Talking about climate change can be both entertaining and profitable.

At almost US$50 million in revenue, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has grossed more than any PowerPoint presentation in history.

Greenpeace is a global business with an annual budget well over $100 million. TV news editors are filling lots of airtime with funky shots of Camp Heathrow, the makeshift eco-village opposing a new runway at the busy London, U.K. airport.

This year, the Banff Television Festival decided to go green, printing conference agendas on recycled paper and urging TV moguls to leave their private jets at home and purchase carbon offsets to be carbon neutral.

David Suzuki, Canadian environmental icon

An inspired "Code Green" panel put Canadian environmental icon David Suzuki, Australian scientist Tim Flannery and actress Daryl Hannah on the same stage. Since they're all basically on the same side of the climate change debate, the topic of the day was the role that the media has played, and should play, in covering climate issues. As insiders, they provided some fascinating insights into how our ideas on climate have been shaped.

Suzuki lost no time in attacking the Canadian government and what he calls "the fossil-fuel industry.”

He described how Canadian scientists were galvanized into action at a meeting in 1988. "Scientists generally are very, very conservative," Suzuki said. "They're not ready to jump into the fray and say: 'Look, we've got an urgent crisis coming.' " Yet, at the end of that conference, they issued a press release saying global warming represents a threat second only to nuclear war and calling for a 20-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in 15 years.

"If we had done this," Suzuki lamented, "if we had taken those warnings seriously, we would be so far past the Kyoto targets, the atmosphere would be so much cleaner, and it would have been so much simpler to get to the big reductions."

As for the role of the media in educating or not educating the public, Suzuki did a minuscule mea culpa, noting that even his own show, The Nature of Things, has been influenced by propaganda.

"The fossil-fuel industry particularly, but also the automobile sector, began a campaign of confusion on the part of the public," he said, "and we in the media fell for that."

Of course, he implied that he really knew better and was just somewhat fettered by things like CBC journalistic policy, which calls for balanced coverage.

Recalling his first major global-warming show in 1988, he fretted that "even though 95 per cent of the climatologists are saying it's happening, in the name of balance, we've got to put someone on who's saying: 'No, no, no it's not.' " Suzuki feels that one of the most striking pieces of information in Al Gore's film is that over a 10-year period, "out of 900 and some-odd scientific papers on climate, not one disagreed with the fact that climate change is happening."

"And yet over half of the media reports on climate change during the same period said: 'Well, we don't know.It may or may not be.' So the media have to take a great deal of responsibility for perpetrating the notion to the public that there's still a lot of confusion on the scientists' part."

Suzuki was particularly harsh on professional advocates who oppose his views, saying that "Exxon Mobile especially spent tens of millions of dollars funding a handful of naysayers, many of the same naysayers who were funded by the tobacco industry 10 or 15 years before that."

Flannery also showed some evidence of a persecution complex, though it may have been hard to keep a straight face.

After all, his website features a photo of Flannery with Australian Prime Minister John Howard getting the 2007 Australian of the Year award, so he's not that hard done by at home.

"It's very interesting living in Australia," he mused, "where the coal industry is our biggest export earner, and where we have a deeply conservative government who has been behind George Bush all the way in Iraq.”

He went on to complain about false information coming from right-wing thinktanks.

"There is a network of these naysayers and people who believe the economy is in fact the most important thing on the planet and who are very closely connected," he said. "Whenever I come to Canada and speak, almost the same day the news is back in Australia with a bit of a nasty twist on it, just to show how irresponsible and silly I am because in Australia, until recently, it's been considered unpatriotic to question the future of the coal industry."

Daryl Hannah has earned praise, and multiple awards for speaking out on the environment, for videoblogging on sustainable solutions and for demanding to be driven around in eco-friendly cars with nary a styrofoam cup in sight.

She quickly admitted she's not a climate-change expert, but that she heeds their advice.

"To me, I just listen to our scientists like I'd listen to a fireman," she said. "If a fireman tells you your house is on fire, and there's two guys next door who say, 'Naw, it's not on fire,' I'd probably be prone to listen to the fireman. In this case, our scientists have been giving us a very clear message that we've got a problem to deal with."

I got to pose a question to the panel, somewhat inspired by the acrimonious media exchange between Suzuki and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach. In February 2007, Suzuki hinted that maybe Stelmach should be out of a job because Alberta's slow progress on curbing greenhouse gases "just doesn't show any economic vision or leadership."

Stelmach shot back that Suzuki's comments "reflect the unproductive emotional rhetoric and personal attacks that distract from efforts to find constructive solutions."

Maybe what we need, I suggested, is what the computer industry calls "open-source solutions" - good ideas that are not burdened by being associated with one of the larger-than-life players in the climate-change world.

Off the top of their heads, none of the panelists had any suggestions about how to accomplish this, though one of Flannery's comments came close. "Life's too short to worry about all of that bullshit, as we say in Australia," he laughed. "You've just got to get in there and try to make a difference."

Web watch: www.desmogblog.com (Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)