My colleague and friend Matt Revell has a nice summary of some of the reasons for rising domestic fuel prices in the UK at the moment. A phrase that particularly caught my eye was this one:
Wind power, also, is not reliable nor particularly efficient and requires generation from other sources (coal, gas, nuclear, for example) to back it up when it’s either too windy or not quite windy enough. So, this is the Goldilocks of power generation and just like Goldilocks in the story, it can’t go for that long without needing a lie down; it’s the energy source with ME. So, no, your electricity won’t be free and nor should it be.
I confess that I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the telly these days. It's a means for me to watch DVDs and little else; most of the news content I read on a daily basis is read via the intertubes. But the point that Matt is making in his post, the one about the problem with TV audiences, or rather with TV programs who cater to the lowest common denominator and require no effort from their audience (that's how I see it, it may not be how Matt sees it) is a valid one.
One of the problems with living in an age of high information availability, when all you need to do to be able to know something more about an issue is look it up on Google, is that people accept the information that comes to them almost without question, in the same way that a stereotypical Daily Wail reader will accept the paper's opinion that the country is going to the dogs almost every single day of the week.
Is this just a human problem? Are we just naturally rather too trusting of, well, just about anyone who seems to be better informed than us? One of the most common phrases I've heard – and which has irked me no end – over the years is "It's (in the paper|on the web|on the TV) so it must be true!"
Anyway, I'm not going to go on further in a post that started out with a purpose but has subsequently become somewhat disjointed and is turning into a rant. Go and read Matt's post for a saner and less crabby commentary on matters.
Instead, dear reader, I'll leave you with a summary of my thinking on such matters by that other web luminary, XKCD:
Actually, the problem is a lot more complex than this. It’s not only that the media is telling lies. The media is telling the kind of lies that it thinks consumers want to hear!
Common sense doesn’t help (!!!) which is a problem in itself (and one that doesn’t make sense). Modern life comprises of many truths that don’t make sense at all. The only solution is to read (or watch, or listen to) a variety of sources. It used to be difficult, but now with services like Google News and such it’s quite doable.