NOTHING LIKE A DANE

Thanks to one of our regular contributors, here's a comment from a young man in Northamptonshire:

'I have 10 wind turbines near me and obviously there was shit loads of opposition but now they're up, everybody loves them. Having another 8 being built soon!'

So - are we learning anything? Lots of people yapping, blathering, putting up placards, lying to their neighbours ... then the turbines start turning and everyone finds out that there's nothing wrong with them. In fact, they're quite inspiring! Do you want a few more? Oh, yes please!!!

That, my friends, is a FACT about windfarms.

Note that FACT. Anyone leafing through today's Evesham Journal will find a small outbreak of FACTs. These are FACTs from the VVASP School of Making Up Misleading Information and Calling it a FACT.

Apparently, someone has identified three FACTs about our proposed Lenchwick Windfarm. Each turbine is the same as a forty storey building and nobody is ever going to want to live near one (that's FACT one). Windfarms create noise pollution (that's another FACT). And windfarms make shadows flicker (that, too, is a FACT).

It would be tiresome to go through the mistakes in this fool's FACT-list and unfair to highlight the extraordinary extent of this person's ignorance. They clearly have let VVASP mess with their heads for far too long. And let's not forget that VVASP's FACTs were rubbished by an independent and impartial regulator.

The fact that this strange local has FACTs rather than 'guesses' just proves that they are a VVASP dupe who can't tell nonsense from fact any more.

Why, though? Why is it that, on the Continent, windfarms are merrily and quietly generating clean energy, much to the satisfaction of the locals, while the English can't stop frothing at the mouth over the whole windfarm/climate change thing?

What makes us so different, say, from the Danes, who love their windfarms?

George Monbiot suggested an answer to this one - the Danes are essentially communal. They get together in co-operatives (which is why we eat Danish Bacon and Lurpak butter), and their windfarms tend to belong to their local communities, who benefit from the energy (and money) generated by the turbines.

In England, no one believes in communes or co-operatives. We're fundamentally selfish and greedy. So a lot of people are prepared to lie about windfarms because they can't see any benefit to themselves from having one nearby.

Certainly, that theory rings true where VVASP are concerned. There are no good reasons (at all) to oppose windfarms, but if you think that you're not going to get anything from a turbine or two nearby, why shouldn't you terrify your neighbours and waste thousands of pounds of public money in trying to stop them?

I guess, just as windfarms in the UK are (if you're a nimby maniac) some kind of conspiracy involving local developers, power companies and Gordon Brown, then the success of windfarms on the Continent is all part of some EU conspiracy.

Doesn't anybody else think that this selfish, right-wing, Daily Mail madness is what's holding Britain back?

Why can't we be more like the Danes?