Myths about the Environment

by Anthony Bright-Paul

It is of course very right and proper that we should be concerned to protect the environment and to minimise pollution. However we do need to be clear on our facts.

First of all there is not one world climate. In fact there are 29 major different climates according to the Koppen-Geiger classification, and of course there are thousands of micro-climates. In the past there have been Ice Ages and Warm Periods, called Inter-Glacials. Just as the weather changes every day, actually every minute of every day, so climates that are an average of the weather in any given location, are also so changing. We can no more prevent, nor reverse climatechange than we can prevent the movement of the Milky Way, which I understand takes some 250 million years to complete a revolution.

Click to view larger image

There is a lot of confusion and misconceptions about Carbon. Carbon is an element of the Periodic table. Diamonds are Carbon, graphites are carbon and we humans are 18% carbon by volume. Carbon Monoxide is a poisonous gas, favoured by suicidals. Carbon Dioxide is colourless transparent gas, which we humans, all animals and bacteria, exhale 24/7. It is part of the Carbon Cycle. By photosynthesis green plants absorb CO2 and produce Oxygen as a by-product. It is not to be confused with smoke, which is largely made up of a number of items like Sulphur Dioxide and particulate matter. According to the IPCC some 97.1 % of Carbon Dioxide comes from natural sources. The 2.9% is anthropogenic. The major source of Carbon Dioxide is the oceans, which produce Carbon Dioxide like a fizzy drink. But volcanoes and geysers also produce CO2; –  for example The Mammoth Hot Springs, USA, pumps out 160 to 190 tonnes of CO2 per day.

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The Earth warms up every day and cools down every night according to that side that faces the sun, and the angle of the earth to the sun, which is spinning and wobbling as it spins. The near surface temperatures vary widely in different locations – Kalimantan is a whole lot warmer than Greenland, and England for that matter. The atmosphere cools with altitude some 2° Celsius for every 1,000 feet, which is known as the Adiabatic Lapse rate. That is why there is snow on the tops of mountains, though the summits are nearer the sun. The so-called Greenhouse Effect is a myth. There is no reflector in the sky, no Smoking Hotspot, but only a continuum to Outer Space. Water Vapour and other so-called greenhouse gases only delay the exit of the sun’s heat. There is no such thing as ‘renewable energy’ – that is a misconception. According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics in a closed system energy can only be transformed, not renewed.  Also we all know that a hot cup of coffee will inevitably grow cold, just as red hot lava will cool to black basalt. That is again according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Everything is cooling. Our sun is a star and will burn out when its fuel is exhausted. Happily for us it looks Ok for another 5 to 7 billion years. ‘Global Warming’ as it is touted is a myth. Such temporary warming as we get from Great Nature is to be welcomed, since it is far more likely that we will soon be entering another Ice Age, for which we need to prepare. The idea of getting energy from the wind and the sun looks very inviting. I myself thought of putting a wind turbine on my roof.

But the proliferation of wind turbines in the British Isles and Europe has caused even the most Green of environmentalists to think again. The hills and mountains of Wales and Scotland are cluttered by these hideous monsters, and the Jurassic Coast and the South Downs are under threat. If they were effective in producing electricity then they might be tolerated, but in fact they are simply totally inefficient as wind is variable, and wind farms have to be backed up by coal or gas fired installations. The rape of the countryside continues apace, as absent landowners enjoy easy pickings.

From the foregoing we can see that all talk of Carbon footprints and Low Carbon or Zero Carbon economy is simply a misuse of terminology and indicates a degree of illiteracy. Unfortunately this is common among politicians and political activists.

With all best wishes to those who do have a sincere and informed regard for our Planet.

Anthony Bright-Paul

PS 1

What’s Free?

My good friend Saxon I have known for 60 years. We studied the Gurdjieff systems together under John Godolphin Bennett. We both entered the Subud Brotherhood together in May 1957. We even holidayed together when young, two-up on his AJS 350cc motorbike, whizzing through France down to the Riviera and back again through Paris. So with so many of our mutual friends having already bit the dust it is especially disagreeable to differ with him even on small things.

But he writes to me that wind is free. How can I object to that? The wind is free; the air is free; the flowing rivers are free; the cataracts and waterfalls are free; the oceans are free and the great ocean currents are free. Everything that we can think of at the point of entry is free. At the point of entry all the minerals you can think of are free. Why, gold is free; lead is free; salt is free; oil and tar are free. They are all lying there in the ground in abundance. Coal is also free and the huge deposits of natural gas are free.

But –  and here’s the rub – converting this free wind into electrical energy is far from free – it is hideously expensive.  To say that the cost of gas or nuclear is just 2.5p a unit compared to 9.8pa unit for energy from Wind Turbines is just half the story. What does Lord Turnbull have to say?   Lord Turnbull doesn’t mince his words:

The feed-in tariff mechanism is fast becoming a scandal. Those lucky enough to own buildings large enough on which to install solar panels or enough land for a wind farm have been receiving 30-40p per kwh, for electricity, which is retailed at only 11p. The loss is paid for by a levy on businesses and households. It is astonishing that the Liberals who attach such importance to fairness turn a blind eye to this transfer from poor to rich running to £billions a year. If you live in a council tower block in Lambeth you don’t have much opportunity to get your nose into this trough.

Here is another example. Wind Turbines do not work with winds that are too light, and they do not work when the winds are too strong.
For example, six Scottish wind farms were paid a total of nearly £900,000 to stop producing energy because the grid network could not absorb it, for several hours between April 5-6th.
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2011/05/not-enough-reliable-wind.html

So we find that the true cost is multiplied many times as absent landowners and farmers are bribed to give up their land unto these monsters.

But that is not all. A Conservative government has injudiciously linked itself with a crazed Liberal-Democrat, presently Minister of Climate Change. With the result that we now have a new phrase ‘Greening the Grid’. This means that the price of a unit of electricity will be artificially raised to the uneconomic levels of wind power. Everyone in the land will have to suffer – except those who are taking a profit, as illustrated above.

The miseries, the alarmists would have it that we are running out of natural resources – this is the word that is put about. So when I passed around the good news about the huge deposits in the Bakken it was met with disbelief. Furthermore the Poles also have enormous deposits of natural gas and shale. Don’t believe me, but check it out for yourselves. Yes, we also have plenty of food for our increasing populations, thanks to the fact that Great Nature goes on providing the Carbon Dioxide that is needed for plant life, which foolish man wants to sequester in the ground! Such is the ignorance that in some countries corn is being burnt for bio-fuels!

Not only does wind power have to be backed up by convention Power stations, but these Wind Turbines gobble up 1,000 times the area of a conventional Power Station. Can you imagine what this will mean if it goes on unabated? The Welsh Mountains will be sacrificed, the Jurassic Coast, the South Downs, the moor land and the highlands of Scotland, all the wild places will go, aided by the avarice and the cupidity of man. Every beauty spot, every wild place, every cliff top is under threat from these very people who claim to be protecting the environment.

Who cares about the environment, when one can be paid over the odds to have a maze of wind turbines on your land? Is that clean energy? No Sir, not all. It is the dirtiest, grimiest energy that you can imagine, based on the deceit of the masses and the cupidity of a few.

Anthony Bright-Paul
18th May 2011

PS2

Altamont Pass (California) Wind Turbines Kill 4200 Birds Annually.

A 2004 study commissioned by the California Energy Commission found that the 5,400 older turbines operating at Altamont Pass killed an estimated 1,766 to 4,271 birds annually, including between 881 and 1330 raptors, such as golden eagles – which are protected under federal law – hawks, falcons and owls.
Source >>

 

PS 3

A Dozen Global Warming Slogans

by Bob Carter

For many years now, our media outlets have been awash with commentary about dangerous human-caused global warming. The coverage tends to move in spasms relating to events such as meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or, as at present, to government efforts to introduce penal legislation against carbon dioxide emissions in the vain belief that this will “stop global warming”.

Given that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas (albeit a mild and diminishingly effective one at currently increasing levels of atmospheric concentration), and that some human-caused emissions accrue in the atmosphere, the question of dangerous warming was a good one to raise back in the late 1980s. Since then, with the formation of the IPCC, and a parallel huge expansion of research and consultancy money into climate studies, energy studies and climate policy, an intensive effort has been made to identify and measure the human signature in the global temperature record at a cost that probably exceeds $100 billion. And, as Kevin Rudd might put it, “You know what? No such signature has been able to be isolated and measured.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that humans have no effect on global temperature, because we know that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas, and we can also measure the local temperature effects of human activity, which are both warming (from the urban heat island effect) and cooling (due to other land-use change, including irrigation). Sum these effects all over the world and obviously there must be a global signal; that we can’t identify and measure it indicates that the signal is so small that it is lost in the noise of natural climate variation.

Twenty-five years on, therefore, we have answered the question, “Are human carbon dioxide emissions causing dangerous global warming”, and the answer is “No”; but strangely that answer causes environmental activists and their supporters, including apparently many scientists, to develop the disease known as deaf ear.

In such circumstances, how is it possible that hypothetical dangerous warming remains one of the most potent political issues in the world, and certainly so in Australia at the moment?

The answer is, first, that a significant part of that $100 billion was spent encouraging virtually every lobby and interest group in Western societies to invent ways in which they could benefit from global warming alarmism—and none more so than the numerous climate research groups that cluster around the supercomputer laboratories, spawning endless virtual realities of the climate world as it might, or might not, be in a hundred years time. (One thing is known for certain about these computer models, and it is that they are wrong as tested against the last twenty years of elapsed global temperature.) Second, for the last twenty years environmental policies, such as being seen to “do something” about climate change, have been a critical currency with which to buy swinging, middle-ground votes in marginal electorates; strenuously and persistently egged on by large and unaccountable environmental NGOs, and by business and climate research group interests, global warming policy measures have thus achieved a remarkable and powerful political resonance.

Through the years, as public discussion of the global warming issue has passed from being dominantly about the relevant science to being instead a happy hunting ground for rent seekers and social engineers, the issue has become an almost exclusively political one. It appears that the only science that now counts is of the postmodern variety—which is to say the “science” of the IPCC, in which consensus opinion (a scientific abhorrence), statistical chicanery and computer fantasising dominate over traditional empirical analysis. Public discussion of global warming in Australia has thereby become dominated by the arts of politics, which is to say spin and repetition towards the end of establishing the propaganda point of the day. This pathology is well exemplified by the remarkably weak and intellectually dishonest government strategy paper that leaked in late March, just after it had been provided to party members as an aid to their convincing the public of the need for a carbon dioxide tax.

Which brings us to the second part of this article, and the fact that, as a result of the strategy paper, Australian press coverage of global warming policy over the last two months has comprised the endless repetition of numerous facile and utterly unconvincing sound-bites, designed with no other end in mind than propaganda.

Each of the following twelve statements reproduces verbatim, or almost verbatim, statements made recently by Australian government leaders, and repeated by their supporters in the media and elsewhere. The persons making these arguments might be termed (kindly) climate-concerned citizens or (less kindly, but accurately) as global warming alarmists.

Most of the statements, self-evidently, were crafted as slogans, and all conform to the obnoxious and dishonest practice of political spin—in which, of course, the citizens of Australia have been awash for many years. The statements also depend heavily upon corrupt wordsmithing with propaganda intent, a technique that international environmental lobbyists are both brilliant at and relentless in practising.

The following arguments, then, are the main reasons given by the government in justification for their intended new tax on carbon dioxide. As we will see, individually and severally these arguments are without merit.

1. “We must address carbon [sic] pollution [sic] by introducing a carbon [sic] tax.”

The argument is not about carbon nor a carbon tax, but rather about carbon dioxide emissions and a carbon dioxidetax, to be levied on the fuel and energy sources that power the Australian economy.

Under clean air legislation, the aerosols emitted from power stations, such as carbon (soot), nitrous oxides and sulphur dioxide, have been scrubbed at source in industrialised OECD nations for several decades. Similar scrubbing needs to be applied in the rapidly industrialising countries as soon as possible, to help reduce their health-damaging levels of air pollution. Taxing beneficial carbon dioxide emissions will contribute nothing towards reducing these genuine pollutants.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a natural and vital trace gas in Earth’s atmosphere, an environmental benefit without which our planetary ecosystems could not survive. Increasing carbon dioxide makes many plants grow faster and better, and helps to green the planet.

2. “We need to link much more closely with the climate emergency.”

There is no “climate emergency”; the term is a deliberate lie. Global average temperature at the end of the twentieth century fell well within the bounds of natural climate variation, and was in no way unusually warm, or cold, in geological terms.

Earth’s temperature is currently cooling slightly, ocean heat is declining, global sea-level rise has not accelerated (although the climate models predict that it should) and tropical storm energy is at a thirty-year low. Furthermore, no evidence exists that Australian climatic phenomena—including droughts, floods, storms, heat waves and snowstorms—differ now in intensity or frequency from their natural historical and geological patterns of strong annual and multi-decadal variability; and the Great Barrier Reef is in fine fettle.

3. “Australia is the largest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide.”

Another untrue statement. Australia emits 18 tonnes per capita of carbon dioxide; according to the UN Human Development Report, countries with higher emissions include the USA (19 tonnes), Luxembourg (24.5 tonnes), Kuwait (31.2 tonnes), the UAE (32.8 tonnes) and Qatar (56.2 tonnes).

That Australia’s emissions are higher than those of some other countries is because we have cheap coal, little hydro-electric potential and have banned nuclear power.

Historically low, but now rapidly escalating, energy costs have allowed Australia, unlike other developed countries, to export products like aluminium (whose production incorporates high carbon dioxide emissions) at a competitive price, thus adding strength to our economy. Taxing the emissions of such companies will cause them to move offshore, or destroy them.

4. “Putting a price on carbon [sic] will punish the big polluters [sic].”

A price on carbon dioxide will impose a deliberate financial penalty on all energy users, but especially energy-intensive industries. These imaginary “big polluters” are part of the bedrock of the Australian economy. Any cost impost on them will be passed straight down to consumers.

It is the consumers of all products who will ultimately pay, not the industrialists or their shareholders.

5. “Putting a price on carbon [sic] is the right thing to do; it’s in our nation’s interest.”

The greatest competitive advantage of the Australian economy is cheap energy generated by coal-fired power stations.

To levy an unnecessary tax on this energy source is economic vandalism that will destroy jobs and reduce living standards for all Australians.

6. “We will protect existing jobs while creating new business investment and clean energy jobs.”

The whole point of a carbon dioxide tax is to force coal-fired power stations out of existence. No amount of subsidy will “protect” the jobs of the workers involved, and business investment will decline because Australia will be perceived as a sovereign risk.

It has been shown that in Spain, 2.2 conventional jobs are destroyed for every new job created in the alternative energy industry, at a unit cost of about US$774,000 a job. In a comparable UK study the figures were even worse, with the destruction of 3.7 conventional jobs for every new job.

7. “Putting a price on carbon [sic] will result in lower carbon dioxide emissions.”

Economists know well that an increase in price of some essential things causes little reduction in usage. This is true for both energy (power) and petrol, two commodities that will be particularly hit by a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

Norway has levied a tax on carbon dioxide since the early 1990s which has added to the already high cost of living there, and despite which a 15 per cent increase in emissions has occurred.

At its mooted introductory level of $20 to $30 per tonne, a carbon dioxide tax is unlikely to effect any reduction in emissions. As the price is ratcheted up, as is intended, to the point at which energy-intensive industry is forced offshore, Australian emissions will decline, as will Australia’s standard of living, but world emissions will remain the same. Such a policy is senseless.

8. “Other countries are taking action, even China and India. We must catch up with the rest of the world, who are already taxing carbon dioxide emissions.”

They are not. All hope of a global agreement on emissions reduction has collapsed with the failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun climate meetings. The world’s largest emitters (USA and China) have made it crystal clear that they will not introduce carbon dioxide taxes or emissions trading. The Chicago Climate Exchange has collapsed, and chaos and deep corruption currently infest the European exchange. Though a dozen US states have previously committed to anti-carbon-dioxide schemes, some of those (such as New Hampshire and New Mexico) are now withdrawing.

Contrary to assertions, neither China nor India is taking substantive action specifically to mitigate their emissions level, and the carbon tax claimed for India is actually an environmental levy on coal mining of about $1 per tonne. This is similar to long-standing levies faced by coal mining in Australia, where, in addition, the Mandatory Renewable Energy Tariff (MRET) requires that 20 per cent of electricity is to be generated by renewables by 2020. Because renewable sources such as wind and solar are uncompetitive, by 2020 the MRET will impose a tax equivalent to $14 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted.

Playing “follow the leader” is not a good idea when the main leader (the EU) has a sclerotic economy characterised by lack of employment and the flight of manufacturers overseas, and when large industrialising countries intend to take no action.

9. “Australia should show leadership, by setting an example that other countries will follow.”

Self-delusion doesn’t come any stronger than this.

For Australia to introduce a carbon dioxide tax ahead of the large emitting nations would be to expose our whole economy to competitive and economic disadvantage for no gain whatsoever. It would comprise an act of economic stupidity.

10. “We must act, and the earlier we act on climate change the less painful it will be.”

The issue at hand is global warming, not the catch-all, deliberately ambiguous term “climate change”.

Trying to prevent hypothetical “dangerous” warming by taxing carbon dioxide emissions will be ineffectual, and is all pain for no gain.

11. “The cost of action on carbon [sic] pollution [sic] is less than the cost of inaction.”

This statement is fraudulent. Implementing a carbon dioxidetax will carry large costs for workers and consumers, but bring no measurable cooling in temperature for many hundreds of years, if then.

For Australia, the total cost for a family of four of implementing a carbon dioxide tax is likely to exceed $2000 a year*—whereas eliminating even all of Australia’s emissions might prevent planetary warming of only about 0.01 degree by 2100.

*Assuming a tax rate of $25 a tonne of carbon dioxide, and Australia’s emissions being 550 million tonnes, indicates a total cost of $13.8 billion. Spread across a population of 22 million persons, that equates to $627 per person per year.

12. “There is no do-nothing option in tackling climate change.”

Indeed.

However, it is also the case that there is no demonstrated problem of “dangerous” global warming. Instead, Australia continues to face many self-evident problems of natural climate change and hazardous natural climate events. A national climate policy is clearly needed to address these issues.

The appropriate, cost-effective policy to deal with Victorian bushfires, Queensland floods, droughts, northern Australian cyclones and long-term cooling or warming trends (whether natural or human-caused) is the same. It is to prepare carefully for, and efficaciously deal with, and adapt to, all such events and trends, as and when they happen. Spending billions of dollars on expensive and ineffectual carbon dioxide taxes serves only to reduce our wealth and our capacity to address these genuine problems.

Summing up, it is a blight on Australian society that an incumbent government, and the great majority of media reporters and commentators, continue to propagate the twelve scientific and social inanities discussed in this article in an uncritical fashion. The current discourse on global warming is a frightening example of how political spin and postmodern argumentation have now come to dominate public discussion of all matters, even scientific ones.

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Note: To maintain readability, the statements of fact made in this article are not referenced to source in detail. Persons wishing to check their validity should in the first instance consult my book Climate: The Counter Consensus, or the following websites:

• Evans, D., 2011. “Carbon tax and temperature. By how much will a carbon dioxide tax reduce Australia’s temperature?” http://joannenova.com.au/2011/03/carbon-tax-australia-welcome-to-futility-island
• ICECAP, www.icecap.us
• International Climate Science Coalition, www.climatescienceinternational.org
• JoNova, http://joannenova.com.au
• Liljegren, Lucia, 2011 (Feb. 19). HadCrut January Anomaly: 0.194C. The Blackboard. http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/hadcrut-january-anomaly-0-194c
• Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), www.nipccreport.org
• The Carbon Sense Coalition, http://carbon-sense.com
• Watts Up With That, http://wattsupwiththat.com

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Bob Carter’s book Climate: The Counter Consensus was published in England in 2010 by Stacey International in its Independent Thinkers series.

Copyright ©2008 Quadrant Magazine Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article URL: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/5/a-dozen-global-warming-slogans

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PS 4

Higher Education and Wind Turbines

by Anthony Bright-Paul

One of the beauties of our educational system in England is that State Schools are free, and furthermore they are compulsory. Compulsorily free!

Hold on a minute. It is true that unlike fee-paying Preparatory and Public Schools one does not have to pay a whacking great fee.  That is true. On the other hand how do you imagine that all the staff at all these huge State Schools get paid? The answer is simple. We all pay, we all pay for our supposed ‘free’ education through taxation – every man-jack of us, who pay taxes.

Now the poor blighters who send their sons and their daughters, to such places as Eton and Harrow, to Sherborne and Marlborough, to Bryanston and Clayesmore, – the last named possibly being the best of the bunch! – actually are paying twice. They pay for a State School education whether they like it or not, and they also pay a whacking great fee in the order of thousands of £s per term. In reality they should get a rebate, but keep Mum or else the Treasury will bust a gut.

Now you would think that if the Government has seen fit to provide ‘free’ schooling, whether it is spurned or not, then surely the logical outcome would be to provide free higher education at Universities, or free training for those without an academic bent.

Yet this is precisely what is not happening. The whole business has become impossibly expensive with University fees so punitive that any who undertake their courses are likely to be saddled with debt until Kingdom come. Supposedly, armed with a degree, they will immediately have the entrée to jobs so highly paid that a debt of say £20,000 to £40,000 could be paid off within a few years.

So the question is this: Why cannot the government spread the taxation around in such a way that all those who qualify can get their education for free. It seems logical, doesn’t it? Well, yes, it does. And in Scotland they have decided to give it a go.

The skyline of Ardrossan, North Ayrshire, Scotland, is dominated by an enormous wind farm. The houses in front are on Eglinton Road.

Unfortunately the Minister there is short on Maths. He seems unable to add up. He is all for populating his bonny Scotland with windmills of shame, which do not produce electricity on tap, but also on every turbine a huge subsidy is paid to the landowner. So much good money is thrown after bad, that there is nothing much left for Higher Education, and the Scottish Treasury is likely to go bust.

If students really understood these things instead of the propaganda pumped out daily by the Greens, they would realise that it is perfectly possible for them to have a higher education for free. Of course, it would not be for free, it would come out of taxation. Ay! There’s the rub.

If governments waste money as they do, billions of £s and billions of $s, let alone Australian and New Zealand dollars, and millions of Euros, if all this money was not wasted on enterprises that are wholly fictitious and mischievous – I am referring to the absurd efforts to combat a Global Warming that is not happening, and to Climate Changes that always are – then it would be perfectly feasible to find a way to fit our young people for a future without their being saddled with debt, and their parents scuppered, with a retirement from work that can only be looked upon with apprehension. If they stump up for their kids, will they have anything left for their old age?  Will their kids find a wonderful job, sufficient to pay off a massive debt? Or will they even find a job at all?

In the meantime, those who have peddled alarms and scares grow personally richer and richer. Al Gore is reputedly the richest failed Vice President ever. And all those on the European gravy train are not doing too badly, and those who are funded like the Climatic Research Unit of Dr Phil Jones of Climategate fame.

Here is one report that gives an idea of the scale of this scam.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph reveals developers are exploiting a green energy subsidy, worth billions of pounds, to persuade landowners to turn their fields over for wind farms.

The speculators – who have been compared to door-to-door double-glazing salesmen – are ‘cold calling’ farmers with offers often too tempting to refuse.

One farmer in Northumberland has reported receiving 12 separate offers from developers to build turbines on his land.

A single, 400ft-high turbine can earn a farmer as much as £60,000 a year – far more than the average farmer’s income of just over £47,000.

The potential profits for the energy companies are even greater.

One turbine can generate more than £13 million over the course of its 20-year lifespan, around half of it from the sale of the electricity it generates, and the other half through a consumer subsidy added on to electricity bills.

By Robert Mendick, Chief reporter        02 Jul 2011     

When we hear the words ‘Government subsidies’ we are inclined to switch off. But let us be absolutely clear what is meant. If Robert Mendick is correct in his information it means that we, the paying public, are paying out of our taxes to support a farmer with one single turbine to the tune of £60,000 a year. How many turbines are already erected? How much electricity are they producing? Can these Wind Farms ever produce the ‘base load’, that is the electricity that we expect at the flick of a switch? The answer is so obviously No! Wind is totally unreliable.

Now let us return to Higher Education. How many scholarships could be provided to qualified students out of the subsidies that are being offered to land owners to have turbines erected on their land? I reckon on these figures that each turbine’s subsidy could provide for some 6 students. How many turbines are there? And how many more are planned?

As of July 2011, there were 305 operational wind farms in the UK, with 3,360 turbines and 5,554 MW of installed capacity. (from Wikipedia)

Let’s do a little maths. If each turbine is subsidised to the tune of £60,000 a year to produce some intermittent and rather useless electricity, then 3,360 turbines are being subsidised to the tune of 3,360 x £60,000 per annum. That comes to a massive £201,600,000!!!!  Just how many student scholarships could that provide?

So our youth and our parents are being all sacrificed upon the Green altar, which will not produce a green world, which will not produce more electricity without conventional power station back-up, and which will have no effect whatsoever on Global Warming and Climate Change.

How mad can we be? How much longer are we to be conned by the stupidity and cupidity of these avaricious men?

Anthony Bright-Paul,  July 2011