Post by Teddy Bear on Aug 4, 2013 17:10:31 GMT
Christopher Booker has produced 2 related articles in the Telegraph this weekend. While this one about solar panels specifically targets BBC bias on the subject, the other about the ridiculous cost of backing up wind turbines, and the BBC continual avoidance to focus on this, could also apply.
It's what BBC considers 'balance' as Christopher observes.
It's what BBC considers 'balance' as Christopher observes.
The BBC’s solar eclipse
Having been reprimanded by the BBC Trust for daring to stray from the BBC’s line in favour of welfare benefits, John Humphrys was, by Friday, showing that he was firmly back on message in an interview on the ever more vapid Today programme, starring the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King.
True to the BBC’s statutory obligation to impartiality, Sir David was allowed to plug a newspaper article he had written calling for the world to make a mammoth push for solar energy, comparable with the effort made to land a man on the Moon. For balance, Today then wheeled on a journalist to say that she “echoed” Sir David’s views, while Humphrys himself confessed that he has put “a solar thing” on his own roof.
What Today considered irrelevant was any mention of recent reports from Germany and Spain, which have poured billions of euros into subsidising solar panels, only to find that this was such a catastrophically expensive waste of money for very little result that they are cutting back drastically on subsidies, with Germany due to scrap them altogether by 2018.
Even here in Britain, where we pay subsidies of up to 150 per cent to persuade people to join the solar scam, those hundreds of thousands of panels that are disfiguring roofs and vast tracts of our countryside managed last year to produce, on average, only 135MW of power – less than the output of 70 diesel generators.
But none of this would trouble Sir David, who once courted controversy over a seeming prediction that unless we curbed our CO2 emissions the world could get so hot that the only continent left inhabitable would be Antarctica.
He may be right up the BBC’s street, but why the rest of us need to listen is a mystery.
Having been reprimanded by the BBC Trust for daring to stray from the BBC’s line in favour of welfare benefits, John Humphrys was, by Friday, showing that he was firmly back on message in an interview on the ever more vapid Today programme, starring the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King.
True to the BBC’s statutory obligation to impartiality, Sir David was allowed to plug a newspaper article he had written calling for the world to make a mammoth push for solar energy, comparable with the effort made to land a man on the Moon. For balance, Today then wheeled on a journalist to say that she “echoed” Sir David’s views, while Humphrys himself confessed that he has put “a solar thing” on his own roof.
What Today considered irrelevant was any mention of recent reports from Germany and Spain, which have poured billions of euros into subsidising solar panels, only to find that this was such a catastrophically expensive waste of money for very little result that they are cutting back drastically on subsidies, with Germany due to scrap them altogether by 2018.
Even here in Britain, where we pay subsidies of up to 150 per cent to persuade people to join the solar scam, those hundreds of thousands of panels that are disfiguring roofs and vast tracts of our countryside managed last year to produce, on average, only 135MW of power – less than the output of 70 diesel generators.
But none of this would trouble Sir David, who once courted controversy over a seeming prediction that unless we curbed our CO2 emissions the world could get so hot that the only continent left inhabitable would be Antarctica.
He may be right up the BBC’s street, but why the rest of us need to listen is a mystery.