How Bad Is Renewable Energy Misinformation?

Some poor souls spend hours going through news every day, doing research for blog like this. Recently, we started seeing multiple instances of posts going online over the course of a day, often over multiple days. One thing that we noticed about this was that the headlines seemed to be anti-renewable. MSN seemed to be doing this in particular.

At first, it looked like the articles were being reposted from other sources. MSN might have been reposting things from other media sources without fact checking and might have been an unintentional participant in the misinformation.

Getting a bit fed up, we decided to do an experiment. We did a search through Google of the terms “renewable MSN,” limiting the search to news that appeared online over the most recent 24 hours. 

As an example, on January 13, we got sixteen results for the “renewable MSN” search. We divided them into those that were positive or accurate on renewable energy and those that were negative and (pretty clearly, in our opinion) untrue. The search results that we call positive were the following four:

1. CT urged to increase renewable energy to cut ratepayer costs
2. 6 Renewable Energy Projects That Are Changing Local Communities
3. Understanding Renewable Energy: Separating Facts from Myths
4. Promising Advances in Renewable Energy Development

Twelve of the sixteen posts were what we categorised as negative. Their titles are as follows:

1. The Renewable Energy Bubble: Are We Headed for an Economic Disaster?
2. The Renewable Mirage: Why We’re Betting on Technologies That Don’t Deliver
3. The Renewable Energy Myth: Why It’s Not as Clean as You Think
4. Blackouts and Grid Instability in Renewable-Heavy Nations
5. How Renewable Energy Is Destroying Natural Habitats
6. The Cost of Going Green: Why Renewable Energy Is Driving Energy Prices Up
7. Top 10 Hidden Costs of Renewable Energy Nobody Talks About
8. Ed Miliband’s ‘obsession’ with renewables as bills reach record high (possibly true, but slanted)
9. The Land Use Crisis in Renewable Energy
10. The Hidden Cost of Renewable Energy Expansion
11. How Renewable Energy Projects Harm the Environment
12. Why Renewable Energy Is Not the Ultimate Solution to Climate Change

That’s three posts of what we believe were misinformation for every one that we might regard as simply reporting news. In general, the posts that were negative were not supported with references, and they were generalised in their statements. By contrast, those that were positive about renewables pretty much stuck to science on climate change and read like normal, thoughtful articles.

Interested in how many posts there were and how often they had been going up, we tried doing searches on some of the titles. In each case, I only got one result, despite the fact that I had actually seen the same title over and over during more general searches made on the same day earlier. We are not sure why this happened, but clearly the search engine had features that enabled it.

We are not trying to conjure up a conspiracy here.  We are simply presenting some contemporary facts which seem to indicate a degree of negativity bias.  Let’s try to stick to facts and use evidence-based reporting; there is enough evidence out there on all aspects of renewables – good and bad – to ensure we don’t need to deviate from anything but the facts.

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