Truth Squad blown for technical foul in awarding technical foul

by: Eric B.

Fri Sep 21, 2012 at 15:51:29 PM EDT

The Michigan Truth Squad fact checked Proposal 3 ads this week from both sides, and issued a couple of technical fouls ... one on each side. The technical foul for the pro-Prop. 3 ads was mostly warranted. They issued it on job growth figures, which are always inaccurate. Anytime anyone ever claims job creation numbers, you could slap them with a technical foul because they're invariably inaccurate by either pretending that construction work is permanent or by adding on extra, spin-off jobs that are mostly just made up and unverifiable. For the anti-Prop. 3 ads, we see how very limited these sorts of operations are, and because of it, the Michigan Truth Squad earns a technical foul for this:

No one is disputing that raising Michigan’s renewable energy standard to 25 percent will cause increased spending on electric generation. Proponents of Proposal 3 regard that cost as an investment that will create jobs and boost alternative energy businesses, giving a lift to Michigan’s economy. Opponents regard that increased spending as costs that will be passed on to energy consumers.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Supporters of alternative energy in general say that there will be additional cost in ramping up alternative energy, so it's an accurate statement as far as that goes. What they are also saying, however, is that building new coal plants will lock the state into coal plants which are already more expensive to build and which will continue to get even more expensive to operate in the future. And, to take it a step further, some of us are saying that the true cost of fossil fuels isn't being paid through utility bills, that much of the costs have been externalized to the public at large through things like health care bills, transportation system construction and maintenance and, ultimately, in things like crop failures and storm damage from volatility introduced into weather patterns by global warming. And, yes, there are factual reasons to believe all this. What they're saying is that energy costs will go up no matter what we do, it's just that alternative energy represents an investment in shifting away from old, outdated, harmful ways to generate electricity. So, for not inaccurately representing the entire argument made by supporters of Proposal 3, the Michigan Truth Squad is guilty of a technical foul.

There's also this:

CARE cites a Michigan Capitol Confidential story from July 11, 2011, as its source for the claim that renewable energy is “expensive and less reliable.”

The story quoted Pat Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, as saying that mandated renewable power will make energy more expensive. Michaels also said that renewable energy is unreliable, requiring more back-up generation.

Well, first of all, anything that cites a Mackinac Center Capitol Confidential article for anything ought to get flagged right out of the gates for a technical foul. Unfortunately, while the ad got a foul called on it, it wasn't for using a notoriously unreliable source where authors make things up that suit their purposes, use faked and cooked data at other times, and conveniently overlook factual data that contradicts it.

In this case, the Mackinac Center cited Pat Michaels, who is perhaps the most unreliable source possible to talk about renewable energy. What you ought to know about Pat Michaels is that he is first and foremost a climate change skeptic, who is best known for circulating a memo to fossil fuel industry people asking for money so he could present "their side" of the climate change story (that side is that climate change doesn't exist). In other words, a hokey "news" outfit used an even more unreliable source to write an article, which is cited by an anti-Prop. 3 ad, which the Michigan Truth Squad cited for a technical foul for other reasons. As mentioned above, the limits of usefulness for things like The Michigan Truth Squad is that it won't get into the weeds and do this kind of thing. It only works "verifiable facts," which means that people can spend all the live-long day citing sources with a terrible track record for credibility (your first clue is that no one ever bothers to come up with any data to support Michaels' claim ... of course they didn't, because said facts don't exist on this or any other planet), who themselves regularly make things up or distort them, and they'll never get a foul thrown because that's not how this truth squad stuff works.