The curse of Aiolos is surely heading this way
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.
Energy 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.
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Weather for Halifax
Thursday 17 May 2012
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Temperature: 6 C to 11 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South
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Temperature: 6 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
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