Peter Barron is the editor of Newsnight, BBC2′s flagship daily news programme, fronted by the famously no-nonsense Jeremy Paxman.

Writing on the BBC Editors blog this week, Barron asked how green the BBC ought to be, and whether it has a duty to try and green up its viewers. His conclusions, rather predictably, were that while it should try and cover green issues in a balanced manner, which means largely following scientific opinion that the warming of our planet is caused by human activities, the BBC should not and must not become a campaigning organisation in its own right on this issue.

He was spurred by Paxman’s comments about BBC hypocrisy on the issue. Writing in an internal BBC publication, Ariel, Paxman had pointed out that:

The BBC’s environment correspondents, even the makers of series like Planet Earth, are trapped in a bizarre arrangement in which they travel the globe to tell the audience of the dangers of climate change while leaving a vapour trail which will make the problem even worse… It strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible. [souce: This is London]

But really the BBC is in a it of a wedge here, for it has a duty to dispatch its reporters to bring us these stories. Further, it could be argued that sending one crew off to the Amazon delta to bring the issue of deforestation to a potential audience of millions means that the opportunity for us viewers to offset the carbon footprint of that trip by amending our daily lies is increased. These trips, polluting though they may be, could actually be highly environmentally profitable for the world as a whole.

It would further be wholly wrong for the BBC, as a publicly-funded body, to spend license-payers’ money on carbon offsets. That’s not what the license is for, and spending it in this way would be a betrayal of the trust between the BBC and its public, regardless of that fact that I would personally be more than happy to see some of my contribution spent that way.

Increasingly this looks like a no-win situation for the BBC, which has been forced into an impossible position by the comments of one of its most high-profile employees.

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