Guess What?

I was stunned, stunned I was, to read the headline on the BBC website: "Fracking 'could harm wildlife'".

Now I've been trying to avoid the BBC news site since I saw the Matt McGrath's article that pretty much said that climate change 'deniers' had come round to the truth because they now accepted that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that the world had warmed. Either McGrath is a moron, or he's a slimy motherfucker deliberately playing the warmist game of 'we were right all along ...'. It really is one of the most outrageous bits of warmist propaganda I have ever seen, anywhere.

Anyway, mustn't think about it now, because my blood pressure rises and I end up ranting that we should privatise the BBC, or better yet just close it down completely. Our state broadcast is as despicably Orwellian as you can get when it comes to climate, environment, immigration, the EU, the cuts...ad infinitum.

So, back to the shock horror that fracking could - note the weasel word right there in the headline - harm wildlife. The source of this is a report from a completely disinterested group of environmental and green group, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (you know, the green charity that has tireless campaigned against wind turbines - or not, because chopping up birds is fine if they are collateral damage in the fight against global warming). The summary report, which is what the headlines are based on is available here: http://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/shale_gas_summary_tcm9-365778.pdf

One would assume that such a document would largely be about the damage to wildlife that fracking has been shown to cause in countries where the technology has been used extensively - in other words based on the experience of the US. So I looked in the report for the evidence of extensive damage to wildlife habitats and the harm that this had done to wildlife. But no, there are some vague mentions of damage, but nothing substantive and most of the report is about climate change, methane, and vague 'could do...' prognostications. It's a science-light propaganda piece that is there just to agitate for tough restrictions on fracking because fracking is bad in and of itself. At the end of the day, these people would rather have birds sliced by wind turbines and the environment scarred by wind farms than go for a lower carbon fossil fuel like shale gas.

And of course, no such exercise would be complete without the BBC there to cheer-lead the way.