Would wind turbine enthusiast like to see them in the Cuckmere Valley?
Eastbourne Herald | 28 June 2019 | www.eastbourneherald.co.uk
Eastbourne Herald | 28 June 2019 | www.eastbourneherald.co.uk
I am not a climate change denier.
Like most people I want the air I inhale to be as pure as possible. But we are seeing a class of environmental fanatics gaining ground.
I am not suggesting Kate Edmonds is in that category but I note she lives in picturesque Alfriston.
Would her enthusiasm for wind farms Letters, June 21 extend to seeing the hills surrounding her in the Cuckmere Valley obliterated by them?
As to the contention that over three-quarters of the population are in favour of onshore wind farms, that is hardly surprising.
Only 17 per cent of the population live in rural areas while 83 per cent are urban-bound (2014 figures).
The latter are not affected by turbines or anything else that goes on in the countryside.
They have no reason to worry or care while accepting whatever benefits accrue to them.
We are said to emit less than one per cent of the world’s total carbon emissions.
Yet Caroline Lucas and her confederates concentrate solely on what we in this country should be doing.
If they placed pressure on the rest of the world to reduce their emissions to our percentage level, would their time not be better spent?
Indeed, what will they do when they have succeeded in covering our countryside in wind turbines?
Ditto every seascape view from our coastlines?
What will be the aim after they have taken down to zero the number of children driven to school by car, and of removing every British Airways plane from the skies?
(Both will take some doing given the collective lack of commitment to place one’s money within striking distance of one’s mouth).
But let us assume every airport in the land has been successfully closed down.
They then eradicate all meat-eating, having made extinct all methane-emitting cattle from the land.
By such and other means they will have reached their 0 per cent carbon emission target.
Will that be the point at which they finally turn their attention to other countries?
We are told that we need ‘moral authority’ before we try to influence others.
How much more moral credit would be gained by reducing our carbon emissions from an apparent 0.9 per cent to zero per cent?
It is in this area that the most ardent environmentalists allow themselves a sense of considerable disproportion.
The late Nicholas Ridley, when Environment Secretary in the 1980s, always considered he took his subject seriously.
But he was not prepared to make a religion of it.
Before the highly impressionable youngest generation are completely bamboozled into a flight of fancy, their enthusiastic elders would do well to advise them in a manner more proportionate than is currently the case.
Edward Thomas
Collington Close
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/06/28/would-wind-turbine-enthusiast-like-to-see-them-in-the-cuckmere-valley/