MORE WINDMILL STUPIDITY

Sunset Cottage is Peter Hart's dream home. Isolated and peaceful, it looks out across the sweeping expanse of Thorne Moors, an internationally protected moorland in South Yorkshire. The tranquillity is broken only by the cries of the rare nightjar, and marsh and hen harriers. In the evening, the sun dips below the horizon in a blaze of yellow and orange. The sun is also setting, however, on Mr Hart's idyllic existence. Soon the view from his cottage will be of 28 giant wind turbines, each 410ft tall, six of them less than 1,000 yards away. The turbines are part of a series of wind farms planned for the Humberhead Levels, between South Yorkshire and Humberside. Six planning applications have been submitted; 13 more are proposed. If they are all successful, more than 300 turbines will dominate the landscape. "We've had a lot of sleepless nights," said Mr Hart, 47. "It's hard to believe that somebody would want to ruin this beautiful area with dozens of metal windmills."

Conservationists say, however, that the threat posed by the wind farms to some of Britain's finest wet moorland is even greater than the threat to the residents' quality of life. The wind farms will form a "ring of steel" around the sites, they say, blighting the landscape, damaging the habitat and leading to rare birds being killed by the turbines' propellers. The biggest fear is for the nightjar, whose population has been falling for several years and which is listed as a "priority bird" in the Government's bio-diversity action plan. Campaigners say that it could be extinct in the area within five years if the wind turbines are built.

Thorne and the nearby Hatfield Moor contain thousands of rare plants and animals. Thorne Moors has more than 5,000 invertebrates and plants, including cotton grass, cranberry, bog rosemary and sundew. The two sites cover almost 9,000 acres and are protected by European Union laws. They are designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Special Protection Areas under the EU Birds Directive and Special Areas of Conservation under the Habitats Directive.

Helen Kirk, the forum's executive secretary, criticised the Government for "a lack of joined-up thinking". In 2002, the Government paid Scotts, an American company, £17.3 million to end peat extraction on the moorland. Last week, Elliott Morley, the environment minister, visited the area to launch the Humberhead Levels and Moors Partnership, a scheme to restore the moors and develop them for tourism. Yet, Mrs Kirk says, the Government is encouraging wind farms, even in environmentally sensitive areas, as part of its plans to increase "green energy" and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. "There is no proper government strategy," Mrs Kirk said. "It's all done on an ad hoc, piecemeal basis and this could have serious consequences for some of our most important landscapes. It looks like this area is going to see an absolute saturation by wind turbines. "We worked hard to get the money to secure this site and now it looks like it is going to be surrounded by a ring of steel. One of the applications suggests the turbines will only be 250 metres from the boundary, which is ludicrous."

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BUT WINDMILL DREAMS SEEM TO MATTER MORE THAN REALITY

And windmill freaks are among the worst enemies of the world's poor

"I would promote wind for power, not damming more rivers," says actor Ed Begley, Jr. It’s low-cost, renewable, inexhaustible, eco-friendly and emits no greenhouse gases. If banks and energy companies financed wind energy projects, they’d help protect wildlife and habitats, "instead of hurting the Earth for oil," intones the Rainforest Action Network. If America devoted a mere 1 percent of its land area to wind turbine farms, it could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind, asserts the American Wind Energy Association.

And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Sadly, equine mirages don’t make sound energy policy. They may generate good sound bites, political polemics and fund-raising appeals. But they don’t generate much electricity. In the United States, wind power accounts for less than 0.1 percent of the electricity produced by renewable sources. The hydroelectric projects Mr. Begley opposes generate 99 percent of all U.S. electricity from renewables and 11 percent of all U.S. electricity. It’s easy to see why. Wind energy is unreliable. Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate, and electricity produced on windy days cannot be stored for use during calm periods.

That means expensive gas-fired power plants must serve as backup, standing idle most of the time, but ready to kick in whenever the wind dies down. Otherwise brownouts and blackouts disrupt whatever depends on the wind-generated electricity: homes, schools, hospitals, assembly lines, offices, shops, traffic lights. Wind can supplement nuclear, hydro, coal, gas or oil power--but it’s not an alternative.

Wind energy is expensive. England’s Royal Academy of Engineering and Scotland’s David Hume Institute found that wind farm electricity costs twice as much as nuclear or fossil fuel power (including facility decommissioning costs). Similar cost imbalances apply in the U.S., but subsidies, special tax treatment and laws requiring utilities to purchase wind-generated electricity mask its true costs, notes energy consultant Glenn Schleede.

Wind power is land-hungry. A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of the state’s wind turbines, journalist Ron Bailey has calculated. The gas-fired plant requires a mere 15 acres. The turbine forest impacts 105,000 acres. Generating 20 percent of America’s electricity with wind (what it currently gets from nuclear power) makes for good PR or barroom banter. But 1 percent of the United States is the state of Virginia--23,000,000 acres--whereas all the nuclear plants in the USA take up only 73,000 acres.

Wind farms ruin habitats and scenic vistas. Because most are located along escarpments and mountaintops, monstrous turbines the height of the Statue of Liberty destroy aesthetic values. Even wind energy advocates like Senator Ted Kennedy morph into vocal opponents when wind farms are proposed for Cape Cod or other sites in their own backyards.

Wind turbines kill. The growth of wind power represents "an imminent threat" to hundreds of bird species, to millions of birds and bats along West Virginia’s Allegheny Front, says Congressman Alan Mollohan (D-WV). His concerns are echoed by the Audubon Society, Nature Conservancy, Bat Conservation International and Center for Biological Diversity. Just in Northern California’s Altamont Pass, wind turbines kill thousands of birds every year, including 1,000 eagles, hawks, owls and other birds of prey, in violation of bird protection laws, they stress.

Now wonder wind plays a near-zero role in the United States and Europe. To impose this energy mirage on Kenya, Uganda, India, Bolivia and other impoverished nations would be a human and ecological disaster. In those destitute lands, 2 billion people still don’t have electricity. Nearly a billion struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. In India alone, 150 million households rely on firewood, dung and agriculture waste for cooking, analyst Barun Mitra points out. These fuels are 20 times less efficient, 20 times more polluting, than electricity or natural gas. As a result, four million children and mothers worldwide die every year from lung infections. Millions more perish from unsafe water, malnutrition and disease, in regions where clinics and hospitals are few and often have electricity only intermittently, if at all.

These communities desperately need abundant, reliable, affordable electricity--for basic necessities that wealthy countries take for granted, to create economic opportunities and jobs, and help them end the vicious cycle of foreign aid, corruption, poverty, disease and early death. But in the name of protecting the planet from dams, fossil fuels, global warming and development that might lure people away from "indigenous lifestyles," Western activists continue to block energy projects. In their view, wind and solar are the only "appropriate" sources for these nations.

The Rainforest Action Network and International Rivers Network pressure banks and energy companies to abandon hydroelectric and fossil fuel projects, and support only renewables. Friends of the Earth is "proud" that it’s stopped over 300 hydroelectric projects. The Earth Island Institute longs for the day when Africa’s poor made clothing for their neighbors "on foot-pedal-powered sewing machines," and says "once they get electricity, they spend too much time watching television and listening to the radio."

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GREENIE LIES ABOUT PESTICIDE EXPOSURE

To me, it is almost a crime when uninformed people write letters of propaganda without having done any research to learn the truth. Such is the case of recent letters in the media attacking President Bush and CHEERS (Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study) for supposedly using children as test subjects for toxic pesticide exposure.

Let's look at facts instead of propaganda-facts that are readily available at http://www.epa.gov/cheers/ -facts that should have caused an alarm at any publication and so stopped the dissemination of such lies.

Under President Clinton, not President Bush, the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA) required EPA to change the risk assessment procedures used for setting pesticide residue tolerances in food by considering the potential susceptibility of infants and children to aggregate and cumulative exposures to pesticides.

What this meant was NOT a study using children, but for inspectors to go into homes, after being requested to do so by an application from the parents, and measure the absorption of toxins by children due to the use of cleaners and pesticides in these homes in the past. Many parents have been naively using new pesticides, chemically treated clothing for infants, and contaminated baby food without knowing of their possible dangers.

The government, via CHEERS, has been studying a sample of homes (not children) and the exposure from these homes to infants who lived in them. Children wore sensors to find out if their homes were harming them. The government was not exposing them to any new poisons as indicated by these letters of propaganda, but rather doing what it could to protect children from everyday poisons found in their homes and to inform parents about how they could avoid having their children harmed in the future.

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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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