‘ …a sobering and disturbing tale, and a reminder that intelligence and a lifelong devotion to “truth” is no protection whatever against believing that the most brutal, stupid, dangerous and unethical ideology is the greatest achievement of mankind.’ Philosophy’s shameful love
Three examples of where the BBC reports something in a different way depending on what ‘narrative’ it is trying to push…..
Firstly….
The BBC’s Matt McGrath was quick to try an exploit a report from the GWPF and turn it to his advantage….despite, when you read it, there being little in its contents that bare much resemblance to claims made in McGrath’s imaginative report.
McGrath preferring to massage the truth in favour of his own ideological prejudices has by comparison completely ignored another report by the GWPF and Michael Gove’s response.
The Daily Mail does report events:
Heads are breaking the law if they preach eco agenda, warns Gove: Education Secretary’s ‘concern’ at report that accuses ‘activist’ teachers
Plans to curb wind turbines onshore will push up electricity bills
Secondly:
When energy firms put up their prices they made a claim that the green levy was a major consideration and burden on them…this was of course pooh pooed by those with vested interests in maintaining the momentum of the green agenda by making fossil fuels more expensive, artificially loading them with extra taxes to make renewables seem cheap….but of course they have to hide the amount of subsidy the renewables get to make that possible.
Helpfully the BBC has long ignored or downplayed the enormous subsidies going to windfarms and other green renewable energy generators. More often than not fossil fuel or nuclear are pictured as vastly more expensive, not to mention dangerous.
How strange then that the BBC, in the shape of Matt McGrath, is now very concerned about the effect that restricting the building of windfarms will have on energy prices….
Plans to restrict wind farms to seas around Britain will need much larger subsidies from consumers, experts say.
So….not interested in the vast costs of directly funding windfarms when they are being built but suddenly is interested when windfarms aren’t being built…then, oddly, not subsidising them is going to cost us more.
Harrabin joins in the chorus of propaganda for onshore:
Journalism or green lobbying?
Roger Harrabin has a theory...and it is only a theory because he offers no proof (who needs proof when you are on a crusade?)…..Pickles has banned windfarms because of the right wing press…..
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has staged a minor coup over coalition energy policy.
Conservative newspapers have been demanding a cap on onshore wind farms, but the Lib Dems have refused to agree…..the Liberal Democrats, accused him of playing politics….
However even McGrath doesn’t come up with that fantasy (and the BBC itself has frequently blamed ‘rightwing Tory backbenchers’ for this policy change)……
Newspaper reports suggest that the Conservative Party will include a pledge to limit onshore turbines in next year’s election manifesto.
Long unpopular among some Conservative MPs from rural constituencies, onshore wind turbines appear to have incurred the wrath of the Prime Minister as well.
Which paper does McGrath link to there?…er…the right wing Guardian….
And what does the Guardian say?:
The south-west is home to a large number of onshore windfarms and marginal Tory-Lib Dem seats.
Asked by the Western Morning News whether plans to curb wind farms would feature in his party’s manifesto, Shapps said: “The wind is moving in a clear direction here.”
Ah…so marginal Tory seats….in other words Tory MPs working the maths out for themsleves unaided by a rabid right wing Press….ban windfarms and get more votes.
Presumably the Western Morning News is not an example of that rabid right wing Press…and yet it is asking questions about a ‘cap’.
Just another example of Harrabin confusing his personal prejudice with news and journalism.
Here Harrabin is more interested in the politics than the facts:
A third example of the BBC’s hypocrisy and the tortured manipulation of the facts to fit their agenda….
China has long been held up as the poster child of the green renewables initiative, despite building a coal power station every week.
China is the new Go-Green Model
We have been told that such developing nations must be allowed to generate massive amounts of CO2 in order that they can industrialise…it’s only fair that they be allowed to catch up with the West.
What’s odd about that is of course that we are frequently told that we have ‘x’ number of months to save the planet…cut CO2 or we will fry.
100 months to save the world
How does that work….a desperate and dangerous time when belching out CO2 is destroying the planet…..and yet China et al are to be allowed to pump out …CO2.
Here’s the latest from the IPCC….
[The IPCC] warns that governments are set to crash through the global CO2 safety threshold by 2030. Humans have tripled CO2 emissions since 1970, it says – and emissions have been accelerating rather than slowing.
Sounds apocalyptic doesn’t it? And yet…China is the Green’s poster boy for renewables…
…why? Because to justify allowing China to generate all that CO2 the apologists have to find something to excuse that ‘polluting’ of the planet…..and it is polluting apparently….Harrabin is quite firm in that belief:
[Harrabin should really stop Tweeting]
But back in the UK or the West, the fingers point at, for example, our vehicle use and how polluting that is…….when people suggest China has vastly more vehicles the point is made that that’s OK because when you look at it as cars per head of population China has far fewer cars than Western countries…not more ‘in absolute terms’….so that’s OK.
The report, seen by BBC News, warns that transport will become the biggest source of CO2 emissions unless politicians act firmly.
Act firmly…but let China et al have what they want.
Contrast the approach when a climate change advocate is trying to extol the virtues and the capacity of wind energy in China….suddenly the relatively tiny wind generated energy shouldn’t be compared ‘per head’ so to speak, but in absolute terms…and then it is permissible to compare it to Europe’s own generation capacity…which of course is allegedly smaller…so good for China…….
A more fundamental question is the likely contribution of wind power to China’s insatiable demand for energy.
The most recent figures, for 2012, show that wind only generated 2% of the country’s electricity. Coal, the largest contributor, generated 75%.
However, since China’s total generation is more than that of all European Union countries combined, wind’s percentage is large in absolute terms.
So…hurray…China is leading the world in green renewable energy…er…in absolute terms…not in comparison to the polluting, dirty, filthy fossil fuel energy it actually produces…but never mind ignore that when convenient.
And then maybe not even in ‘absolute terms’….. in the comments to the BBC report someone begs to differ and suggests China is not as productive as the BBC claims:
84.
Roberto Lacal
9th January 2014 – 20:59
One of the statements of the article is not true: “the European Union countries together have just over 90GW of installed wind capacity”.
The EU had 106 GW of wind installed capacity by 31/12/2012. Source: “Renewable Energy Snapshots 2012”, p. 34.
In addition, China produced 100.2 TWh of wind electricity and the EU around 180 TWh in 2012 (Eurostat official figures only published by July 2014)
And you may be interested in this from the Telegraph:
Global solar dominance in sight as science trumps fossil fuels
Solar power will slowly squeeze the revenues of petro-rentier regimes in Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. They will have to find a new business model, or fade into decline
Solar power has won the global argument. Photovoltaic energy is already so cheap that it competes with oil, diesel and liquefied natural gas in much of Asia without subsidies.
Roughly 29pc of electricity capacity added in America last year came from solar, rising to 100pc even in Massachusetts and Vermont. “More solar has been installed in the US in the past 18 months than in 30 years,” says the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). California’s subsidy pot is drying up but new solar has hardly missed a beat.
For the world it portends a once-in-a-century upset of the geostrategic order. Sheikh Ahmed-Zaki Yamani, the veteran Saudi oil minister, saw the writing on the wall long ago. “Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil,” he told The Telegraph in 2000. Wise old owl.
Read a bit of James Lovelocks “Revenge of Gaia” in a charity shop yesterday(not worth the £2.49 , but got the drift!)
He wants us to have nuclear power(as France does) and to reduce our population( as China and India have done).
I respect his reductio ad adsurdem-his clear scientific principles, but he knew he was a pawn in Al Gores agitpop shenanigans and has nothing but scorn for the lobbies and media, charities and political oafs like the Greens.
In face he says that when the Greens got political, they lost any pretence of genuines science or caring for the truth-the virtue, the titles and media pawned them in turn.
No wonder he`s hated by Monbiot and Porritt etc-and no wonder we never hear him on the BBC, despite being the father of this quack religion of the BBCs.
Our stupid new Prime Minister wants to reduce France’s nuclear generation by 30% by 2020. If you have a look at this active site You will see the overwhelming dependance that we have on this form of energy. At the moment of looking there was:
Total demand 50.24GW
Nuclear = 45.67GW (90.90%)
The man is mad, living in Cuckoo land.
Whoops. The site is
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
Lovelock has recanted on Newsnight, but he did look a bit fearful when he said they where guessing.
Lovelock has caught up with David Bellamy, both are greenies that realise that carbon dioxide is the food of live, not a pollutant.
Without Lovelocks Gaia, due to life thriving on carbon dioxide and water, the Earth would be like Mars and Venus, with a carbon dioxide atmosphere.
harrabin tweets, “Do you support a switch from onshore to offshore wind?”
My response would be, I support blowing up every windmill and going back to coal. It is cheaper, more efficient, would get miners back to work and with the CO2 driven climate catastrophe hypothesis being increasingly falsified, It would not damage the planet!
My response to Mr Harrabin would be…. “No, and unless you can provide reasonable proof that, compared to other energy production methods, onshore-wind-produced energy is not going to be highly subsidised (given, just for example, the high cost of stand-by generation for when there is little wind around) for the rest of the life of the expensive equipment we’re installing, then that, too should be stopped in its tracks.
Offshore wind equipment which, almost by definition, given its location and thus its propensity to be much less easily maintained, is bound to be more expensive over its lifetime than similar onshore equipment, and has never had an effective business model without even bigger subsidies.
Something else that never seems to be ‘reported’ or ‘speculated’ on is the effect of climate change on the production of ‘renewable’ energy. Will the sun continue to shine and the wind blow?
Last week, for instance, we were in full disaster mode because of the mist/pollution/afro-dust hitting London (in particular, of course!), did this have an affect on solar for instance?
Well, on my own installation, I have been noting a gradual steady increase in weekly generation as the hours of daylight increase. Last week, however, the output was only 62% of the previous week.
Climate change might produce cloudier summers and lower wind speeds so all this new infrastructure will be wasted.
Anybody thought of a telly that has an aerial that can double as a wind turbine?
I know we`re digital-but I for one am happy to return to the landfill if my return to analogue would save an Arctic hare from slipping and hurting its paw.
Especially now Rolf is indisposed , should it need care at the vets.
The idea that China (and others) have to catch up with the West despite their humungous CO2 output proves that the ‘climate change’ agenda is purely political and anti-West. Hardly surprising as the whole environmental movement was infiltrated by Marxists a long time ago.