BBC in bed with FoE again

As usual, the BBC can do a good job in leaving the reader speechless (with rage, usually). Take this latest example from the always odious Richard Black. Under a headline of UK nuclear plans 'put energy in French hands', Black regales us with the story of 'four senior environmentalists' (all former directors of Friends of the Earth UK), warning David Cameron that the plans for new nuclear build put the UK tax payer at too much financial risk.

The gall of these people is unbelievable. One of them is even quoted as saying:

"How on Earth can the prime minister justify paying billions of pounds of subsidy to French power companies when the chancellor is slashing welfare budgets for poor people in Britain and there are a million young people unemployed?"

Since when have these four ever been interested in the British tax payer? I hear no complaint from them about the millions wasted on wind farms, solar and other 'renewables' gravy trains. Nor do they seem to be aware that it's because these renewables don't function as effective power sources that we're having to go the nuclear route - all in the cause of reducing CO2. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas have followed through on their own logic and accepted that nuclear is the way to go.

But the truth is that we're already dependent on nuclear, including French nuclear generated electricity piped to the national grid. And that dependency will grow even as we throw money at windfarms.

These four unelected politicians (which is what they are, the FoE being part of the corporate state that runs the EU), are also against the one fuel source that can stop both windfarms and new nuclear in its tracks: shale gas. What's more, shale will also reduce CO2 emissions to a greater extent than most renewables. If they were serious, they would be out campaigning for shale and trying to end the windfarm subsidy-fest that they helped engineer in the first place.

And, if we were serious, we'd also be campaigning for more research into thorium reactors - which again promise cheap, low-carbon energy and without the military spin-offs that have driven so much development of conventional nuclear energy.

But that's never going to happen. The truth is what Porritt and co want is to scale back industrial development, cut back on cheap energy and move society back into a world where light and heat are luxuries and we live in a cold, dark world that's closer to nature and more in tune with Gaia. When all is said and done, primitivism is where their brand of environmentalism inevitably leads...