Fox Airhead Discovers: It’s Not Always Sunny in Dusseldorf
February 11, 2013
When a Fox News airhead “analyst” Shibani Joshi told the Fox & Friends audience last week that solar energy was doing well in Germany because “they’ve got a lot more sun than we do”, the youtube clip went viral, as more evidence that Fox is indeed the preferred news source for what Bobby Jindal calls “the stupid party”.
One has to assume that sometime over the weekend, someone showed her a globe. At some point monday, a nearly invisible apology appeared, not on television, but on an obscure posting on the Fox News website.
But I incorrectly stated that the chief difference between the U.S. and Germany’s success with solar installations had to do with climate differences on a “Fox and Friends” appearance on Feb. 7. In fact, the difference come down more to subsidies and political priorities and has nothing to with sunshine.
The apt adage is “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
That said, a quick look at Shibani Joshi’s wikipedia entry shows that she is married to Joshi Rahul Advani, “a principal at Energy Capital Partners”, a firm that, according to its website, “focuses on investing in the power generation, midstream gas, electric transmission and energy and environmental services sectors of North America’s energy infrastructure.”
So in this case, stupidity conveniently serves Joshi’s long term financial interests, as well as the ideological bent of her employer. Don’t believe for a second there would have been an apology if not for the outcry from citizens fed up with journalists, businesspeople and public officials who’ve built careers by failing upward with exactly this kind of serial incompetence.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
February 11, 2013 at 11:40 pm
Just one small correction required Peter, there’s no air in a vacuum.
February 12, 2013 at 1:00 am
Re: “Just one small correction required Peter, there’s no air in a vacuum.”
Hehe.
Let me try to be punny here. There’s air in my vacuum. It’s a “giant sucking sound”. (I think I need new motor bearings.) Perhaps an apt metaphor for what German corporate parasites are doing to the hapless residential rate-payers in Germany. First these parasitic corporations made billions of Euros on cap & trade swindles based on devious assumptions created maliciously by financiers, and now they are gaming the Energewende system. The 1% seem unstoppably evil in their grasping for every advantage.
February 12, 2013 at 1:32 am
With such a powerful vacuum as yours Ray I recommend you stop putting the nozzle up to your ear. It is impeding your judgment.
February 12, 2013 at 3:17 am
Re: “It is impeding your judgment.”
Hmmm, you leave me hanging in suspense. Do you take exception to punning or to my characterization of the 1%? Or other? 🙂
February 12, 2013 at 2:41 am
I was wondering why they keep repeating NatGas like it was a New Age mantra.
February 12, 2013 at 4:29 am
Doesn’t she then have a conflict of interest?
February 13, 2013 at 6:07 am
Re: “Doesn’t she then have a conflict of interest?”
Oh tut, tut, Christopher!
On Faux News this is considered a CONFLUENCE OF INTERESTS!
“Corruption, it’s, for lack of a better word, a good thing!” -Gordon Gekko
February 15, 2013 at 1:25 am
Re: “I wonder how many watch the 80′s Wall Street movie and actually look up to Gekko.”
Actor Michael Douglas was interviewed about this a couple of years ago. He expressed surprise that the Oliver Stone film which was intended as a warning against excessive greed and Any Randian selfishness as portrayed by Gordon Gekko was actually being spoken of in (Poison) Ivy League B-Schools as the model for behavior for Wall Street’s aspiring young MBAs and wannabee bankers. A large percentage of our elite youth want a piece of Gekko’s action.
Even after the crash of the markets of 2008, our privileged youth still understand that cheating, inside deals and skullduggery are still the preferred tools to climb the economic ladder.
Witness the recent Harvard test scandal for an indication of the zeitgeist among this crowd.
February 15, 2013 at 1:50 am
otter,
OK, I’ve just rebalanced the universe. I gave myself a “like” so now we’re in balance.
OM SHANTI OM. NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO. OM MANI PADME.
It’s All Cosmic, baby! 🙂
February 15, 2013 at 2:18 am
After all the financial shenanigans of the last 2 decades, that must be a rhetorical question.
February 12, 2013 at 2:58 pm
That was not a real apology.
A real apology would have taken place on air – for the apology should be made to the same viewers who were misled. Not just for some reporter scouring the on-line equivalent of a display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard”.
February 13, 2013 at 1:36 am
That’s something that’s irked me for a long time about newspapers.
The big story is in the 1st few pages but the correction is buried at the bottom of page 23 in 7-point type.
February 13, 2013 at 2:14 am
Hi Morin,
Like as for you, it used to piss me off that corrections were so lame in the MSM.
But then I grew up, became an adult and realized the MSM is not a source of information. It is a means of disseminating propaganda for the 1%.
Then I could start to take a cynical sort of pleasure in seeing the machinations of PROPAGANDA ON PAGE ONE and the truth in small print lost in the back pages.
It all makes more sense when you are a cynic.
“No matter how cynical I get, it’s hard to keep up.” –Lily Tomlin
February 12, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Yeah, I looked her up, too. But her husband’s firm invests in a number of ‘clean’ companies, too: Sungevity, NanoSolar, Ice Energy (Smart Grid), NextLight Renewable Power, FirstLight (hydro), and SunZia (renewable grid in SW). They also invest in technologies to reduce nitrous oxide emissions and are exploring carbon offsets. Perhaps they do this simply as a hedge against natural gas, which does seem to be their main focus – but I think their portfolio suggests they clearly treat renewables seriously.
Besides the Germany = more sunlight thing, Joshi’s real fault is in buying into the logic that the government shouldn’t help support the solar industry. The government does almost nothing EXCEPT support industries and special interests of one stripe or another. Government is, and always has been, about who gets the money. Corporate media sources like Fox News are openly engaged in pushing public opinion towards supporting certain industries. They want the money to go in a certain direction.
At 2:34 she says we just have to figure out where we want to be as a nation. And that’s it in a nutshell. Do we want to be a nation that thinks the oil/coal/gas industry should be supported above all others for the next few decades as we have the past century, or do we want to at least try to get a competitive renewables industry going?
February 13, 2013 at 1:40 am
NPR’s All Thing Considered had an interesting segment tonight on natural gas. In a nutshell, there’s two different markets for the abundance of gas available. It can be turned into LNG with the concomitant 30% wasting of energy to liquify the gas for the export market. Or alternately the abundant natural gas can fuel the disparate parts of the petrochemical industry and we can ship far more sophisticated final products from our industrial base into the world market.
I fully expect the intelligent decision to NOT be made. This is America, after all. The land of the 1% fleecing everyone for a short term profit. Imagine the unions that can be busted if we destroy the petrochemical industry in favor of turning America into a Third World natural resource exporting nation! Oh, the patriotism! Oh, the joy!
February 13, 2013 at 3:05 am
The NG biz is going to have a flash crash in a year or two. It’s completely reliant on fracking now, which requires continually drilling new wells, or else the production drops off a cliff. And that’s exactly what hasn’t been happening the past year, as NG prices have been far below the breakeven point in pricing. As a result, drilling has virtually ceased – it’s being replaced by oil fracking instead. Supply is suddenly going to plummet some time before 2015, and we’ll have a significant price shock. Everyone is going to question the ‘abundant’ tag that’s being placed on NG relatively soon.
February 13, 2013 at 3:08 am
He he. Sounds like we read the same Cassandras. 🙂
February 13, 2013 at 2:34 am
After the harping on Solyndra and Obama’s supposed stimulus failures, they could hardly expected to make an abrupt turn in favor of solar unless some prominent conservative gave them a whipping on-air which is what happened when the called the Chevy Volt the Exploding ObamaCar.