Starmer’s green utopia could cost the earth
Yorkshire Post, 4 Oct 2022, Neil J Bryce, Kelso
Sir Keir Starmer in his keynote address to the Labour Party Conference clearly revelled at the prospect of “a fairer, greener future” which conjured up images of an earthly paradise not unlike Shangri-La.
He confidently predicted that he will become the next Prime Minister in 2025 and among his many gilded promises he stated that within just five years the number of land-based wind turbines will have doubled to 17,500.
This was one of many declarations that won a standing ovation,
but I wonder how many of his audience realised that this will require a land area equivalent to around three times that of Greater London (1,800 square miles).
The tonnages of steel, concrete and plastics required as well as with the associated high emissions will be truly staggering. Perhaps we are meant to believe that the required steel will have been miraculously made in Britain using green hydrogen, powered by this industrial array of what will amount to 26,000 land-based and offshore turbines. They may go under the guise of renewables, but going by their consistent failure to deliver anywhere near their rated capacities, unreliables would be a more appropriate term.
As Mr Starmer basked in the adoring acclaim of the party faithful, what thought was given to the consequential environmental havoc and human misery caused by the extraction and processing of rare earth minerals from the Congo to Chile and beyond or of the implications of the damage wrought on land and marine ecosystems or the further decimation of avian life?
He also promised to triple solar power output to 42,00 MW which will mean the loss of up to 330,000 acres of arable land.
It seems that the £3 trillion necessary to realise this green utopia of net zero, where electric vehicles will glide silently through probably the most heavily turbined landscape in the world, is a vital component of the price we must pay to save the planet from climate catastrophe.
Unfortunately these people have been taken in by the now discredited 97 per cent scientific consensus and fail to recognise that humaninduced carbon emissions play a vanishingly small role in climate change compared to the hugely complex array of infinitely more powerful natural forces that have influenced the climate for millennia irrespective of varying carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2022/10/04/starmers-green-utopia-could-cost-the-earth/