Dislike Wind farms? BBC Sneers at your Madness

[Teddy Bear]

Dislike wind farms? Then the BBC thinks you're both mad and a NIMBY

By James Slack

‘Are you a believer in the whole theory of man-made global warming?’

So sneered the BBC’s Evan Davis this morning, in a short but brutal inquisition of Martin Hill, the leader of Lincolnshire County Council.

Mr Hill’s crime – for that’s certainly how it was being treated on Radio Four’s Today programme – was to propose plans to make it harder to gain planning consent for wind farms.

He was not, as Mr Davis’ question so deliberately suggested, some sort of lunatic climate change denier or flat-earther. Nor was he what the BBC would call a NIMBY, meaning ‘not in my back yard’.

The (Tory) councillor was merely suggesting that perhaps the good people of Lincolnshire – who already have 75 huge wind turbines on their door step – had largely done their bit. That their landscape had been scarred enough, thank you very much – particularly since there are significant doubts about whether wind farms are actually much use.

Mr Hill tried to be reasonable. He tried not to rise to Mr Davis’s accusation that Lincolnshire council was being ‘draconian' or engaging in ‘tokenism’.

‘We're not going to say we aren't going to have any more,’ he said. ‘I [just] don't think we want the whole county to be covered by a forest of the things’.

But that, of course, was too much for the BBC, which treats the pursuit of ‘green energy’ as some sort of holy grail, in much the same way as it continues to revere the collapsing European single currency.

First came the accusation that Mr Hill might be a climate change denier – just about the gravest charge in the Corporation’s book.

Then there was time for one final gem from Mr Davis: ‘Do you think 1,000 years ago you would have been there saying, "no churches should be built in our villages. They're too nice. We do not want these ugly spires in our countryside"?'

Can you imagine the BBC treating the green lobby with such contempt? Not a chance.

The fact is that the Corporation has chosen its side in the wind farm debate.

On one side, there is the BBC, Chris Huhne, the rest of the Liberal Democrats, the wind turbine manufacturers keen to keep gobbling up all those meaty government subsidies and – for as long as the party thinks there’s a few metropolitan votes in it – the Labour Party.

On the other side are the residents who actually have to share their villages and green fields with these inefficient monstrosities, the Duke of Edinburgh, countless energy experts and the rump of the Tory party.

Significantly, the High Court has also intervened. Last week Mrs Justice Lang ruled that the Government's renewable energy targets did not outweigh the right of the villagers of Hemsby in Norfolk to preserve their landscape.

The judge said that building four 350ft turbines, a proposal from the company Sea & Land Power and Energy which had already been rejected by both council and government inspectors, would harm the character and appearance of the beauty spot on the edge of the Norfolk Broads.

Mrs justice Lang should count herself lucky that she didn’t have to be interviewed on the Today programme to explain herself. It wouldn’t have been pleasant. And it certainly wouldn’t have been impartial.

But, then, isn’t such bias precisely what we’ve come to expect?

[Teddy Bear]

Despite the title, the following article by the eminent James Delingpole concerns his recent successes in his campaign against Wind Farms, in spite of the propaganda generated by the BBC.

The BBC and Jimmy Savile: peas in a pod
By James Delingpole

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been out winning wars. And now that we've reached at least the end of the beginning of the battle to rescue Britain from the hideous wind farm menace it's time to start naming the guilty parties.

Guiltiest of all, in my book, is the BBC. Without the BBC's relentless propagandising on behalf of the alarmist cause everywhere from the Today programme to Springwatch to the hysterically doom-mongering reportage of Roger Harrabin and David Shukman the public appetite for climate action at all costs would not have been nearly so strong or undiscriminating. Nor would our politicians have been quite so desperate to prove their green credentials with lunatic policies like the Climate Change Act. This in turn would surely have meant fewer wind farms. And, better still, fewer expensive sports cars for the noisome Dale Vince. Perhaps Vince might even have been forced to get a proper job.

How did the BBC feel justified in playing Al Gore's Dr Goebbels when – under the terms of its charter – it is supposed to remain scrupulously balanced and neutral? Well, this is subject of a court case which has been going on this week, which has seen the massed ranks of the most expensive lawyers the BBC can muster pitted against a North Wales pensioner and his wife. It concerns the origins of this now-infamous occasion in 2006:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

Only one witness has stepped forward to reveal what happened that day, blogger and journalist (not to be confused with the one without the D.) Richard D North. He wrote:

I found the seminar frankly shocking, The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the Corporation) were matched by a equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the ‘we must support Kyoto’ school of climate change activists…

I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed.,I mean that I heard nothing which made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily). Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject … I spent the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.

I argued at the seminar that I thought most broadcasting coverage on climate change was awful. But I also said there was no need for them to become self-conscious about it, This was because, although the issues were scientifically, politically and economically difficult, the BBC’s reporting of the thing would improve as soon as their audience was asked to vote or pay for climate change policy.

All this piqued the interest of blogger Tony Newbery – aka Harmless Sky - who has been on the BBC's case ever since. Here he describes his motivation:

Years of watching the BBC’s coverage of this subject - with growing astonishment -during which numerous ‘scientific experts’ who clearly hold very partisan views on climate change, have been interviewed to provide viewers with what they were lead to believe were objective opinions on the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, has made me despair of BBC impartiality. I am thinking of people like George Monbiot, Mark Lynas, Professor Chris Rapley, Lord May of Oxford, Sir David King and Professor Tom Burke in particular. Anyone who has followed this controversy will be well aware that, although such people may be experts on the subject, they are anything but impartial or objective.

In an attempt to discover whether the BBC had organised this seminar in order to acquaint itself with the issues, or whether the purpose had been to obtain some kind of spurious authority for an editorial policy that had long since become ingrained in their news coverage, I thought that it would be worth trying to find out who had been invited to advise them. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations I made the following request to the BBC for information….

The BBC's response has been to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds – hey: aren't you glad your licence fee is so well spent? – trying to ensure he never finds out the answer.

This is a scandal. A bigger scandal, I'd argue, than the Jimmy Savile affair because so many more people are affected. For years, aided and abetted by its house menagerie of useful idiots from Chris Packham to David Attenborough, the BBC has been pumping out a relentless slew of climate change propaganda so frenziedly biased and hysterical it might just have well have come, unedited, from a Friends of the Earth press release.

The damage this has done to our country is incalculable: it has warped the minds of the young and impressionable, giving them utterly misleading notions about the state of climate science and the health of the planet; it has nudged our politicians into making truly fatuous decisions which have a deleterious influence on all our lives; it has lent a veneer of wholly unmerited moral credibility to the schemings of "green" politicians like Lord Deben, Tim Yeo and Chris Huhne; it has laid the foundations for a mad, mad world in which it is somehow deemed a rational and noble thing to pay rich, often absentee landowners out of the pockets of the poor to erect massive, bird-slicing bat-chomping eco crucifixes on their estates, spoiling the view for miles around, generating no useful electricity whatsoever, and actually – in so far as we need to care about such matters – increasing carbon emissions rather than reducing them.

I know I was on the BBC the other day – and it was jolly good fun reminding the ridiculous Caroline Lucas that she's a self-confessed "Watermelon". But, by God it's the most appalling institution.

[Teddy Bear]

With the BBC continually trying to present itself as concerned for the environment, thereby justifying their promotion of wind farms, you may wonder why you won't find the following information available on their website.

Wind farms vs wildlife
The shocking environmental cost of renewable energy

Wind turbines only last for ‘half as long as previously thought’, according to a new study. But even in their short lifespans, those turbines can do a lot of damage. Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that, this century at least, renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.

I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked as an environmental consultant — conducting impact assessments on projects like the Folkestone-to-London rail link — and I now teach ecology and conservation. Though I started out neutral on renewable energy, I’ve since seen the havoc wreaked on wildlife by wind power, hydro power, biofuels and tidal barrages. The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons. What few of them have in their heads, though, is the consolation of science.

My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.

Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).


‘Uh-oh.’

I’ve heard it suggested that birds will soon adapt to avoid turbine blades. But your ability to learn something when you’ve been whacked on the head by an object travelling at 200 mph is limited. And besides, this comes from a complete misconception of how long it takes species to evolve. Birds have been flying, unimpeded, through the skies for millions of years. They’re hardly going to alter their habits in a few months. You hear similar nonsense from environmentalists about so-called habitat ‘mitigation’. There has been talk, for example, during proposals to build a Severn barrage, that all the waders displaced by the destruction of the mud flats can have their inter-tidal habitat replaced elsewhere. It may be what developers and governments want to hear, but recreating such habitats would take centuries not years — even if space were available. The birds wouldn’t move on somewhere else. They’d just starve to death.

Loss of habitat is the single biggest cause of species extinction. Wind farms not only reduce habitat size but create ‘population sinks’ — zones which attract animals and then kill them. My colleague Mark Duchamp suggests birds are lured in because they see the turbines as perching sites and also because wind towers (because of the grass variations underneath) seem to attract more prey. The turbines also attract bats, whose wholesale destruction poses an ever more serious conservation concern.

Bats are what is known as K-selected species: they reproduce very slowly, live a long time and are easy to wipe out. Having evolved with few predators — flying at night helps — bats did very well with this strategy until the modern world. This is why they are so heavily protected by so many conventions and regulations: the biggest threats to their survival are made by us.

And the worst threat of all right now is wind turbines. A recent study in Germany by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research showed that bats killed by German turbines may have come from places 1,000 or more miles away. This would suggest that German turbines — which an earlier study claims kill more than 200,000 bats a year — may be depressing populations across the entire northeastern portion of Europe. Some studies in the US have put the death toll as high as 70 bats per installed megawatt per year: with 40,000 MW of turbines currently installed in the US and Canada. This would give an annual death toll of up to three -million.

Why is the public not more aware of this carnage? First, because the wind industry (with the shameful complicity of some ornithological organisations) has gone to great trouble to cover it up — to the extent of burying the corpses of victims. Second, because the ongoing obsession with climate change means that many environmentalists are turning a blind eye to the ecological costs of renewable energy. What they clearly don’t appreciate — for they know next to nothing about biology — is that most of the species they claim are threatened by ‘climate change’ have already survived 10 to 20 ice ages, and sea-level rises far more dramatic than any we have experienced in recent millennia or expect in the next few centuries. Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might.