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Wind farms are shite - more evidence
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Re: Wind farms are shite - more evidence
Aug 21, 2007, 23:27
Pretty crap article in my view. Biofuels / agrofuels are certainly far less "green" than they are being made out and will almost certainly lead to both environmental and social catastophe if adopted on a large scale.

Wind farms, however, are about as "green" as it gets. The idea that they "destroy the landscape" is bollocks. Certainly they can be badly planned and located (draining peat-bogs to build a windfarm, for instance, is clearly madness), but that says everything about the people we have planning these things and nothing about wind farms themselves.

For example, how exactly do offshore windfarms destroy the landscape? Also, even when located on land, it's a completely aesthetic thing rather than an ecological one. If you think they look ugly then clearly you'll feel they degrade the environment they're in. On the other hand, if you think they look nice (as do I) then they don't.

I mean, clearly we don't want every single square inch of countryside filled with windmills, but nobody is suggesting that should happen. Indeed there's nothing to prevent wind farms being erected on existing farmland with a fairly small loss of physical space for crops or grazing. So theoretically they needn't have any impact whatsoever on what's left of the "natural landscape" (anyone who suggests that levelling the land, dividing it into boxes, ploughing it up and growing crops on it has less of an impact on "the environment" than building windmills is simply talking nonsense).

Of course I agree that we need to consume far far less, but the extreme urgency with which fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced means that at the same time we're trying to power down society, we also need to be bringing genuinely green alternatives on stream with all haste. Keeping our massive population warm and well fed takes a lot of energy (far less than we're currently consuming, of course, but still lots), and it has to come from somewhere.
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Wind farms are shite - more evidence (muddy knees)
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