At least someone is seeing sense about wind farms
By Clive Aslet, Daily Mail, www.dailymail.co.uk 30 May 2012
By Clive Aslet, Daily Mail, www.dailymail.co.uk 30 May 2012
Judge’s aren’t famous for common sense but one has got his priorities right.
Mrs Justice Lang has ruled that it’s more important to preserve the beauty of the Norfolk Broads that to disfigure it with wind turbines, erected to provide a miniscule amount of green energy. Well done, your honour. Spot on.
I can only hope that this will set a precedent for other objectors and other wind farm proposals.
As Britain bumps along in recession, the need for a green energy policy looks rather less compelling than of yore. In a recession, we use less energy.
Even if such a policy were an urgent requirement, wind would only provide a tiny particle of what we use.
Means of energy generation come and go. I’m told that, in Scotland, some Edwardian systems are being taken out of mothballs.
But once the loveliness of the countryside has been compromised, it can never be retrieved. Today’s wind turbine becomes tomorrow’s brown field site.
Rather than a green energy policy, we need an energy policy. The Blair government ducked the big decisions and have left us in an appalling mess.
In typical master showman style, they gave the illusion of doing something by building turbines.
It was all as blusterous as a Force 10 gale, and we’ve been left exposed to the whim of foreign suppliers.
Much better to have got on with the job of building nuclear power stations. Nuclear power is about as green as you can get (except, admittedly, for the matter of what to do with the waste).
Without it, we’ll have to adjust to a different standard of life, as the cost of energy rises. As a nation, we haven’t exactly embraced the austerity that the government has offered us, and seem convinced that there is a painless way out.
Whatever we think and however we moan, there won’t be a pain-free way out of the energy crisis. We’ll be somewhere unpleasant, without a paddle.
Well, well. Who knows whether the coalition is any more likely to grasp the nettle than was Labour?
But we may at least now be able to console ourselves by visiting the countryside, whose tranquillity will supply an antidote to all the shenanigans in Westminster.
And our policymakers won’t be able to hide behind the pretence that mega wind turbines are anything more than a green fig leaf to cover the erectile dysfunction that stands (or droops) where a properly constituted energy policy should be.
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/05/30/at-least-someone-is-seeing-sense-about-wind-farms/