartiality”, which had suggested that the BBC ought not to be seen to take sides on climate change issues. The science of climate change, he said, was now so well established that the BBC ought not to see it as a political issue on which it had to be neutral. If it was willing to stage famine and poverty relief events, such as Red Nose Day, it ought to be prepared to do the same thing for environmental causes.
He said that the BBC “seems to take the view that everything is like a soccer game, with two sides. This wouldn’t have been in violation of impartiality at all. There are arguments about the timescale of climate change, but there’s no longer any serious debate that we need to be doing stuff to address it.
“This would have been a social service, in much the same way that programmes showing you how to do up your house are a social service.”
The BBC denied that the decision had been based on impartiality. A spokeswoman said: “We explained at the time the reasons why we didn’t go ahead with Planet Relief and that this wasn’t about concern about impartiality but because we had found that audiences responded better to documentaries and factual programming about the issue of climate change.
“We regularly cover this subject in our news and online output as well as in factual programmes, for example showing a definitive history of climate change, Earth — The Climate Wars, on BBC Two last year. We are always looking at other ways to cover the issue. For example we are planning a big special on energy consumption later in the year on BBC One.”
Lord May, who is president of the British Science Association, was speaking at the launch of its British Science Festival at the University of Surrey in Guildford yesterday. In his presidential address tonight, Lord May is to say that the world faces several interlocking problems that will require concerted action over the next decades.
As well as climate change, major challenges will include providing food and water for a growing population, and dealing with a huge loss of biodiversity. “In all this, probably the biggest difficulty is that globally co- operative actions are required,” he will say.
Though Lord May is not religious, he believes that religions can help such co-operation because the idea of a deity can serve as a “punisher” who encourages people not to cheat on their obligations to society. Religions, however, can also be part of the problem because they are often authoritarian and resistant to change.