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Wind farms not the answer
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Building industrial wind farms onshore is an environmentally destructive agenda.
The idea is not to help ordinary people cut energy consumption and live low energy lifestyles, it’s about business as usual, and helping multinationals to cash in on climate change.
Decisions have already been made at the highest level of government to sacrifice large tracts of land to stimulate the development of wind factories in previously remote upland areas.
The financial incentives are in place to encourage the developers, and the Government and local authorities have shown an eager willingness to change the planning system to accommodate that which was unacceptable under the old system.
It’s not surprising that rural Wales is now under siege from developers who claim they can combat climate change by erecting these huge machines. The agenda is in fact an enormous environmental con that breaks precedent on many fronts, and overrides all other concerns, not least of which is visual intrusion.
How sad it is to understand that environmental watchdogs like Friends of the Earth (FoE) are party to this agenda. How sad it is that FoE, instead of protecting the open countryside, is flag waving for the wind industry to wreck it. In his recent letters to the Journal, Gordon James has made it quite clear that FoE considers the building of industrial wind farms to be environmentally benign and good value for money.
The agenda, however, is invasive of upland countryside like none other ever conceived. It enables industry to squat the mountaintops with development projects to erect huge whirling machines and associated infrastructure. It’s a thumbs up for invasions of heavy construction and earth moving equipment into the wild open spaces of upland Wales. It’s a thumbs up for road building and quarrying in areas previously unaffected by industrial development.
It’s an agenda which releases huge amounts of carbon to the atmosphere by means of ripping up the peaty, carbon-rich soils of upland Wales. It’s death to raptors and other birds, as well as bats, and it’s hell for isolated rural communities faced with these developments.
During manufacture, transportation and erection, building wind farms is greedy for the consumption of land, mineral resources and non-renewable energy, but FoE still thinks it’s a good idea. Never mind the view, never mind the upset, never mind the desecration of our rural heritage, if it’s industrial wind, it’s okay.
It seems for the sake of a few megawatts of intermittent green electricity, and the naive belief that industrial wind farms actually combat climate change, FoE has sold out the countryside and entered a delusional state, whereby it now campaigns to promote the wind industry’s lucrative “greenwash” agenda above all other concerns.
Tim Shaw
Dinefwr Green Group
Llandeilo
10 October 2007
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