[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Alice Watkins Last month the think tank Civitas published their report on net zero, which claimed that the cost of reaching net zero would be £6000 per household per year. This report was covered in the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Spectator, Daily Express and The Times. It soon emerged that the report contained serious and fundamental errors, yet the newspapers which covered it have not adequately corrected themselves - and IPSO, the press complaints handler, has done nothing.The report, penned by climate sceptic Ewen Stewart, claims to offer a “realistic” £4.5 trillion estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Energy costs alone were calculated to be £810bn - a fifth of the total costs included in the report. But, as Carbon Brief editor Simon Evans explained in the Guardian, Civitas only reached this figure on account of some seriously flawed methodology.Firstly, the basis of Stewart’s calculation confused measurements for power capacity (MW) with electricity generation (MWh). This resulted in his overestimating costs by over 10,000 times. Secondly, as well as ignoring the savings from net zero in terms of lower fossil fuel bills, the report also fails to account for any of the costs which would occur from the impact of unmitigated climate change (which would be saved, from moving to net zero). In reality, the impact of climate change and the increased price of fossil fuels has already had a serious impact on the public’s everyday life. In 2022, an estimated £11bn was added to UK food bills. The report seems to have been timed to follow on from Rishi Sunak’s climate speech, in which the Prime Minister called for an honest approach to net zero that ends “unacceptable costs”. Much of the coverage also failed to highlight Stewart’s (who wrote in 2021 that human-caused warming is a “contested theory”) history of climate change scepticism.Newspapers should hold power to account. Coverage of climate science impacts the decisions we make in our daily lives as citizens, and it is important that reporting on the issue is accurate. Of course, think tanks and journalists should have the right to express their own opinions, even irrational ones. But newspapers should not blindly republish the press releases of think tanks, without investigating the accuracy of their reports.

IPSO has done nothing

The Times and Daily Express have since taken down the articles - but we have been unable to find evidence of a correction.Removed but uncorrected articles will not stop the spread of dangerous misinformation online, as many readers will have already seen the inaccurate report.The Mail removed the article, but instead of prominently correcting themselves, they published a brief and light-on-detail clarification:An article in Thursday’s paper reported analysis from think tank Civitas about the possible costs of achieving net zero. We are happy to make clear that Civitas has since removed the study from their website because it was found to contain factual errors. The Sun, meanwhile, have - incredibly - kept the article up! All they have done is added a disclaimer, stating that there are inaccuracies, but not specifying where, and indicating they will update the piece in future. This is not good enough, and is exposing more people to disinformation every day.IPSO could investigate these inaccuracies, and how it came to be that agenda-driven think tanks were able to get them amplified in national newspapers.An independent regulator might even have taken an early look at the report, after the first few days of publication, and advised publishers about its inaccuracies. Proper journalism requires rigorous fact checking in pursuit of the truth, and regulation is essential to building and maintaining the trust of the public, as well as protecting them from inaccuracy.Readers deserve better than newspapers which trade in falsities, to peddle a Government agenda. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]