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There was a remarkable exchange on a Daily Telegraph 'blog' recently, from which the following extracts, edited for clarity and anonymity, have been taken. Nevertheless, if you see your edited contribution here and would like it removed, please let me know, and it will be done; I do not know how to contact you privately.

These blogs are frequently interesting and informative; many of the contributors are ordinary engineers and scientists who are frustrated at the way the BBC never reports their views, and their comments often shed light on what is happening in energy policy.

The article at the head of the page was talking about policy on wind farms, and the way local opinion is usually over-ruled when deciding whether to grant planning permission. It began like this:

........Nick Boles told John Hayes, a fellow Conservative, that local people have genuine concerns and that wind farms are not appropriate in all settings.

The Daily Telegraph has been told that Mr Boles warned Mr Hayes in the letter that people bitterly resented having onshore wind farm developments imposed on them by planners after an inquiry.

The intervention will be a major boost for communities which are fighting the construction of turbines near their homes. It is the first evidence of a Tory ministerial alliance against Liberal Democrat attempts to introduce more onshore wind turbines.

Mr Boles is looking to build an informal alliance against wind turbines with Mr Hayes, a near constituency neighbour, without having to get agreement from Ed Davey, the Lib Dem Climate Change Secretary......




One blogger, whom I'll call 'r', commented:

This is an amazing article showing the failure of the planning laws to protect what I had always considered to be the strength of our democracy.

Local people opposed to onshore wind farms should not have their views ignored.

Does anyone here disagree with this?

If a community decides that they do not want a wind farm in their local area, why should a challenge to this be allowed?

Anyone disagree with local democracy?


Then this:-

"A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “The whole point of the planning system is to ensure that developments happen in the right places and take into account local concerns.”

Who should decide where the "right places" are, if not the locals?

So - if the locals turned the proposals down, why should anyone have the right to override their decision?

The article then informs us that there is "growing community support" for wind farms.

If this is true, then why not put them only where the local community agrees to them?


Whether you agree or disagree with renewables......... do we now live in a fascist dictatorship?



Another person on the blog asked the question "How could anyone falsify official global warming data?"

A scientist posted the following reply:


Easy. You assume without any justification that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere affects the climate. Then you think up a suitably large alarmist global warming figure. Fake up cod science to back it up and GIGO it through big computers to dazzle people. Con politicians into giving you lots of other people's money and use it to suppress dissent around the world. Bingo.

The number of people who can see through the cod-science is quite low, and most had better things to do, until recently.

Things went wrong after good old tempus fugit led to a stink in the global warming movement, because their forecasts failed to happen, and evidence showed their hypothesis to be untrue.

Now real scientists have debunked the IPCC equations.

Bingo again - lo and behold: massive fraud.



I'll leave the final comment to someone who knows how the industry operates ...

...I work in the oil industry in the offshore construction side. The offshore windfarms are installed, unsurprisingly, by foreign construction firms which primarily work in the oil sector.

But there is a difference. A few lads I know worked on the Sheringham Shoal offshore windfarm installation, and one I know actually quit because of the unbelievable waste of money going on. Because the installation is essentially done using taxpayer's money (and run by Statoil, a Norwegian oil company) the actual speed of installation was snail-like. No-one cared and the costs because of it were huge.

When we work in the commercial sector with the oil majors, the pressure is always on to get the job done. When putting in the windfarms it was almost farcical in the lack of pressure to finish, because it was not being paid for by people who cared where the money was spent. Like all government projects, taxpayer money hangs off the branches of trees, to be plucked when needed.

And not one single conventional power station can be taken out of service because of windfarms unless we are prepared to accept blackouts when there isn't any wind.

A total utter waste of money, a blight on the environment, and a waste of the energy required to fit them.






NOTE ... GIGO means "garbage in, garbage out"...Ed.

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