The Washington Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll performs the job our native fact-checkers won’t do. He fact-checks New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu’s correction of President Trump speaking in Davos. According to Qiu, “[Trump] falsely claimed that China had no wind farms. (China has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country.)”
There is a relentless quality to Stoll’s column that I can only stand back and admire. He writes (links omitted):
Contrary to the Times’ false claim that Trump said China “had no wind farms,” Trump himself acknowledged in the speech that China “put up a couple of big wind farms.” The Times doesn’t share that part of Trump’s speech with its readers, misleading readers by withholding the full truth of what Trump actually said.
As for Trump’s basic point that China gets most of its energy from coal, not wind, even if you rely on China’s own unreliable data, the International Energy Agency lists coal and coal products as 71 percent of China’s energy production, and solar, wind, and other renewables combined at 5.4 percent.
As for the Times’ claim that China “has more wind farms and wind power capacity than any other country,” that actually supports Trump’s point that “they don’t use them.” “Farms” and “capacity” are different than energy production. What matters is not the number of farms—China is a large-population country, and it operates on a communist central planning system that frequently disregards efficiency and market forces, so it’s not surprising that it would have “more” of anything—but how much energy the farms produce, and at what cost and return on investment.
The Times fact-check about China and wind is not attributed, but comes straight from the talking points of the Chinese foreign ministry, whose spokesman, Guo Jiakun, also responded by talking about installed capacity rather than energy generated and used. It’s the latest in a recent series of false Times reports about how China is surpassing America, which is itself a Chinese propaganda theme.
I could stop there, but there is much more, as in the immediately succeeding paragraph:
For its claim that “China has more wind farms and wind power capacity,” the Times hyperlinks its own previous fact-check article, which relies on data from “The World Wind Energy Association, a nonprofit based in Germany.” Yet the World Wind Energy Association used to be run by He Dexin, honorary director of the Chinese Wind Energy Association and a graduate of Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, one of the “seven sons” deeply involved in Chinese military research. The current secretary general of the Chinese Wind Energy Association, Qin Haiyan, is also the vice president of the World Wind Energy Association. The “World Wind Energy Association” isn’t exactly an independent or nonpartisan source.
We used to call it a fisking. It’s almost funny. Read the whole thing here.
