Sunday, September 11, 2011

Monuments to lunacy


Booker returns to wind farms this week, these "monuments to lunacy" that are better described as subsidy farms.

The case is made – again – and Booker remarks that it is nine years since he began writing about these monstrosities, having decided that his main aim had to be to bring home to people just how grotesquely inefficient and costly they were as a way to make electricity – without even fulfilling their declared purpose of reducing CO2 emissions.

Then in a lament that echoes across so many fields with which we have to deal, Booker notes that, "despite all the practical evidence to show why wind power is one of the greatest follies of our age, those who rule our lives, from our own politicians and officials here in Britain to those above them in Brussels, seem quite impervious to the facts".

This is why, from a purely historical perspective, I am wont to observe that, "this is why we are going to have to kill them", the "we" in this context being the generic English people who – as a matter of historic inevitability – are eventually going to rise up and slaughter them.

Regular readers will know that I do not suggest this as a firm prediction – much less an incitement (Mencken notwithstanding) – but as a direction of travel. It is one which can be changed in time, but I see no signs that this might happen.

Nevertheless, the one great advantage we have is that the administration's plans, and their ruthless arrogance in ignoring science, economics and the wishes of the bulk of the people, makes them so fragile that their downfall may well come before we have to rise up and slaughter them. It may, however, be a close-run thing.

But if I am confident that the lunacy must end at some time, if only because I cannot imagine it continuing, there will be at least one legacy of these mad times.


With highly detrimental changes to the planning system in hand, Booker observes that, if our administration really wished to make a useful change, it should insist that every planning permission to build wind turbines should include a requirement that, after their 25-year life, they must be removed at their owners’ expense.

Alas, he says, by that time the companies will all have gone bankrupt, and we shall be left with a hideous legacy as a monument to one of the greatest lunacies of our time.

COMMENT THREAD