How a False Net Zero Claim Became ‘News’:
The Right-Wing Disinformation Loop
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Today’s edition will be both a direct debunk and a mini-lesson on how the right-wing media ecosystem can work, to help you spot these types of stories in the future.
The Background
Friday morning, we woke up to the news there had been a massive fire in an electricity substation near Heathrow, and Heathrow Airport had had to close down, causing travel chaos both in the UK and internationally.
Lots of people suddenly became experts in electricity infrastructure, substations and transformers over on X!
Late afternoon, a tweet by Reform MP and GB News presenter Richard Tice, caught my eye. He was claiming that Net Zero was the cause of the Heathrow shut down and that it was a “refusal to have diesel generators” that was the issue:
Was that true? It would be a huge blow to support of Net Zero plans if so.
I thought I’d dig in and see what the Telegraph article showed
The Telegraph article
When I clicked on the link I was taken to an article headlined
Heathrow ‘forced to shut down because of net zero’
My first port of call whenever investigating these articles is to go to the web archive, where all versions of an article can be found, and you can see how they have evolved over time.
At the time of writing, there are currently 6 versions available.
The first, titled “Watch: Huge fire rages at electrical substation in Hayes after ‘explosion’” was at 1.14 am Friday, simply reporting on the fire, with no real reference to Heathrow.
The second, titled “Why was Heathrow so vulnerable to substation fire?” was at 10.44 am Friday as more details of the substation fire became available and the impact it was having on Heathrow. It suggested that the fire at the substation knocked out the main power supply to Heathrow, causing it to have to close. There was some confusion about backup generators and whether they had been impacted by the fire or not.
Importantly, the article pointed out that backup power could never support the functioning of the entire airport - they are only for safety-critical systems.
Although critical national infrastructure such as Heathrow typically has a number of backup power feeds and generators, documents published by the airport suggest that those systems are mainly used for airport lighting – critically important for airlines to move around safely on the ground after dark. They are not able to run the entire operation, given the amount of power it needs.
Systems are also typically only able to deal with short grid outages that last a matter of hours – not those that last for an entire day.
By the third iteration, at 2.25pm, the new headline was “Heathrow ‘forced to shut down because of net zero’”
To find out why, we need to go off on a little tangent……
Richard Tice
Earlier that day, Richard Tice reported on GB News that he had spoken to an unnamed ‘industry export’ who told him the airport closure was down to a decision to replace all the diesel backup generators with biomass ones in order to hit Net Zero targets - and they had somehow failed as they were designed “not to completely replace the grid but work alongside the grid”.
I think we can agree that would be a very poor backup if it were true, and we will return to that shortly!
Tice’s theory was taking off amongst Right-wing commentators online. Someone bashing Net Zero is like catnip for them!
So, back to the Telegraph.
The 2.25 pm version now had the first six paragraphs dedicated to Tice’s theory, and the headline changed. Tice and his unnamed ‘industry expert’ were the only source for the change. The section ended with:
“Basically, their net zero compliant back-up system had completely failed in its core function at the first time of asking. It beggars belief.”
Speaking to the Telegraph, Mr Tice said: “Why is Heathrow being so silent about this? Are they embarrassed because they have something to hide? Is it because their net zero backup failed at the first time of asking, and they daren’t admit it? It just shows the lunacy of net ‘stupid’ zero.”
This rather childish tirade was published and treated as factual despite the earlier version highlighting that backup generators - REGARDLESS OF FUEL TYPE - were never going to support the energy needs of a fully functioning airport!
What do other sources have to say?
When investigating claims, it’s always important to find other sources of information on a subject. After all, Tice could well have been right that biomass backup generators had somehow failed, even if he was wrong about how much generators can do.
So I checked the BBC and a couple of non-British sources for good measure - Bloomberg and the New York Times.
The New York Times reported on Heathrow’s Chief Executive saying that the “backup systems worked, but were not enough to power the entire airport”. And that the size of the power outage was “unprecedented” and had “never happened before.”
Bloomberg reported:
While backup systems kicked in, they only allow the hub to land some aircraft and evacuate passengers, but not to support full operations.
The BBC reported:
Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, so it is not possible for it to have the back-up power by itself to run its operation safely.
A source at Heathrow said it did however have back-up options for certain key systems, but kickstarting the alternative power supplies for the whole airport took time.
The systems need to be checked to ensure they are working properly.
A Heathrow source said its back-up diesel generators and uninterruptable power supplies in place all operated as expected.
Wait a minute! So it turns out that not only did the Heathrow backup generators work as planned, but they do still have diesel generators.
So Tice was wrong on both fronts!
And it gets worse….
