EnviroSpin Watch

Simon Jenkins and wind farm vandalism: common sense at last in The Guardian.....

So, iconic Romney Marsh is the next ancient British landscape to be sacrificed in pursuit of the Government's non-sensical and punitively-expensive policy of dumping wind farms where there is beauty and 'wilderness'.

It will not do. This heavily-subsidised vandalism must be stopped. It is surely time to issue a few ASPOs - Anti-Social Planning Orders. We must not allow the Government to continue to destroy our rich landscape heritage for something that will not even work. Sadly, (as I am Labour), this is New Labour at its worst, peddling a poorly thought out energy policy, developed on the hoof, and then stubbornly driving it through willy-nilly despite all the mounting evidence that the policy is entirely misguided:

"First they came for the Welsh
and I did not speak out
because I was not Welsh.
Then they came for Scots
and I did not speak out
because I was not Scottish.
Then they came for the West Country
and I did not speak out
because I was not Cornish.
Then they came for the flat and rolling South ..."

Luckily, Simon Jenkins is now at The Guardian, and today he writes an excoriating piece on the Romney Marsh travesty. In this brilliant article, he righty raises the values of landscape and 'wilderness' over the Government's wind farm follies. At last, Mr. Jenkins is starting to make The Guardian readable once again: 'Better to have nuclear power than a blot on the landscape' (The Guardian, October 28):

"... [A]ll this character is doomed. Even by government standards the Romney turbine decision is a corker. The towers are to be massive, 30 storeys high, despite being surrounded by bird sanctuaries. Their footings must be buried 100 feet in the soft subsoil and require six-and-half miles of new road across the marsh, stabilised by 50,000 tonnes of excavated roadstone. Nobody can say how much energy all this will consume. Of the £50m cost, roughly 70% will come in various forms of subsidy. On any basis, this is a wildly extravagant government project...

...The turbines have been opposed by every parish, district and county council in the area and by every known conservancy body...

... Given the energy that goes into building and backing up turbines there are moves, I am told, to declare turbine power no longer 'green' for global warming purposes...

...The greatest irony is that the Romney tragedy is unfolding down the coast from one of the world's oldest nuclear plants, still pumping out far more megawatts, at Dungeness. Like other early stations - Bradwell in Essex, Hinckley Point on the Severn, and Wylfa on Anglesey - Dungeness was located far from human habitation. There were complaints from naturalists at the time, not least at the pylons stretching across the marsh...

...But nuclear power is at least real power...

...If Wicks [the Industry Minister] can put turbines on Romney Marsh, nowhere is safe. Where poor, flat-chested Romney goes today, the buxom Cotswolds go tomorrow [sounds a tad like different Jane Austen heroines]..." (read the whole article here)

Wind farms are going to prove one of the most tangible disasters of the 'global warming' hysteria.

Philip, seething at the follies that 'environmentalism' is heaping on the environment. Coffee through gritted teeth.