WINDY NONSENSE

The Greenies have gone off wind power now but no-one has had the heart to tell the British government. Niall Ferguson is irate. Excerpts:

"My objection is not just that wind turbines are a much more expensive way of generating power than conventional power stations. We could all put up with bigger bills if it meant, in the cant phrase, saving the planet. The key problem is that wind power is so inefficient that it scarcely replaces conventional sources of energy at all.... wind varies: any energy supplier wanting to buy power from wind farms must also line up substitutes for those days when the wind is either too weak or too strong. Wind farms can stand in for other forms of power only when the wind is not too weak and not too strong, but just right. The rest of the time, the more reliable power stations have to step in. This means that the true cost of wind power includes the cost of providing back-up power to compensate for the wind turbines' intermittent output. And guess who picks up these extra costs? Step forward the consumer - not to mention the taxpayer.

The Department of Trade and Industry has decided that nearly three quarters of the additional "renewable" energy should come from wind turbines. To ensure that this happens, electricity suppliers are being forced by law to buy a rising proportion of their power from wind farms..... What this represents is a return to the planned economy in the name of environmentalism - a kind of Green Stalinism. The consequences are the familiar Soviet ones: centralised decision-making and localised devastation.

What is so absurd is that, no matter how many wind turbines we build, global dependence on fossil fuels will scarcely be diminished at all. Indeed, if we are not careful, we ourselves could end up relying even more on precisely the sources of power the Government claims it is against. Why? Because even as it has pumped money into the white elephants known as wind farms, the Government has been unthinkingly running down the one reliable source of CO2-free power. Over the next 20 years, all but one of Britain's 16 nuclear power stations will close.

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Junk law: "They all deserve a good spanking. 'They' are the state attorneys general (AGs) and other lawyers who will soon file briefs with the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia demanding, in effect, that the U.S. Government ration and restrict the American people's access to energy."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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