Is Australia’s ABC Asking the Wrong Questions About Climate Change?

A billboard at a busy train station in Melbourne’s wealthy inner-East earlier this year featured an eerie message projected onto a home on a suburban street that had seemingly been plunged into almost complete darkness.

“CAN WE AFFORD THE ENERGY TRANSITION?” the sign asked, in all caps.

Beneath the illuminated message appeared the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s logo, and the words “Keep Asking.”

The ad was part of a campaign for ABC News that included at least seven other questions, none of which questioned the costs of fossil fuels or climate change more directly.

We spoke to a number of climate advocates and journalists who expressed concerns that framing the question around the affordability of the energy transition, rather than the mounting costs of not acting to prevent climate change from worsening, resembled disinformation tactics used by the fossil fuel industry to delay climate action.

To find out more, Drilled put questions to the ABC and asked for correspondence about how the questions were finalized via a freedom of information request. We also conducted an analysis of how ABC News has been covering the costs of both renewable energy and fossil fuels.

Our findings indicate that both the ad campaign and the ABC’s broader coverage suggest that the ABC may not be following its own editorial policies, including those on ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Impartiality and Diversity of Perspectives’ when reporting on the costs related to the energy transition.

‘Keep Asking’

After seeing a billboard with the question “Can we afford the energy transition?” at Malvern station in Melbourne, earlier this year, Drilled sent the ABC a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to try to understand more about how this particular question ended up being displayed as a prominent, standalone advertisement.

An email sent to Drilled under FoI showed that the question on the energy transition was among seven questions included in the final campaign   that were “approved by EdPols”, the ABC’s Editorial Policy department, before being sent to Leo Australia.

An eighth question that was included at this stage, which an email said captured “all final feedback”, was redacted from the list sent to Drilled. The only other environment-linked questions in the final campaign were “What’s causing the algal bloom?” and “How much more can our farmers survive?”

The Editorial Policy department, which approved the list sent to Drilled, is responsible for ensuring that ABC content complies with the “guiding principles” of the ABC’s “editorial approach”, including policies on ‘Accuracy’ and ‘Impartiality and Diversity of Perspectives’.

The Accuracy policy requires “reasonable efforts to ensure that material facts are accurate and presented in context” and says that content should “not present factual content in a way that will materially mislead the audience.”

The Impartiality and Diversity of Perspectives also says that ABC content should seek “balance that follows the weight of evidence.”

Yet a number of climate advocates that Drilled spoke to expressed concern about the inclusion of the question ‘Can we afford the energy transition?’ in the campaign.

“I was perturbed to see that the ABC, while advertising itself as a source of truth, would highlight a question that is actually just a climate denial narrative,” Belinda Noble, the President of climate advocacy group Comms Declare told Drilled.

“A lot better question would have been, you know, why is my house insurance going up? … Or why is there a super Godzilla El Niño coming this summer?” Noble said.

The ABC has “a terrific climate reporting team”, Noble added. “Maybe they should have asked them before putting in a question about the cost of climate action.”

The Keep Asking campaign was developed for the Australian public broadcaster’s news division along with the advertising firm Leo Australia, a subsidiary of US-based ad firm Leo Burnett.

Asked by Drilled about how the Keep Asking campaign came about, an ABC spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the “questions were not constructed for advertising, they were already being asked.”

“The idea came to life through eight real questions, drawn directly from ABC News’ journalism, covering a range of topics,” the spokesperson added, without specifying who had asked the questions.

Drilled also asked if other questions about the costs of fossil fuels or climate change had been considered.

The spokesperson did not respond directly to this question.

The fossil fuel industry has long used biased economic analysis that overemphasises the costs of actions while omitting the costs of climate change as a means to discourage timely action on climate change.

Guidelines from Covering Climate Now, an initiative which hundreds of newsrooms have signed up to, suggest that journalists should make the climate connection in relevant stories, which for example might mean including estimates of the costs of climate change, when reporting on the relative costs of different kinds of energy infrastructure.

When we asked if the ABC had any specific reporting guidelines on climate change, they pointed us to the same editorial policies that the ABC’s internal emails showed were used to approve the wording in the Keep Asking campaign.

While the issues with this wording were not identified by ABC’s Ed Pols, Noble told Drilled that it may have been picked up if the ABC had worked with an ad agency that has committed to not working with fossil fuel clients, in a registry maintained by Comms Declare. A registry maintained by Comms Declare includes dozens of Australian agencies that have made this commitment.

“What this campaign reveals is that either someone at Leo or the ABC just doesn’t understand climate communications,” she said. “Because talking about the cost of climate action is one of the main narratives of denial, and is used a lot by industry across Australia to try and stop climate action and stop the rollout of renewables.”

Leo Australia, which the ABC worked with on the Keep Asking campaign, does not work with any fossil fuel clients, according to a list compiled by the US-based group Clean Creatives. However, outside Australia, its parent and holding companies do work with a range of fossil fuel clients.

‘Journalism is more important than ever’

For Drilled, the inclusion of the question “can we afford the energy transition?” in the Keep Asking ad campaign also raised questions about how ABC News is covering these issues.

The ABC is regularly ranked as Australia’s most-visited news website yet we found that when it comes to reporting on the costs of renewables versus fossil fuels, its readers may not be getting a balanced picture.

For example, an online article about Victoria’s Western Renewables Link described the project as a “controversial $1.5 billion transmission line project” in the first sentence.

By comparison at least three articles about so-called waste-to-energy plants, which will burn rubbish, including plastics (PDF) derived from fossil fuels, in Victoria, included no references to how much these projects cost.

By contrast, News Corp’s Herald Sun newspaper reported on the same story with the headline: ‘$15bn waste incinerator, data centre plan for Sunbury’.

Unlike the Western Renewables Link which was described as “controversial” in an ABC headline, one ABC headline about the incinerators used words like “modern” and “safe” before describing community opposition to the campaign as “these Melbourne residents aren’t convinced”.

These differences seem to reflect a broader trend across more than two dozen ABC News articles analysed by Drilled.  We found that the 15 most recent articles about renewable energy infrastructure projects we analyzed in mid-October were more than twice as likely to refer to their costs prominently and specifically than the 15 most recent articles about fossil fuel projects which mostly included no references to costs at all.Some 86 percent of the articles about renewables projects mentioned the cost above the fold, on average by line seven. By comparison only 40 percent of the articles about fossil fuel projects mentioned their cost, and of the handful that did it was on average more than two times further down in the article, by line 15 on average.

This pattern contrasts with the latest data on electricity generation costs in Australia, from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).

As explained in one recent ABC article these latest figures, published in July, showed that “average prices in the national electricity market spanning the country’s eastern seaboard [have] fallen from historic highs of $189 a megawatt hour in 2022 to $104 a megawatt hour in 2025.”

The report added that the 2022 price spike was due to gas price increases “triggered by sanctions on Russia due to the Ukraine war, together with unplanned coal plant outages”, two details that were left out of at least two ABC articles referring to this research.

An article from ABC’s climate team did report on the CSIRO/AEMO’s finding that “battery technologies continue to deliver cost reductions while rising demand for gas turbines to power US data centres is increasing costs for gas-based technologies.”

Australia’s aging coal infrastructure also means that some costs in building new energy are inevitable, but the CSIRO/AEMO projections show that renewables are already the most affordable alternatives to invest in.

Aging coal plants mean outages are an increasingly common occurrence in places like the Latrobe Valley in Eastern Victoria.

Josie Hess, from Environment Victoria, told Drilled that they “grew up watching the ABC” and that the framing of the campaign’s question on the costs of the transition was “odd.”

“The real question is can we afford not to, to which the answer is no.”

Hess, who is from the Latrobe Valley, said that most people in the city still don’t know what’s going on there, including the environmental and water issues related to closing aging coal power stations.

“Journalism is more important than ever to hold power to account,” they told Drilled.

“I just want to see the ABC back in its full ethical power, you know?”