WIND FARM FANATICS ARE BANKRUPTING US WITH THEIR HOT AIR

By James Delingpole

17th February, 2012

Daily Express

Wind farm fanatics are bankrupting us with their hot air

THIS week the chairman of the National Trust finally admitted what the rest of us have known for some time: wind farms are the ugliest, most stupid, environmentally damaging, expensive, wasteful and utterly pointless monstrosities ever to deface the British landscape. Not that Sir Simon Jenkins put it quite so bluntly. But from the chairman of a conservation organisation with four million members, 28,500 acres and 700 miles of coastline this was still pretty powerful and damning stuff. Wind power, said Jenkins, is not only the “least efficient” form of renewable energy but it also “wrecks the countryside”.

Nor do wind power’s disastrous side effects end there. It also: wipes out birds (400,000 a year in the US alone), drives anyone who lives nearby mad with its strobing effects and low subsonic hum, trashes property values, costs between three and nine times the amount of conventional energy, creates the fuel poverty which has caused hypothermia deaths to soar this year, slows economic growth, blights views destroys jobs and produces such unreliable, intermittent energy it requires near-100 per cent backup from conventional power. Apart from that, though, wind power is great.

Ten years ago, at the height of the man-made global warming craze, Jenkins’ remarks might have got him into an awful lot of trouble. Today they just sound like a statement of the bleeding obvious. Apart from hardcore eco-activists, the only people left who believe in wind farms these days are ignorant politicians, crony capitalist energy companies and rent-seeking fat cats. The 15 biggest estate owners receive no less than £850million a year in subsidies – paid for by a hidden tariff added to our electricity bills.

BUT how on earth was such a massive scam perpetrated against the public on so little scientific evidence? This is the question future generations are going to ask and it’s the same one I ask in my new book Watermelons. The short answer is: follow the money.

From small, cultish beginnings as the obscure obsession of a few hairshirt eco-loons, “climate change” has grown into a massive industry worth billions, if not trillions, of dollars worldwide. When you consider that just one US solar energy firm Solyndra managed to snaffle (before it collapsed) a whopping $500million of tax- payers’ money you begin to realise the scale of the great global warming Ponzi scheme. And also why so many vested interests are so reluctant to see their gravy train derailed.

The wind farm industry is a case in point. Despite over- whelming evidence of the damage it has wrought it continues to expand against the will of the people because of the fortunes being made by the unprincipled few.

In Britain by 2030, the Renewable Energy Foundation calculates, as much as £130billion will have been paid out through taxpayer subsidy to the wind farm industry. With such eye- watering sums of easy money to be made (last year six Scottish wind farms were paid £900,000 just to turn their turbines off in high wind so that the power surge didn’t disrupt the grid) it’s no wonder the industry can afford to pay an army of lobbyists.

Some of these lobbyists pay eco-activists to masquerade as ordinary citizens who just happen to have been inspired to write letters to the papers and MPs in praise of the latest wind farm development. The real people who have to live alongside these eyesores stand no chance against such well- orchestrated, lavishly funded and utterly cynical campaigns.

This is entirely typical of the lies and hypocrisy of the climate change industry. Anyone who questions the “consensus” of global warming is accused of being in the pay of sinister corporate interests but the truth is the balance of spending lies all the other way. According to calculations by Australian blogger Jo Nova, the amount spent funding the global warming industry is around 3,500 times greater than the amount that has been spent funding climate scepticism.

All of which might yet be forgivable if climate change were a serious problem but increasingly the evidence suggests that the catastrophic warming predicted by alarmist computer models simply isn't happening. Not only did global warming stop in 1998 but the lack of recent sunspot activity suggests we're entering another of those mini-ice ages redolent of the days when ice fairs were held on the Thames.

WHILE this may be good news for skaters it will be of little comfort to those who - thanks to green tariffs – can scarcely afford to heat their homes. Nor indeed to those who want an economic future or jobs for their kids. The depressing truth is that, thanks to their misguided obsession with global warming, a handful of Left-leaning environmental activists (watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside) have successfully created the biggest outbreak of mass hysteria in history that has in turn done incalculable damage to the global economy, to our landscape and wildlife. In the name of saving Earth, in other words, these idealistic misanthropes have helped destroy it.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/302702/Wind-farm-fanatics-are-bankrupting-us-with-their-hot-air