The central part of BBC reporting of climate change is an unquestioning acceptance of the tenets of the green religion. Here David Shukman – enlarging his size nine BBC carbon footprint with a nice trip to Texas in advance of Cancun – admiringly tells us that there are more wind turbines in the southern state than almost anywhere else. Breathlessly, too, he trots out their output as if, without a doubt, these monstrosities are going to be a replacement for the nasty coal and oil and gas. True, he talks to a few of those who oppose both the turbines and the concept of climate change; but his condescending tone implies strongly that these are right-wing Republican nutters.
I note, too, that Mr Shukman omits key issues which I would have regarded as important in a longer-form background story of this kind. He has not a scintilla of curiosity about whether wind farms are actually efficient, or whether they are – as T.Bone Pickens clearly believes – “green”. Matt Ridley (writer of the book The Rational Optimist) posted on this very issue yesterday, and Mr Shukman, had he been at all objective, could have dug it out. What he says is devastating:
Every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2.5 tonnes of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up to spoil my view in Northumberland. The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty (involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product), that only one country does it: China. This year it flexed its trade muscles and briefly stopped exporting neodymium from its inner Mongolian mines. How’s that for dangerous reliance on a volatile foreign supply?
Besides, wind does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. As Robert Bryce shows in his book Power Hungry, even Denmark, which can switch off imported Norwegian hydro power when the wind spins its many turbines, has failed to save any significant net carbon emissions through wind. The intermittent nature of the wind means that fossil-fuel power stations have to be kept going, or inefficiently powered up and down. Besides, the total power produced from even the biggest wind farms is so small that, as a strategy for reducing carbon emissions significantly, wind power is a failure
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This lack of inclusion of such key facts is deliberate bias by omission and shows this story up for what it really is – yet another part of the BBC’s endless no-expense-spared green crusade.