I’ve just returned from a short break in Devon, which has to be one of the loveliest places on earth. If there is a God, then He can surely be seen in Devon’s rolling patchwork of fields and flowering hedgerows. It’s a landscape that stirs a pride of country as great as that evoked by our cultural and scientific achievements. As my grandfather would have said, it’s the view that won us the war.
While I admired this magnificent scenery, at no point did I think that it would benefit from the addition of a few 300-foot wind turbines. Yet, there are people living among us who would disagree; people who would like to carpet our countryside with these monstrosities; people who even claim to find them beautiful – a sentiment I find as credible as a Soviet peasant admiring the Tiger tank that had just squashed his grandmother.
I’m no harebrained idealist when it comes to conservation. I realise that we must sometimes accept changes to our environment for the sake of net gains, otherwise we’d have no roads, bridges or reservoirs. But wind power is a lose-lose proposition. In exchange for the vandalisation of our countryside, it offers us an inefficient, unreliable, not-especially-green energy source, that performs unplanned vivisection on our wildlife, and requires huge subsidies to give it the illusion of viability.
Wind enthusiasts claim that subsidies will help the technology develop to the point that government support is no longer needed. But unless those developments include a cloaking device and the ability to generate a thousand-times the power, even when the wind’s not blowing, it’s money down the drain. Wind will never be a substitute for coal, gas or nuclear power. For us to reject this reality would be like NASA eschewing rockets and attempting a moon-shot on horseback (something that’s increasingly likely now that it’s an arm of the environmental movement).
As it stands, we’re being asked to accept the despoilment of our landscape, power shortages, higher taxes and spiralling energy bills in exchange for what? An end to the spectre of global warming? The same global warming that even its devotees are admitting may not be as serious as they once claimed? Even if you buy into this apocalyptic guff, our sacrifice to the sun god won’t make an iota of difference to the climate. Even as a pompous example-setting exercise for other nations, it’s a disgrace. A century ago we impressed the world with our ingenuity and endeavour; now we parade our self-abasement and challenge other countries to follow our lead. Talk about a race to the bottom.
I’ve already given this issue more serious consideration than it deserves, because, when all is said and done, supporters of the great breeze wheeze aren’t really looking for a solution to our energy needs. They would want to turn our countryside into scene from War of the Worlds even if their death-dealing behemoths weren’t wired up to the grid.
Nothing gives liberal-lefties greater satisfaction than believing that the business world is an iniquitous shambles that would be better-run by panels of state-sponsored experts. As usual with the Left, this is a tribal conflict: a chance for its clan of talkers and thinkers to discredit its rivals for power. Green energy is the statists’ baby: their attempt to prove that business success is not a matter of balancing supply and demand, but about deferring to the wisdom of an unaccountable elite. It’s a model in microcosm of how liberals would like society as a whole to operate. They are fast-tracking a post-fossil fuels future, where the state runs the energy show. Now there’s something to look forward to.
The demand for green ‘solutions’ was summoned out of thin air by politicians and technocrats, as were the ‘problems’ they are designed to solve. The market for green energy isn’t a response to an attractive product that serves a concrete need, but to bribes, coercion and the promise of secular sainthood for its supporters. To concede that green energy is a busted flush would be to admit that individuals and businesses working together produce better outcomes than self-styled experts ruling by decree. And since this would undermine the legitimacy of the state as a whole, don’t expect a significant change of heart any time soon.
Wind turbines serve an additional purpose for the Left, similar to that performed by the tower blocks Ceausescu built in the middle of farmland, or the factories found on the horizon of Soviet rural scenes: they are statements of power. These steel sentinels remind country-dwellers that they are within the gravitational pull of the capital’s dark star, and that if they believe they are free to reject the beliefs of the metropolitan elite, they can think again.
The countryside has long been an object of suspicion for liberal townies, who consider it a viper’s nest of erroneous thought, inhabited by toffs, retired colonels, golf-playing Rotarians and other conservative bogeymen. The propensity of country folk to choose their own values, to observe age-old traditions and to rely on each other to get by puts them in conflict with everything the Left stands for. In the liberal worldview, you’re either one of them, one of their flock, or an enemy of the people whose way of life must be destroyed. First they banned fox hunting, then they ruined the landscape. What next? Collectivised farms? Internment camps for UKIP voters?
This is one of the chief reasons that wind turbines cause such distress to liberty-minded folk. It’s not just that they’re an ugly and expensive folly; it’s that they represent the intrusion of liberal dogma into places where sanity and decency can still be found. They’re about power, alright, but not for those of us who are forced to pay for them.
Bogpaper.com 
If the Greens really wanted to give us a post fossil fuel age of cheap, plentiful, safe, carbon free energy they’d be shouting about Thorium and LFTRs instead of wind mills and bicycles.
What their elite, control freak leaders really want is to totally destroy liberty and Western civilisation, and depopulate the planet. The sheep who follow them have been brainwashed into hating their own species. Useful idiots who don’t even realise what they’re doing.
It occurs to me if they wish to depopulate the planet, they should lead by example. I’m fairly confident we would enjoy the benefits of their sacrifice.
An especially interesting point at the end of an excellent post: “Wind turbines … are statements of power”.
If that is the case – and I suspect you are right – then their very uselessness makes them all the better as symbols of power.
They then serve the same purpose as Communist Propaganda or Political Correctness (as famously noted by Theodore Dalrymple): to create a society of emasculated liars.
Funnily enough, I was going to make a similar point, but forgot all about it, so thanks for reminding me. As Dalrymple suggests, nothing reminds a victim of his powerlessness more than making him suffer some pointless and arbitrary inconvenience.
And the Emperor is no longer over the mountains and far away. He’s right there in your face.
Reblogged this on Power To The People and commented:
Wind turbines are not about power to the people they are about power over the people by elite government overseers who rule the masses with invisible chains of government dependency symbolized by massive bird chomping eco towers laying waste to once bucolic green pastures.
Thanks for this article: I don’t consider myself an authority on climate change or wind power but it’s encouraging to discover there’s someone who knows less than I do.
“It’s encouraging to discover there’s someone who knows less than I do.”
Oh, don’t sell yourself short. I think you are definitely in the top ranks of people who know very little. If you were a truly data-driven liberal , you’d be out protesting wind turbines like an OWS howler, and that’s coming from someone who is a pro-environment rescuer of disabled birds. These monstrosities combine ugliness, irritation, great expense and utter uselessness into a vast panorama of bird Cuisinarts.
The sabotage of our countryside continues – building on the geenbelts to accommodate all the immigrants, prairy farming and now the wind farms scam. Our country has been run by vandals for the last 20 years, politicians cannot be trusted, councillors cannot be trusted, all the destruction is tantamount to the power of the £ to corrupt.
The push to gay ‘marriage’ was so urgent for a similar reason: not because the liberal elite care so much for the 1% of the population who are homosexuals or lesbians, but to show all the right-wingers who’s boss.
Great article. Here in Oz we’re just starting to get into our stride with regard to wind farms. They’re well on their way to visually polluting some of the finest vistas in the land.
SOLAR POWER BRINGS NO JOBS FOR HAWKCHURCH
My friend in Hawkchurch, Devon, reports on the construction of a ‘solar farm’ outside the village. The proposal to build it was rejected by the villagers but the views of locals were ignored and it was erected anyway.
The components were made in Germany, and were delivered by German lorries, which were accompanied by workers from eastern Europe who carried out the erection and installation.
Not one local job was created.
The solar farm is now earning subsidies, paid for by the taxpayer. It will produce less energy in its lifetime than it took to extract the silicon to make the solar panels in the first place.
Most photovoltaic cells are net consumers of energy. This means that if carbon dioxide reduction is the objective, solar cells are not fit for purpose.