BBC Look North this lunchtime
More outrageous bias from ?The world?s most trusted broadcaster?
The lead story was that Drax is going to stop burning coal completely, and will only burn wood chip. Hurrah! The world is saved! Big smiles from the presenter and the reporter; you?d think it was VE Day ? except neither of them would know what that was. They pretended to consider the holes in this greeny narrative, but of course it was a sham. They only found a few tiny holes; ones that could easily be darned apparently ? they didn?t discover the massive unfixable voids in the logic of the whole crazy idea. The report was nothing more than a press release for the Green Party. They wheeled on a guy in a Drax hard hat (smart suit + hard hat = voice of authority?), who said, deadpan, that the woodchip was all made from waste wood, and if woodchip wasn?t burnt at Drax it would be burnt in America, where it comes from. This would ?release CO2 into the atmosphere.? Err, that?s what?s happens when it?s burnt at Drax! In any case, more and more stories are coming from the US suggesting that it isn?t 100% scrap wood at all. There was no mention of the CO2 produced when the woodchip is transported by truck, ship, and train to Drax. Drax is, apparently, the UK?s biggest CO2 emitter. The green concept is that these emissions don?t matter, because for every tree burnt another one is planted, and that tree will absorb CO2. Two snags: Trees absorb approximately the same amount of CO2 as the green pasture or crop that they replace, and it takes a tree thirty to fifty years to absorb the amount of CO2 that burning it will release. Since the ?climate emergency? is allegedly upon us right now, that?s not much help is it? The burning of wood pellets causes Drax to emit particulate matter. Drax is one of the top five emitters of PM10 air pollution in Europe. I suppose if the world is going to end in a few years (© Prince Charles, God help us, our next monarch) everyone downwind of Drax might as well die of lung cancer.