NO CHANGE

Last night's 'The World Tonight', ignoring the wisdom of Peter Sissons, discussed climate change from a single, wholly biased perspective.

The issue was feed-in tariffs.

These are incentives to encourage people to adopt renewable energy, such as solar panels or wind turbines. Anyone who contributes excess electricity & feeds it back into the national grid will receive a dividend.

Every contributor was in favour of them. No-one questioned the need for them. The presumption of man-made global warming (AGW) was taken as read by all.

First, the BBC's environment 'analyst' Roger Harrabin, a committed supporter of AGW, was on hand to trumpet the triumph of the feed-in tariffs scheme in Germany: "It's been extremely successful in Germany, where they've vastly increased their amount of renewable energy".

Another fan followed as next up came Hermann Scheer, "the German MP" known as 'the father of feed-in tariffs'. (Presenter Robin Lustig failed to mention, naturally, that Scheer is a Social Democrat - in a fresh case of Bias by Labeling (or, in this case, not labeling)), who waxed lyrical in favour of his child. His one bone of contention with the British Labour government's adoption of this policy is, as you might expect, that they should pay a higher dividend (say 40p rather than 30p). Scheer is Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy & president of EUROSOLAR.

Did a dissenting voice follow? No, instead we got a discussion between Lord Philip Hunt, the Labour minister for climate change (one of the ministers responsible for the proposed legislation) & Jeremy Leggatt, chairman of the solar energy company Solarcentury, who (unsurprising) made it clear that "We love feed-in tariffs!". Again, Leggatt's only beef with the government was that it wasn't going far enough & also wanted a higher dividend.

On what planet would this be considered a balanced discussion?

Robin Lustig's questions were also wholly concerned with the scale of the incentives, rather than in questioning the concepts behind them. He talked of "small is beautiful" and the "micro" and the "macro". The stance from which every one of his questions came was entirely at one with that of Harrabin, Scheer and Leggatt.

This should be unacceptable.