Tuesday
Jan292013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Less daft
Jan 29, 2013 Energy: gas Energy: nuclear Energy: wind The Scottish Conservatives have announced their new energy policy, which seems, on the face of it, to be not quite as foolish as what has gone before.
Wind farms should be substantially cut and fossil fuels such as shale gas should be exploited, according to a review of Scottish Conservative energy policy.
The shake-up calls for councils to be given the power to halt all wind farm applications for a year and suggests homeowners should be compensated for loss value because of turbines.
They are also advocating construction of new nuclear power stations. However, belying their reputation as a party of small government and free markets they still intend to pump money into renewables.
Could do better.
Reader Comments (21)
Sounds like a strong push back on the SNP policy. Good to calm down on windfarm applications and consider other sources of energy.
At the end of the day it's still North Britain parish council isn't it?
Thank you Andrew. I will pass this message on to the people of Paisley. A peer reviewed psephological study showed that the next time we are due to elect a Conservative MP will be shortly before hell freezes over. The anti global warming message should be particularly welcome then.
As for the SNP, a party with only one plausible policy, North Sea oil, their Green agenda must come from the fact that their leader was previously an economist with RBS. Like his sponsor, Rupert Murdoch, a true man of the people.
The Scottish Conservatives are in opposition. With 16 out of 129 seats (of which 12 are "list" - they won a majority in only four constituencies), they are going to stay that way. A marginal force in Scottish politics for the last sixty years, they have no prospect of power except - an outside chance though, with Eckie's lot, one never knows - in coalition with the SNP. (That said, our central-belt local authority is currently run by an SNP-Tory coalition.)
OTOH, if they don't put some distance between themselves and Westminster's wind frenzy, their already modest share of the vote is likely to fall even further as they rely on the rural vote. The restrictions on wind power that they propose are (I'm told - I haven't studied them in detail myself) pretty worthless on close examination and can have no effect on the ~16GW of applications currently in the planning system.
I wonder if they're not flying a kite for many southern colleagues rightly concerned about energy policy.
Very disappointing.
The left find it hard to take on the environmental movement since they share a big overlap of language and activists. The proletariat have been utterly abandoned in favour of 'the environment' as a means for the gentle ones to be well-intentioned busybodies and the hard ones to be ruthless warriors against humanity and what it has acheived to date. The SNP appear to be firmly in both camps.
Surely a non-left party can find the courage to be a little more radical these days? What have the Conservatives to lose in Scotland if they were to give that a go?
Dave B - With regards wind power proposal I agree that its a token given the applications in process but at least it gets the discussion out to the general public so more communities may start to question applications more as they are reviewed instead of just bending over as seems to be the case just now??
[O/T]
[Snip O/T]
The green constituency is an orphan constituency in the asylum, periodically visited by all her elderly uncles.
[Snip - O/T]
It seems freezing to death, like hanging and the guillotine, focus the mind. Even in the UK. Well, parts anyway.
One thing, for sure, when that leaked IPCC reports comes out, if they print it, ship you copy to the UK. They'll need them to burn until they fix their malappropriation of their energy investments.
No idea if they'l just leave the windmills but maybe they'll just let them rust away. A modern Stonehenge.
[Snip - calm down]
The wind farm juggernaut rolls ever onwards, here south of the border..
Near the village of Graveley in Cambridgeshire, the weasely developers have 'bought' the residents with a promise of £300000 'over the lifetime' of the wind farm (eight truly ENORMOUS turbines - oddly described in The Cambridge Evening News as 'new landmarks'..!).
Now, I make that just £12000 a year, assuming a 'lifetime' of 25 years - what does that buy..? A few trees..? Anyway, as I pointed out in a blog on said local newspaper, wind turbines last, on average, 7-12 years (Denmark's experience), so expect the funding to disappear as soon as the turbines get too costly to maintain...
A separate proposal turned down by the local planning committee near Huntingdon has been appealed by the developers, so has gone to the Planning Inspectorate. We all know what THAT means...
[Snip - Godwin]
The post is about Scottish energy policy.
An independent Scotland could have very significant effects on energy policy in England, not least because of the people it would remove from the Parliament at Westminster.
Has president Obama or the European Commission given much thought to the ramifications of this I wonder?
Oh dear. A bit if fine-tuning here - some adjustments there. This is a Goldilocks policy - not too hot and not too cold. Ted Heath on stilts.
You describe what the Conservatives want for Scotland. This is what the Scots will probably get.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/9825296/Most-wind-farms-in-Scotland-after-SNP-overrules-councils.html
Justice 4Rinka
My son used to annoy his Scottish friends by calling it Scotlandshire.
Apologies, Bishop, O/T
To the outnumbered Scottish conservatives I have a few words of encouragement to offer. The pace of political change can be very rapid, when people's lives are damaged by policies that simply can't work. Look at the Germans, now recommitting to coal-fired plants. Even 5 years ago, that would have been unthinkable. So, buck up, have courage, keep trying to inject a little truth and skepticism into the Green's pie-in-the-sky Utopian agenda.
Of course, a money-back guarantee from the windmill idiots would be much better than a pep-talk, but that money is gone, flushed away, gone to meet it's maker, away to money heaven. Sorry about your loss.