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Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

[Narrator]

No refrigeration or modern packaging means that food can’t be kept. The fire in the hut is too smoky and consumes too much wood to be used as heating. There is no hot water. We in the West cannot begin to imagine how hard life is without electricity. The life expectancy of people who live like this is terrifyingly short – their existence impoverished in every way.

[Comment 128: Mitigating climate change does not require such people to be kept poor. Also, many such people will have their livelihoods destroyed by climate change impacts: such as desertification (for example, in Sub Saharan Africa); and sea-level rise (for example, Pacific Islands, Bangladesh). For more information on this, see the IPCC’s Climate Change 2001 Working Group II report at http://tinyurl.com/394n6f, and also see paragraph number 5 of Comment 123, page 104.

So cutting emissions and thereby slowing down climate change will bring great benefits to these people, in direct contradiction to the false impression that the narrator was seeking to create. ]

(In breach of the 2003 Communications Act Section 265, Ofcom 5.4, 5.5, 5.7, 5.11, 5.12)

[Cut to UN office in Nairobi]

[Narrator]

A few miles away, the UN is hosting its conference on global warming in its plush gated headquarters. The gift shop is selling souvenirs of peasant tribal life, while delegates discuss how to promote what are described as: “sustainable forms of electrical generation”. Africa has coal, and Africa has oil, but environmental groups are campaigning against the use of these cheap sources of energy. Instead, they say Africa and the rest of the developing world should use solar and wind power.

[Comment 129: Again in a single short statement the narrator has seriously misled the public about the facts in several distinct ways:

Out of 56 African countries, only 11 have oil and only 14 have coal – 36 have neither (see the US Government EIA website’s figures at: http://tinyurl.com/28eewm). Ironically, Kenya, where this section of the Channel 4 programme was filmed, has neither oil nor coal.

In remote African villages, photovoltaic (solar) generators (see Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/2xe8dn) are frequently far more cost-effective to install and maintain, and the resulting electricity bills are far lower for the villagers, than connecting the same villages up to a national grid. See for example the peer reviewed book, Goldemberg J. and Johansson, T.B. (Editors) (1995), Energy as an Instrument for Socio-Economic Development, United Nations Development Programme: New York, NY.

Continued …

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Comment 128: Creating false impression of effect of climate change on developing world / Comment 129: Misrepresentation of availability of coal and oil in Africa, and of their relative cost vs. renewable energy in remote rural communities]


Page 109 of 176	Final Revision	Last updated: 11 Jun 2007