It would be interesting to know how many of the hoorays who have objected to the proposed Lenchwick Windfarm on behalf of their horses actually read British Horse, the official magazine of the British Horse Society (BHS).
BHS Scotland had a superb awayday in September when representatives of the access committee and riders' access groups visited Europe's largest wind farm at Whitelee, near East Kilbride, to investigate equine usage.
As the article in the Oct/Nov edition of the magazine goes on to tell us, 'Delegates were met by three horses and their riders from nearby Meadowhead Farm Riding School. They shared their experience of living adjacent to Whitelee and discussed the new and exciting opportunities that Whitelee Windfarm brings to this busy riding school.'
New? Exciting? Did they interview the horses?
Well, according to one of our local nookies (who hasn't ridden a horse in years), the creatures are flighty things and will almost certainly be spooked by a wind turbine a bit of a distance away. The very first objection to the Lenchwick planning application came from someone - not very local - who seemed to feel that horses are more important than society or the planet, because they're more sensitive (or at least their riders are). So, obviously, horses and windfarms don't mix.
Or, rather, they do. Very happily. The first windfarm built in the UK - Delabole - also has a stud and riding stables on site. The owner often rides his horses round the windfarm. An early windfarm. Blades much closer to the ground.
And what's this - BHS Scotland Development Officer, Helene Mauchlen, says 'Wind farms are an increasing feature of rural life and many people are already enjoying satisfying and safe horse riding access around them.'
What? No horses rearing, panicking, running amok at the mere sight of a turbine? That can't be right, surely!
Well, actually, it's true. It's not horses who don't like windfarms, it's (some of) their owners - who, like the other nimbies involved in this fraudulent travesty, objecting to windfarms, would rather use their children, their animals or their elderly relatives to advance their cause than admit that they're just selfish and stupid.
According to the British Horsearticle, ScottishPower Renewables have made a modest donation to help fund a joint UK-wide survey, along with BHS Scotland, of attitudes and experiences connected with horses and windfarms. Ultimately, the reason is probably to help shoot down the maniacal claims of the horsey, anti-windfarm set of Daily Mailreaders who are currently doing their bit to hold the country back.
Still, yet again, it's all good news. Okay, BHS Scotland will be more familiar with windfarms than their soft southern comrades because the Scots are better organised than we are and are already a good way down the road towards a happily renewable future.
So it makes sense that the Scottish branch of the British Horse Society is leading on this one. They know what they're talking about (windfarms are good news for horseriders). Unlike the delusional fools of VVASP, who'll tell any lie going if they think it means people will take them seriously.
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The curse of Aiolos is surely heading this way
ReplyDeleteby Bernard Ingham
This column has been coming on for a long time.
It is a challenge to the massed ranks of “greens” in upper Calder Valley to admit the error of their ways and apologise for the damage
they are inflicting on their fellow men and women.
It is no good their claiming that climate change is a greater threat to mankind than terrorism. That does not excuse the use of something
as spectacularly and expensively useless as wind power.
I am moved to issue this challenge to them by Keith Milligan, a former metropolitan advertising consultant, who lives in the upper Calder Valley.
He has just published a novel, “The Crosses of Aiolos”, which is a fearful tale of the consequences of wind power for a Pennine community
called Cloughgreen.
The “greens” might reasonably argue that Milligan has visited the Cloughgreen district from Blackshawhead’s Long Causeway across to
Stoodley Pike with all the dreadful results of wind power’s development reported from across the world.
He has indeed – and added some for good measure to spice his grand indictment of one of homo sapiens’ latest grand follies.
Let us leave aside the industrialisation of our bare moors with forests of wind turbines, wrecking the peace and solitude of uplands that
are the “lungs” of the West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester conurbations.
He piles in bird kills; light strobing; horse-spooking, bringing the tragic death of an old international eventer and his old nag and putting
a stud out of business; noise pollution, the ruination of people’s lives and the loss of property values to the extent of unsaleability; and
the imprisonment of a woman campaigner for damaging a turbine in protest.
All this is bad enough. But then comes the interference with the water table leading to a disastrous Aberfan-style peat slide that devastates
Cloughgreen and its major employer. And this leads on to the suicide of a fastidious local authority planner probably out of self-disgust and
the spiriting abroad of a corrupt official who deliberately turned in a criminally inadequate hydrology report.
I can hear Hebden Royd’s “greens” in solemn conclave dismissing all this as completely over the top. In a sense it is.
But what they cannot spirit away – as Milligan so eloquently demonstrates the wind industry’s PR machine systematically disposes of
bad news – is his total rejection of wind farms as a practical response to any threat posed by global warming.
He has come up with a powerful expose of what potentially could happen when fanatical environmentalism gets into bed with unbridled capitalism.
Whether we like it or not, that is the situation we have at the moment.
Worse still, it is aided and abetted by every political party in Britain who are unaccountably besotted with “renewables”, which effectively
means wind power.
part 2 follows
part 2
ReplyDeleteEnergy Secretary Chris Huhne’s determination to wreck the priceless tranquillity of our uplands and impoverish the electricity consumer
underlines the prevailing hysteria.
Regular readers of this column well know my scepticism, not about climate change, but about the extent of man-made global warming.
But I would dip my pen in exactly the same virtriol I am now using if I felt global warming science were as settled as some scientists try to make out.
This is because I simply do not believe we should fight a perceived threat with ineffective weapons.
Still less should we do so when those weapons will, if persevered with, bring distress to those least able to pay electricity bills, alienate
those who can afford the mounting cost and price our industry and commerce out of international markets.
The sooner the “greens” and our pathetic politicians get it into their daft heads that, however free the four winds are, they cannot be
relied upon to blow when we need them, the sooner we shall have a rational approach to whatever threat global warming represents.
No entrepreneur would be building wind farms today without the massive subsidies consumers have been hi-jacked to pay without being told.
Their electricity is at best three times the cost of conventionally generated power.
And that does not include the cost of backing up unpredictable wind farms with entirely predictable traditional generating plant,
usually fired by fossil fuels.
Just imagine the absurdity to which we have been driven of actually having to build mucky power stations as cover for when the
winds inconveniently don’t blow or blow too hard that turbines have to be shut down.
In this way wind power is not much of a reducer of carbon emissions. It is therefore just about the most expensively incompetent
way of attacking global warming.
We ought to feel indebted to Keith Milligan for systematically exposing the curse of Aiolos, the Greek God of wind. It now threatens Todmorden Moor.
You have been warned.