THIS IS SOMETHING THE GREENIES SHOULD BE GETTING ANGRY ABOUT (BUT THEY DON'T)

Story from aboard a fishing trawler in the Irish sea:

"As the first batch was sorted, we watched in mounting horror as Mate, Francois Bruneel with Steve McDaid and Gary Hugman, the enormously impressive crew, threw marketable fish into red plastic bins - not unlike laundry baskets - sweeping the rest, undersize and unmarketable fish along the belt. Lubricated by a constant flow of sea water, they were flushed through a small opening in the hull, back into the sea, dead and dying, from whence they had so recently been plucked.

That was the horror. From that first, bulging net, the harvest of the sea, we estimated that at least ninety percent of the catch was dumped - or "discarded" in the clinical jargon of the trade. By far the bulk of this waste was immature plaice, thousands of baby fish, some only three or four inches long, tiny, perfect replicas of the few remaining adult fish which would be landed later that day and sold for the dinner plates of the nation.

Then came the next batch, smaller in quantity - much smaller. Good, clean adult fish, mainly prime plaice, ripe for the market, tossed swiftly into the red bins, ready for gutting and cleaning. This time the bulk of the "discards" amounted to unsaleable "dogs" - lesser spotted dogfish. These where were also flushed through the hatch. Plunging into the water, each shook itself like a canine, as if indignant at their treatment, and swum swiftly away from the trawler, none the worse for their experience.

So what was happening here? Why the obscene waste from the first batch - "next year's harvest", one of the crew observed bitterly - and so little from the second?

As we grouped in the tiny mess room after the nets had been "shot" for the second time, supping mugs of scalding tea, Skipper Dell explained. It was the nets he was forced to use. They had been specified by the EU commission in regulations under the Common Fisheries Policy, perversely - to the utter frustration of all the fishermen of Fleetwood - as a "conservation" measure, supposedly designed to aid "cod recovery" in the Irish Sea.

If you wanted logic, Dell continued, there was none - none that he and his colleagues could discern...."

More here.




U.K. GOVERNMENT WIND POWER SCHEMES ARE A JUGGERNAUT

Hard to stop even though nobody now thinks they are a good idea

"The Government's plan to dominate hundreds of square miles of Britain's countryside with wind turbines is the centre of a battle rapidly approaching its crisis. This year 30 new schemes have been approved, for turbines supposedly generating 770 megawatts of power - equal to the entire capacity of the 1,165 turbines erected to date. Up to 9,000 turbines are now at different stages of the planning process - and many are far bigger than the majority of those already built.

The Government is desperately bending the planning laws to get the turbines up because the EU requires us to generate 20 per cent of our power from renewable sources by 2020. Meanwhile, ever more scientists, engineers and conservationists are adding their voices to the argument that wind turbines are ludicrously costly and inefficient - and do not bring the ecological benefits they are supposed to achieve anyway. There are many who warn that the Government is making a catastrophic blunder.....

The statistics demonstrating the futility of wind power are now overwhelming. Electricity from wind is two-and-a-half times more expensive than from conventional sources. The claims for the amount of power generated by turbines - which consumers already subsidise to the tune of œ1.5 billion a year through higher bills - are wildly exaggerated. On the Government's own admission, the output of each turbine, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, is less than a quarter of "installed capacity" (24.1 per cent), so that the 1,165 turbines already built produce an average of only 186 megawatts: a fraction of that produced by one large conventional power station.

The saving in greenhouse gas emissions is minimal: the 1,165 turbines already built may "displace" 93 tons of CO2 an hour but, for comparison, five jumbo jets in flight will give off 100 tons an hour. And even this notional saving is discounted by the need to keep conventional power stations permanently ticking over, ready to take over for the three-quarters of the time when turbines are unable to generate.

The Government, as deluded by its windmills as Don Quixote, is backed by a strange alliance of ill-informed, sentimental greens and the wind-power companies themselves. The latter cannot believe their luck at a bonanza worth more than œ1 billion a year. On the opposing side, led by such eminent conservationists as Prof Bellamy and James Lovelock, is an increasingly clued-up army of critics, who cannot understand why we should desecrate vast tracts of Britain's most beautiful countryside for what they see as "the scam of the century".

More here.

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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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