Saturday
Jun112011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Greens trash national parks
Jun 11, 2011 Climate: Houghton Climate: other Energy Greens Tony at Harmless Sky is highlighting a new planning document introduced by the Welsh Assembly, which will allow windfarms to be built in national parks. There is a petition afoot to try to stop it.
Sir John Houghton and George Monbiot both live in Wales if I recall correctly.
Update on Jun 11, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
Tony emails to point out that the document is not new, but that it is having an increasing effect.
Reader Comments (11)
I posted the link to the petition a couple of days ago:
http://www.assemblywales.org/gethome/e-petitions/epetition-list-of-signatories_all.htm?pet_id=579
I not that neither Sir John Houghton nor George Monbiot have signed it yet!
We might get to enjoy a textbook case of ideology colliding with hipocrasy in a buttock-clenchingly public way....
Now is not surely a time to gloat..?
Is it?
I, the Welsh ave gan green
The document (TAN 8) (Planning for Renewable Energy) is not new, having been issued by the Welsh Assembly in July 2005. It was developed with considerable behind-the-scenes assistance from the wind industry to produce Strategic Search Areas (SSAs) where wind farms could be sited with little scope for resistance from ordinary folk. National Parks were excluded from the SSAs, but that is not to say that wind farms can't be sited in Welsh National Parks.
A windfarm has been recently built above the Rhondda Valley against the wishes of local people. Despite local council support, an inquiry carried out by one person named Ward (no first name available but surely not...!) overruled local wishes and the monstrosities were built spoiling an area of natural beauty.
My wife and I have signed the petition as suggested by Philip B. but I fear it will have little impact on the politicians of the Welsh Assembly Government who are even more committed to these stupid bird-mincers
than their Westminster counterparts.
You see...you can kill native bird life and destroy the countryside with windmills...but heavens forbid you warm your home with coal!
Monbiot has written passionately about the destruction that sheep do to the high country and how wonderful wind farms are. He sounds like a number of city people of my acquaintance who are actually frightened of sheep and regard them as being more dangerous than wolves - wolves are somehow, in their eyes, more 'natcheral', although I struggle with concept of a windmill being in any way 'natcheral'.
But, hey, who can claim that Monbiot and his ilk are rational?
It must be something in the Welsh drinking water ...
Today, I came across this report:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2011/06/11/is-wales-sitting-on-gas-reserves-worth-billions-91466-28859676/
Scroll down to read the nay-saying by local MPs, both Tory and Labour!
Yeah - let's destroy the Welsh mountains and beautiful landscape forever - because even trying to go for shale gas would affect the winding down of fossil fuel use ...
Verily - huge numbers of wind 'farms' are a veritable tourist magnet, because they can't see them anywhere else ...
I propose we transport all those politicians and all those AGW believing hacks to an uninhabited island somewhere north of Scotland and let them get on with their non-fossil fuel life - the few Welsh Islands are far too beautiful for them to be banned to ...
Thanks for the link Viv. I live 2 miles from the Llandow site and I see the potential benefits for The Vale of Glamorgan and Wales as huge.
Typical politician response which ignores the fact that 60% of people in work are employed by the government in one way or another and approx. 20% are unemployed. Thank goodness for English subsidies, although less than received by our Celtic cousins in the North and across the sea.
This
is what
they really
want to do
to all the remaining mountains
we have left, just to vainly display the crosses
and monstrous sunset sunrise flickering shadow fields
of their sacrificial doomsday religion,
access roads and
power lines
included.
Tony emails to point out that the document is not new, but that it is having an increasing effect.
jeans wear