THE LIE OF THE LAND

Here's the problem: a tiny, unrepresentative, undemocratic minority of extremists are actively seeking to subvert Britain's energy policy, to overturn the vital, international drive towards sustainability (in the UK, at least), to see Britain falling behind the rest of the world in the growing green economy, to create more pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, to force up energy bills and to deny our children the right to a clean environment and low-cost green energy.  Why are they doing this? 

Because they're fanatics.

Their current targets are those national organisations which have so far been, if not actively in favour of wind energy developments, at least relatively open-minded about them.  So, keep an eye on the British Horse Society, which has been pretty sensible where windfarms are concerned.  Idiots who haven't ridden a horse in years routinely object to windfarm proposals on the shabby grounds that they might scare the horses (how - if windfarms are as "noisy" as the nimbies like to make out?  Do they really expect us to believe that these "noisy" windfarms deliberately go quiet when a horse is approaching, only to start making a noise and sending "shadow flicker" - a phenomenon that no nimby seems, or tries, to understand - just when the horse is at its most vulnerable?  Is that what the numbskulls think?).

The British Horse Society has so far been pretty good at pointing out that many people ride horses near windfarms without courting disaster.  The first real windfarm in Britain was built by a stud-farm, and those horses all survived.  That particular windfarm in Cornwall has now been upgraded (the locals voted for larger new turbines to replace the existing ones).  It would surely be more realistic of the horse brigade to worry more about things that pose a genuine threat to horses - like the Grand National - rather than making up a load of horse-sh*t about windfarms.  But, sadly, the British Horse Society is coming under pressure, it would seem, from its more intolerant, aggressive, Daily Mail reader types, and might be forced by that vicious minority to start making stupid anti-windfarm statements before long.

That, certainly, is what has happened at CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England).  Previously very sensible on the matter of windfarms - recognising, for example, that the real threat to the English countryside is posed by climate change - CPRE has had a collective fit and allowed the harrumphing brigade of mindless nimbies in its midst to run riot.

In a press release, CPRE demanded that the government publish a wind energy strategy, dictating precisely how many wind turbines there will be in England and where they will be built.  The CPRE press release is a masterclass in nimby gibberish.

They have a "tranquillity map of England".  Possibly, one of the silliest maps ever created.  And, drawing an inference that no rational person could draw, CPRE are claiming that windfarms will jeopardise the "tranquillity" that CPRE has gone to the trouble of mapping (incidentally, has anyone got any idea how CPRE mapped England's "tranquillity"?  Was there even a trace of science involved?)

Given the strict noise conditions imposed on windfarms, and the requirement of windfarm operators to ensure that their turbines barely exceed the level of ordinary background noise - and that at the nearest residential amenity to the windfarm - it is quite obvious that someone at CPRE has got their knickers in a twist over nothing, here.  In fact, if you want to preserve the elusive "tranquillity" of the English countryside, you'd be best advised to support many more windfarms.  Where a windfarm is built, you won't get a major housing development, for example (which would be considerably noisier than a windfarm).

As if to show that CPRE is talking out of its corporate bottom - and doing so in the strangulated tones of a nimby idiot - the press release bends over backwards to present wind turbines as an "industrial" thing.  This is a favourite trick of the nimby Nazis.  Imagine how they'd react if something genuinely industrial was proposed!!  But by misusing language in order to promote the illusion that windfarms are "industrial" and a threat to the "tranquillity" of rural England, CPRE are letting their nimby slip show.  Or, to put it another way, they have thrown objectivity, science, rationality and the national need out of the window.  They decided to go down the deadend road of nimby nonsense by fantasising about an England in which every rural area is "tranquil" - no farming going on, we hope to God, 'cos it's bloody noisy and pretty filthy too - and all landscapes are "unspoilt" (yeah, as if) and renewable energy projects are "industrial".

You'd have to be bonkers to believe any of that.  Nimbies do, because they're bonkers.  But we have a right to expect better of CPRE.  We also have a right to expect that those who claim to run such organisations should restrain the swivel-eyed nimby liars rather than pander to their looney-tunes ideas.

Here's where CPRE leap right off the deep end into nimby paranoia: "Communities feel increasingly powerless in the face of speculative applications from big, well-funded developers, and this risks undermining public support for the measures needed to tackle climate change."

Shall we number the idiocies in that brief statement?  Yes, let's.  So, working backwards:

1) Nimbies don't give a damn about climate change.  These are the same nutters who complained about recycling and moaned about longlife, low-energy lightbulbs; the same boneheads who kicked up a stink about different coloured wheelie-bins.  They will happily delude themselves into believing that climate change isn't happening, if it means they can avoid personally having to do anything about it.  Most nimbies are right-wing nutters with a poor grasp of reality, and to them "climate change" is some vague socialist conspiracy.  They couldn't care less about climate change or doing anything about it.

2) CPRE seem to be saying that, in order not to undermine public support for the measures to tackle climate change, we should avoid taking any measures to tackle climate change, such as approving windfarms.  After all, it's easy to support something which we know will never happen and won't demand anything at all from us - any wild-eyed nimby whacko can do that!  Besides which, the public - it has been shown time and time again - tend to approve of windfarms when they've got used to them, which happens pretty quickly when one has been built (the only exceptions being those hardened, sclerotic, myopic terrors who insist that they were right about wind turbines all along, even when everybody else has admitted that they're actually okay, or those poor fools duped by their nimby neighbours into believing that they can really hear a distant windfarm, when they can't).  But CPRE seems to be saying that the best way to maintain public support for anti-climate change measures is not to implement any of those measures.  Which is pretty mad.

3) How many windfarm developers go in for "speculative" planning applications?  Does CPRE really think that windfarm developers treat it as some sort of game?  It takes YEARS to process a planning application for a windfarm.  There are dozens of hoops to be jumped through, all manner of surveys, studies, consultations.  It's an expensive, time-consuming activity.  CPRE has proven that it has stopped listening to common sense and is now only listening to the barking nimbies if it thinks that windfarm developers happily waste their time and everybody else's with "speculative" planning applications.

4) Not all windfarm developers are "big" and "well-funded".  Many are relatively small, community-funded enterprises.  CPRE presumably doesn't like these either.  Why?  Because CPRE has not thought things through.  It has just leapt willy-nilly on the nimby bandwagon and will be contradicting itself for evermore, or until it wakes out of its nimby coma.

5) Considerably less than half of all windfarms proposed in England receive planning consent, and that often after a planning inquiry and various foolish legal manoeuvres by the cretins of Middle Earth (sorry, Middle England).  The idea that "communities" are powerless in the face of windfarm developers is a nimby myth, pure and simple.  Many, many cases have come to light of aggressive, dishonest and misinformed nimby campaigns causing havoc with the planning system and holding Britain back.  The real people who are powerless in all this are the supporters of wind energy who refuse to stoop to the depths to which the nimbies are only too happy to stoop.  The supporters of wind power get bullied and threatened and abused by the vicious nimby crew - the very nimbies who claim to feel "powerless".  Sorry, but CPRE have completely lost the plot if they think that the seriously delusional, thuggish and mendacious types who drive nimby campaigns are "powerless" in any way; in fact, CPRE has fallen prey to the very self-serving propaganda issued by the nimbies themselves.

6) "Communities" are not the issue here.  The problem tends to be newcomers to a rural area, and a handful of retired bigots, who band together to fight anything and everything.  Sometimes, it happens to be a windfarm proposal that falls foul of these extremists.  But it can be anything.  These terrorists whip up as much frenzy, fear and loathing as they can, splitting and harming their communities in the process.  If CPRE were honest, they'd leave "communities" out of this.  But they've fallen for another of the nimby lies - that the "community" is against something (which it doesn't understand, and has been repeatedly lied to about by the hoodlums in their midst).  In fact, the real community stands to gain - economically and environmentally - from having a windfarm nearby, and the community proper is usually not-all-that-bothered about having one.  It is the crazed despots of the nimby movement, and them alone, who cause all the trouble, and they do not represent the real community, no matter how much they like to convince themselves that they do.

Here's some proof.  A recent Ipsos Mori poll found that 68% of rural residents want more wind power.  That's more than the city-dwellers, 66% of whom want more wind energy.  It's close, but the difference is also telling.  It shows that more than two-thirds of people living in rural England want to see more windfarms.  So what the flock are CPRE on about, with their gibberish about "communities"?  Most people living in the countryside support wind power.  Only a demented few are actively opposed to it.

Does CPRE only represent the demented few, now?  The newcomers, who moved to an "exclusive" rural area and won't allow anyone to do anything there, anymore, ever again?  The Telegraph-reading twits and Daily Mail monsters?  The sort who complain about sheep and church bells ruining their new-found rural "tranquillity"?  The selfish, deluded, right-wing maniac brigade?  Is that who CPRE now represents?

It comes to something when Charles, Prince of Wales, expresses support for wind power (in a new film, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, screened at the Sundance Film Festival), while a body like CPRE sides with a self-serving nutcase like Donald Trump.  Prince Charles provided the narration for the film Harmony.  He praises Germany for leading the way in wind energy technology and says:

I recently flew over the German countryside where ancient buildings and castles now merge into a new landscape dotted with solar panels and wind turbines.  I certainly support the commitment to working with nature's freely-given forms and clean energy.

So, too, do the clear majority (9 out of 10, in the case of all renewables) of English people.  The same proportion of English folk and Scots - roughly 7 out of 10 - support wind energy.  They have realised that the "new landscape" described by Prince Charles in Germany is the landscape of the future.  Ancient buildings and castles belong to it, too.

Unless you're the daffy old CPRE, which has had a collective breakdown and thinks that the only things allowed in the landscape are ancient buildings and castles.  You know - the very sort of thing yer average nimby thinks.  Once they've built their own monstrosity in the midst of the "unspoilt" countryside, that is.