Time to double down on media censorship

Those transition reality leaks are really getting uncomfortable

Giant Vestas Wind Turbine Collapses in Northern Sweden

Wind turbine falls down in Estonia

No one injured after wind turbine collapses onto Dodge County field, leaving a 'crater'

Wind turbine down | Emergency services race to Vattenfall collapse in Netherlands

Giant wind turbine collapse to be investigated

Do you know how long it took me to find these? About 30 seconds, that’s how long. And the reason I even started was this recent article by Bloomberg: Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over

By now, the story has made the rounds in the media world, prompted some raised brows and no doubt many condescending scoffs, but it may have also prompted another kind of reaction: fear.

When you’re in the business of telling people there is only one right and true way forward into a better future, it is scary to learn that this way may not be the only right and true one for various reasons, including the laws of the physical universe and the fact that humans are imperfect beings (except the extraterrestrial, touched leaders of the transition, of course).

The reason this is scary is because evidence that the transition, as conceived, may be actually the wrong thing to do undermines a narrative that has been carefully crafted and continuously adjusted for many years.

Global warming became rebranded as climate change over these years, seasonally normal weather became referred to as extreme and we were all blessed with a code system for various weather events such as rain, snow or sunshine that made virtually all weather a potential danger, necessitating a warning. Yellow code for moderate rain? Spare me.

As the narrative grew and flourished, and bore fruit in the form of ESG investing and government green new deals, reality began leaking out because that’s what reality tends to do. That or become the wall you run into blinded by beliefs.

EVs caught fire for no apparent reason. California learned to live with the risk of blackouts every summer because solar panels reached peak production during bottom consumption and vice versa. Britain had to restart coal generation amid a wind drought that last for weeks.

A Norwegian shipping company announced a ban on EVs for its vessels because they’re a fire hazard. Insurers are writing off moderately damaged Teslas because they are too expensive to fix. Vampire drain in EVs is a thing. And wind mills have been dropping dead with few noticing.

During all this time, the media, excluding some rogue outlets refusing to join the choir, has been a huge cheerleader of the transition and the changing narrative. It has, in fact, been instrumental for its growth the way fertiliser is instrumental for a plant’s growth. And yet it appears the media cheerleaders have not been doing their jobs all that well if such articles have managed to slip through the cracks of editorial policies.

Too harsh, you say? A case of green grapes, perhaps? Gods forbid. The reason these stories have been showing up in large media outlets such as Bloomberg, the BBC, and even transition-dedicated outlets such as Recharge is that all media feeds on news. If there is no news, there will eventually be no media.

That and a feeling of conscientiousness, a remnant of the old definition of journalism, which cared about reporting the facts, has been what has motivated the writing of these stories. They have not threatened the narrative because they have been few, far between, and lost among all the climate alarm reporting, of which there have been copious, constant amounts.

Reality leaks have not been a threat. Until now. Because they are multiplying and the reason they are multiplying is the same reason a crack in a wall dam, if left unattended, eventually leads to disaster and minus one dam.

Like water, facts cannot be contained behind a wall forever without regular maintenance and the transition-cheerleading media have underperformed on that maintenance task, also known as censorship.

The culprit? Social media. There is little point in trying to cover a wind turbine collapse when witnesses will no doubt tweet about it or write a Facebook status, or upload a video on Instagram or wherever. Totally effective censorship has therefore simply become impossible. So, what’s a transition leader to do in such circumstances? Well, if the obstacle in your way is too big to jump over, you can simply go around it.

Take the way Bloomberg is handling it. Bloomberg News reports factual stories about falling wind turbines. BloombergNEF, for its part, makes detailed forecasts about how wind power generation is going to surge because the energy transition is the only way forward for us and there is no alternative. Bloomberg News then reports on BloombergNEF’s forecasts and so it goes.

This is not an exception but the rule, even for media that do not have their own forecasting department. They just publish research from openly pro-transition outlets and present it as factual news. And it’s not just the media, either.

Imagine my surprise when I started reading BlackRock’s 2023 outlook and found a citation of research from Ember, self-described as an “independent energy think tank that uses data-driven insights to shift the world from coal to clean electricity.” Independent and impartial, I might add.

Here’s the context of the quote: “Further impetus [for the transition] is likely to come from higher traditional energy prices, which are exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis and have shifted the economics decisively in favor of cleaner energy sources.”

Needless to say, it’s not just Bloomberg and BlackRock. It’s pretty much everyone. And it’s getting easier and easier because of the illusion of truth, detailed in this BBC article.

Simply put, the illusion of truth comes down to the fact (scientifically proven) that “people tend to rate items they've seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.”

From the article: “But a reliable effect in the lab isn't necessarily an important effect on people's real-world beliefs. If you really could make a lie sound true by repetition, there'd be no need for all the other techniques of persuasion. One obstacle is what you already know. Even if a lie sounds plausible, why would you set what you know aside just because you heard the lie repeatedly?”

And this is what has made the whole climate change narrative so successful. How many of us had any prior knowledge about meteorology and the earth’s climate history? How many had, and still have, prior knowledge about how energy systems function? A tiny minority, that’s how many.

It is still a tiny minority that is aware of the hard facts. For the rest, the lies that are being repeated hundreds of times on a daily basis — and they are being repeated hundreds of times on a daily basis — has become an unquestionable truth because we simply lack the background knowledge to question it. Until the reality leaks begin multiplying and force us to start questioning the narrative.

The transition media should really do a better job at controlling these leaks before the situation gets out of control. And there is hope of that, per the last paragraph in the Bloomberg article:

“The pressure to invest in green projects is so intense that breakdown fears haven’t yet slowed the flood of money into wind farms,” says Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF.

The failure issue has become a concern for bankers and other creditors, however, who may begin to demand higher interest rates, he says. “There’s a hesitancy among insurers and lenders about these big models that haven’t been tested yet,” Metcalfe says. “The technology alarm bells are ringing.””

One might say, if one is of a strong sarcastic bend, “Oh, really? Whatever could have gone wrong?”