THE FAIL STRIKES AGAIN

A lifetime ago, that august periodical known as the Daily Mail openly declared its admiration for a certain German Chancellor who went on to murder millions, simply because they were Jewish, black, gay, gypsies or disapproved somewhat of his fondness for invading other people's countries.

Treachery seems to run through the sclerotic arteries of the Daily Heil. That's why it regularly pays thirty pieces of silver to a deranged and slavering mutt known as Richard Littlejohn (we think the surname is really a nickname), so that he can unleash his peculiar brand of right-wing drivel on the British public from his home in Florida.

Given the immense problems we face - climate change, peak oil, energy security, etc, etc - it must be considered an act of treason not just to oppose sensible and urgent renewable developments but to shriek gormless lies about them just to keep the nimby readership of the Heil in full tut-tut mode. Which makes Littledick one of the biggest traitors of them all.

His barking rant in today's hate-Mail is typical. First of all, he wants to blame the rising costs of gas and electricity to the consumer entirely on the renewables industry. Forget wholesale prices and global shortages in natural resources, or the fact that Japan, embarrassed over its nuclear catastrophe, is now competing for natural gas imports - let's just pretend shall we that the real problem is windfarms. That's right. Don't attack the problem - blame the solution!

To begin with, this article questions whether Littlehampton and his pack of mongrel journalists are even right about the scale of the price increases:

http://fullfact.org/factchecks/energy_bills_prices_climate_change_taxes-2758

Now, we don't expect Littlebrain to get his facts right. After all, why break the habit of a lifetime? And, of course, his fatuous 'opinion' was instantly flagged up by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group of nutters, led by Nigel Lawson, which exists to deny climate change, rather as the Renewable Energy Foundation exists to promote the use of fossil fuels.

Even so, Littlehope's grotesque excuse for a journalistic article does what all the right-wing papers do: trots out every false fact and disproven myth it can. Reading that sort of gibberish is very much like being at a nimby meeting, or one of VVASP's notorious rallies. Science and sense go out of the window. Lies are the currency.

Of course Littleman trots out the usual hogwash about windfarms never actually generating electricity (this usually comes in the same breath as the one about them being built only to generate subsidies, but since the Renewables Obligation Certificates are only awarded on the basis of the amount of electricity generated that argument doesn't really stand up). And then he gets all hot under the collar because some windfarm owners were paid money earlier this year to shut down their turbines.

This, said Littlewilly, was because it was an 'especially gusty night' - the windfarms 'were producing too much electricity and there was no capacity to store it.' In other words, in the mad, mad world of Littletwat and his barking believers, windfarms don't produce electricity, except on the one occasion when they produced too much.

You couldn't make it up, could you? Well, actually you could. Or rather, if you were Richard Littlecapacityforrationalthought, you did.

The problem was not that it was an 'especially gusty night' on 5/6 April 2011. The problem was that a thermo-nuclear power plant was being brought online after a rather typical period of outage (the myth that nuclear is reliable simply doesn't stand up, either).

It was not an 'especially gusty night', but it had rained heavily in Scotland, so that the hydroelectric facilities were all working at full pelt. Now, Scotland is a net exporter of electricity (all those windfarms, see?), but that night the main power lines to England went down.

Put simply, Scotland had more electricity on hand than it knew what to do with, couldn't sell it to England because the lines had gone down, and couldn't power down the nuclear reactors because that's a huge palaver.

The simplest, easiest and safest solution was to shut down a few turbines till the problem was over. As ever, the turbines proved to be more reliable than other sources (as with Japan - a nuclear meltdown, but the turbines stayed working as usual). Obviously, having gone to the trouble of installing the turbines, the windfarm owners were due compensation for the electricity that they would not be producing while everyone else flapped about like Keystone Kops.

What Littlewit and his fellow morons in Heil-land and elsewhere keep trying to hide is the fact that, once again, wind turbines saved the day.

But then, with an idiot like Littlejohn, working for a paper of traitors, what do you really expect?