EcoWarriorMe

I grew up in a small(ish) town before moving to the big city to study then settle down. I still go back to the small town from time to time and I notice the changes, some I like but others I don't. I like the riverside park that has been extended and I dislike the creep of houses and shops in to the countryside on the periphery of town. But I do not live there. I have chosen not too, therefore I must accept the changes made by those who do. In the big city we have many amenities; why should the small town not have some too if the townsfolk want them? Unfortunately there are some that don't see the world that way. They move to the bright lights but they want the old place to remain as it was when they left, as they remember it. They will go to great lengths to keep it that way despite the desires of those living there to improve the place. Worse still are those who have never lived there but have some ancestral ties that they believe gives them the right to decide what is an...

Following the recent attack on wind farms by MPS, I wanted to look at the cost of wind energy in fairly broad terms.  The latest attack on wind farm development is by a list of over 100 hundred Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum (I counted 2 Labour, 2 Lib-dems, one DUP, with the remainder being conservative) who wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for a ban on any subsidies and tightening planning controls to make it easier for people to block developments. This coming from a government that wants to reform planning to include "presumption in favour of sustainable development".  They appear to rate wind farms as unsustainable while new housing on greenbelt is perfectly sustainable; we have so much green space that we can build on it now without limiting future generations ability to build on it too!

Are wind farms a blot on the landscape? What are those white things over there? Oh, they're sheep.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about rising domestic energy prices and competition failures in the market, most recently the figures published by Ofgem on the profit made per customer by the big six energy suppliers. While these snapshot figures may not be particularly helpful in telling the whole story, they certainly reveal enough to raise the issue to the top of the agenda. The market is poorly functioning and there is too much complexity, lengthy tie-ins on the best deals and better deals for new customers.  This is an inevitable consequence of different suppliers selling essentially an identical product, with price being the only comparison.  The lights aren't brighter with electricity from one supplier compared with another, only cheaper or dearer.

In a recent post to the renewable-energy Yahoo group, a post compared the production of aircraft during World War II with the manufacture of wind turbines in order to achieve 100% renewable energy in the US.  It is a fitting comparison since the threat from global warming is every bit as serious a threat to our way of life as Hitler was.  If only it was as visible as a line of tanks crushing everything before them as they trundled through Europe then the powers that be would be motivated to take action rather than talk around the issue.  The same media that denies global warming would support measures to tackle it for fear of being unpatriotic and thus motivate mass participation in carbon reduction programmes. Back to the original quote: