Another Media Retraction

...re Global Warming. The original piece is by Christopher Booker, who seems to have got it from Richard North, both men being known for their screw-ups on this file (North's flame-out on Amazongate, for example). It seems to have disappeared from the U.K. Telegraph website, but you can find a copy through the link below. Some excerpts:

What is the connection between Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railway engineer who has been much in evidence at the Copenhagen climate conference, as chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and an Indian-owned steel company's decision to mothball its giant Teesside steel works next month, ripping the heart out of the town of Redcar by putting 1,700 people out of work?

Nothing of this complex story is likely to be heard in the dreary concrete shed outside Copenhagen where, as temperatures drop towards freezing, 17,000 prime ministers, officials and climate activists are earnestly discussing how the planet is warming up towards extinction. But it certainly sheds a little light on a colossal worldwide racket these delegates are helping to promote, because the end of the story is that we shall all be paying to export thousands of British jobs to new steel plants in India, for no gain in the reduction of worldwide CO2 emissions.

There's lots more, but here's part of the windup:

But this is only half the story. In India, Corus's owner, Tata, plans to increase steel production from 53 million tonnes to 124 million over the same period. By replacing inefficient old plants with new ones which emit only "European levels" of CO2, Tata could claim a further £600 million under the UN's Clean Development Mechanism, which is operated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the organisers of the Copenhagen conference. Under this scheme, organisations in developed countries such as Britain – ranging from electricity supply companies to the NHS – can buy the right to exceed their CO2 allocations from those in developing countries, such as India. The huge but hidden cost of these "carbon permits" will be passed on to all of us, notably through our electricity bills.

Thus, at the end of the day, Redcar will lose its biggest employer and one of the largest manufacturing plants left in Britain. Tata, having gained up to £1.2 billion from "carbon credits", will get its new steel plants – while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot.And the connection with Dr Pachauri?

Directly there is no connection at all. But it just happens that Dr Pachauri's other main job, apart from being chairman of the IPCC, is as director-general of the Tata Energy Research Institute, funded by Tata, which he has run since 1981.

And here's the grovelling apology:

In reports in December 2009 we said that Tata had used the carbon trading scheme to transfer steel production from Redcar to India, pocketing £1.2 billion in carbon credits at the cost of 1700 jobs. We accept this was wrong. Redcar was mothballed because a 10-year steel contract was not honoured and the credits could never have amounted to £1.2 billion.

In addition, we accept Tata’s assurance that it did not displace “hundreds of thousands” of villagers from its sites in Orissa and Jharkhand and that at its new site in Orissa, Tata is providing new homes, jobs and facilities for the 1200 families which remained at the site.

We also accept Tata’s assurance that it has no relationship with the Chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

We apologise for these errors.

And, just for fun, here's a column by James Delingpole, no stranger to inaccuracy himself, praising Booker and Co.s work uncovering this "scandal".

And I guess one advantage to being a gigantic Indian Steel company is you have a bigger legal department than the Telegraph. Because I can't see anyone screwing a retraction out of a tabloid like the U.K. Telegraph without anything less than an army of solicitors (to use the cute English word).

PS. And when I say the Telegraph is a tabloid, I don't necessarily mean its physically laid out in the tabloid style. In its heart its a tabloid: if you're employing Delingpole and Booker, you're running a scandal sheet no matter what the damn thing looks like.