Wind farm protests go UK-wide

[The following is an excerpt from an article in the July 2004 issue of the U.K. magazine The Great Outdoors (tgo), transcribed from a scan provided to Country Guardian.]

'In a letter to tgo, Ms [Lisbet] Rausing asks if Britain can afford to savage its natural beauty. "For the same taxpayers' money that wind farms cost," she wrote, "many more C0₂ emissions could be saved by more conventional means -- by cleaning up coal power plants globally, by saving energy, and so on.

'"My husband and I may be getting a wind farm on the border of our Scottish home at Corrour, by the Blackwater Reservoir. At the moment feasibility studies are being carried out but if it does go ahead it will overshadow the single most wild vista in all of mainland Britain, the magnificent sweep of Rannoch Moor and the mountains ringing it, including Ben Nevis."

'And in a recent article in the Guardian, Philip Stott, professor emeritus of geography at London University, wrote: "Onshore wind power doesn't deliver the environmental benefits it promises and yet it carries substantial environmental costs. Promoting wind farms over other forms of energy generation will surely prove to be a most costly blunder. It is time to roar out against this crass industrialisation of our countryside and our last remaining wilderness."

'However, director of Friends of the Earth and wind farm supporter Tony Juniper says that the opponents of renewables are parochial and shortsighted. "Climate change is the world's most pressing environmental problem and the anti-lobby, helped by nuclear interests, is trying to undermine Britain's role as a leader in tackling it and to fatally delay action," he said. "Wind is the most advanced of all the renewable technologies but it needs to be followed quickly by solar, wave, tidal, biomass and others. No one is arguing that wind generators should cover all the national parks. That would be mad. The landscape can and must be protected."

'But that does not seem to be happening. The Whinash development threatens those who live in the lovely Borrowdale Valley, near Tebay. Similarly the local community of Ullapool in Wester Ross were of the opinion that the quality of the landscape surrounding them would be sacrosanct from such developments but they were wrong. Scottish and Southern Energy plan to run an interconnector cable under the sea from wind farm developments on the Isle of Lewis. The cable is to come ashore just off Ardmair Bay, a notable beauty spot, from where 50-metre high power lines will carry it via the Dirrie Mor and Fannichs to Beauly, where it would join another giant grid to run south as far as Denny in Stirlingshire.

'At the time of going to press there is already active consideration of wind farm projects by the Assynt crofters, the Durness crofters, and landowners in Strathconan and Glen Luichart. Indeed, we could probably fill the magazine with all the other developments that have been proposed for areas of outstanding scenic value.

Oops

www.solaraccess.com/news/story?storyid=6856

Iowa has a new subsidy system:

• it establishes 1¢/kW-h tradable tax credit for new wind projects
  
• any project over 1 MW must forego existing exemption from state sales tax and reduced property tax
  
• local counties have to give the "extra" property tax to the state to cover the tax credit
  
• the credit is limited to 320 kW-h per MW capacity.

This shuffle obviously doesn't do anything to foster wind development. What it does is shift the subsidy from a blatant tax giveaway to what can now be presented as a "renewable energy incentive" credit. Local communities still pay for it.

The joke is the limit, 320 kW-h/MW/year. Reportedly the drafters of the bill simply forgot to multiply by the number of hours in a year, and it was supposed to be 2800 MW-h, representing a very hopeful 32% capacity factor.

They hope to fix the law in 2005. Nice try, folks!

Officials try to hide rise in transport pollution

'Official figures showing sharp increases in gases responsible for climate change from air and freight transport were removed from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) report on the environment last week after pressure from the Department for Transport.

'In a week when Tony Blair was insisting the issue of climate change was "very, very critical" and Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, claimed the UK was a world leader in reducing emissions, official statistics would have shown an 85% increase in pollutants from the airline industry and 59% for freight transport since 1990.

'Instead, the announcement was withdrawn and another substituted which did not mention transport emissions at all.'

Ireland bars Stephen Joyce from National Library

books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1230277,00.html

James Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, is notorious for opposing public performance of his grandfather's works. If he doesn't like the project, he will block it out right. If he is willing to tolerate it, he demands a very large fee. J Joyce's most famous work, Ulysses, is set in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Since the 1950s, June 16 has been celebrated around the world as "Bloomsday," after the main character of the book, Leopold Bloom. The centennial of the date in Dublin this year will of course be a huge event, drawing "Joyceans" from around the world.

A couple years ago, the National Library of Ireland bought a lot of Joyce's manuscripts, display of which is planned as a central part of "Rejoyce Dublin 2004." The grandson, however, warned of copyright violations. The Irish parliament responded by amending copyright law to allow public exhibition of "protected" works.

A public reading of Ulysses and a performance of the play Exiles, however, will remain cancelled. An who knows how many other events were never allowed to get started.

Setbacks

Issues of icing, noise, and structural damage and failure, particularly as they determine setback requirements, have been extensively documented by John Mollica in response to proposed expansion of the wind facility on Wachusetts Mountain in north central Massachusetts (between Princeton and Fitchburg). The title of this post links to a page from which a complete or partial PDFs can be downloaded.

What sets this paper apart is that it relies solely on information from wind industry proponents. The Wachusetts project borders a public recreation area, and Mollica shows that the proposed expansion doesn't come close to meeting even the industry's own guidelines for safety and nuisance setbacks.

World Pays Heavy Price for Global Airline Boom

A Reuters story describes the growing contribution of airlines to CO₂ emissions and global warming. Besides creating clouds that help trap heat, according to the article a jumbo jet emits about 100 tons of CO₂ per 2,000 miles flown. According to the wind-energy industry, one megawatt of wind power may displace 250 tons of CO₂ in a year (see earlier post). This is almost certainly exaggerated, so it is fair to say that over an entire year, one megawatt of wind power may save the amount of CO₂ added to the atmosphere by only one transatlantic round trip.

Keep digging, boys!

Ricardo Sanchez, the soon-to-be-replaced lieutenant general in charge of the U.S. military escapade in Iraq, addressed his troops on Memorial Day, telling them they must keep at whatever they are told to do, however futile, counterproductive, or criminal, so that those who have already been killed doing so will not have died in vain.

It's a bit late for qualms of vanity when the whole enterprise was "in vain" from the start. Remember the looting in Baghdad a year ago? Hospitals, schools, power plants, museums, libraries, government buildings were decimated because the mission of the invading troops was to secure only the oil and interior ministries. Now the dimwits who planned it all are starting to realize there's more to occupying a country than securing Halliburton contracts.

But it's too late. A giant hole has been dug where once was an organized modern society. It was headed by a despicable tyrant, but below him was a fully functioning government. Saddam is gone. Now we too need to leave -- not to keep digging. Rather than keep paying $200 billion a year to continue occupying (sorry -- "providing security for") the country, we should pay for what we've broken and leave Iraq to the Iraqis. That might start to redeem the dead.

The only justice, however, for the dead and maimed on both sides would be to put the man who would be king and his Richelieu -- George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney -- into prison for the rest of their lives.