Fox News has a knack for reporting on non-problems by making problems out of them. Such is the case of an article on their website today titled “Wind Farms Blow U.S. Off the Radar,”  which at first made me fall to the ground in laughter because it resembled an Onion News Network satire piece from this summer titled “Coal Lobby Warns Wind Farms May Blow Earth Off Orbit:”

 

Fearing the dire effects that wind turbines have on radar, I clicked into the article to find this lead:

This one’s really off the radar.

Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: “blank spots” that distort radar readings.

Is the first sentence referring to the second? Because “solar power and other alternative energy sources” have no connection to the way a wind turbine functions or affects the environment.

The article continues on by framing the problem that these “blank spots” pose:

Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars — and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.

Shepherd’s Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would “seriously impair the ability of the (DoD) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations.”

Then Oregon’s senators got involved.

“The Department of Defense’s earlier decision threatened to drop a bomb on job creation in Central Oregon,” democratic Senator Ron Wyden noted in a press release.

Clearly, Democratic politicians, with their mischievous plots of job creation and misguided hopes in “alternative energy sources” are causing radar vulnerabilities for Department of Defense.

Or is this really not a problem at all:

Beloite told FoxNews.com that the project was given the green light by the military only after scientists at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory assured the Department of Defense “that there were algorithms and processors they could design for not too much money that would mitigate the problem.”

Beloite said that the MIT technology has proven successful in the last few months.

“[The problem] has been addressed. And I have a letter from the deputy director of operations from U.S. NORAD that says ‘step one of the two-step fix worked so well that we recommend we don’t spend any more money on step two.’”

So wind farms aren’t really a problem for the Department of Defense, and the fix has been so effective that there’s no need to move on to a Plan B. Shouldn’t this article be about the triumph of technology to solve problems?