Christopher Booker’s Notebook in today’s Sunday Telegraph

focuses on three interesting environmental topics, including this extract concerning the BBC’s misleading coverage:

A feature of the row over the BBC’s rigging of competitions has been the rush to protest that this is trivial compared with the much greater scandal of the BBC’s generally biased world-view on a whole range of topics, giving almost everything it broadcasts a distorting spin.

It is not always easy to pin this down to hard, indisputable facts, but one small, telling example consistently demonstrates just how one-sided its coverage has become.For some years, in all the BBC’s promotion of the benefits of wind power, it has always concealed one central flaw. This is the fact that turbines are a highly inefficient and unreliable energy source because wind only blows on average for a quarter of the time.

The BBC betrays its systematic bias on this by invariably referring to the output of wind turbines only in terms of their “installed capacity”, as if their blades were constantly spinning at maximum efficiency,

Last week, for instance, the BBC reported on three turbines, nearly 400ft high, being installed at the port of Bristol. These, it told us, will produce “all the electricity needed to run the port”, while saving 15,000 tons of CO2 every year.

There was no mention of the fact that three quarters of the time the port will have to draw its power from conventional power stations, kept running to step in when the wind drops (let alone that those 15,000 tons of “CO2 savings” equate to 3 per cent of the yearly emissions of one jumbo jet).

Another tireless promoter of the wind scam is Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC’s environmental correspondent, who recently reported on the Government’s energy White Paper standing in front of the 36-turbine Gallow Rig windfarm in Dumfriesshire, which she excitably claimed produces “enough power for around 18,000 homes”.

In fact, thanks to the Renewable Energy Foundation’s website, we can now see exactly how much (or how little) energy is produced by every turbine in the land. This shows that claims such as this exaggerated Gallow Rig’s output by about 400 per cent.

Because this sort of telltale error is so persistent in the BBC’s coverage of wind power, perhaps it is time for the corporation to tell us exactly what it is up to.

Do read the rest – it’s all interesting stuff.

Thank you to commenter Max for the link.