Peter Luff MP

We do not have any artists from Worcestershire represented on the website yet, which is a shame as it is such a beautiful county, but this is a pastel I painted after staying near Broadway, which is not very far from the site of the Stop Lenchwick Wind Farm group.

Mid Worcestershire MP Peter Luff, will be introducing the “Onshore Wind Turbines (Proximity of Habitation) Bill” on November 3rd.

Read more on is website: www.peterluff.org.uk/

And here in the Birmingham Post

Posted by Christine Lovelock

Good news for the Flint Hills

Kansas Supreme Court upholds ban on commerical wind farms in the Flint Hills... read more

Just a reminder

"Seaweed Smorgasbord" by Marion Chapman

Just a reminder - while looking at the web-page about Broken Hill/Silverton and the Barrier Ranges (New South Wales)
don't forget to look at Marion Chapman's paintings as well, and her photographs of wildlife at the Bald Hills Wetland Reserve (Southern Australia)

Another photograph from Marion Chapman

This photograph was titled Dragon. It is one of many photographs that Marion has sent us from the Barrier Ranges in New South Wales, Australia.

We have set up an extra page on the artistsagainstwindfarms website to highlight the threat to this unique area. Here is the link:
www.artistsagainstwindfarms.com/australia/broken-hill.html

A German energy company wants to build a 282 turbine windpower station there, with an extra 316 turbines to be added later.

This area isn't only famous for its wildlife. You can read more about the city of Broken Hill, famous as a centre for artists, with its rich cultural heritage on wikipedia,

Here is another link with more information about the area:

www.travelpod.com

Latest news from our Featured Artist, Marion Chapman in Australia

These emus are in a part of Australia known as The Barrier Ranges. This is not only an important Australian Landscape but because of the unique character of the Silverton Broken Hill region it is one of international significance.

The German renewable energy company Epuron wants the Barrier Ranges to be home to a 282 turbine wind farm, with a further 316 to be added later. The site is public land and leaseholders are reminded of the arrangement in any dealings with the government. Opposition to the wind farm has been ignored, like everywhere else, and locals remain distressed about the impact on the direction their community has taken which relies heavily on tourism.

In the next few days we will have a link to a new page on the artistsagainstwindfarms website, with more photographs that Marion has sent us, and information about the special importance of this region from an artistic viewpoint.

Okehampton today

This photograph was taken today in Okehampton, while waiting for the 118 Beacon Bus back to Barnstaple, after a trip down to show support at the Public Inquiry concerning the proposal for nine turbines (about 400ft high) near the little town of North Tawton, in Devon.

You can read more about this on the denbrookvalley.co.uk website. If you care about rural Devon, and Dartmoor, and the issue of wind turbine noise, please go to this website.

Two Jags and the "Landed Gentry"

John Prescott descends to class-warfare (read the article in the Independent on Tuesday)- a sure sign that he is losing the argument.

Having traveled round many parts of Britain where people oppose wind farms, I can assure him that many of the people he talks about are very far from being "landed gentry". They come in all sorts: rich, poor and middling, young, middle-aged and old, country dwellers, and town dwellers who love the countryside too. One thing unites them, a love of the countryside and the natural environment, and a dislike of a government and political class that seeks to destroy our most precious heritage, for such little benefit.

And, as is pointed out in the "Comments" to the Independent article (do scroll down through them if you can), in some parts of Britain it is the "landed gentry" who want to impose wind farms on their neighbourhoods, against the wishes of their tenants and/or neighbours...

LabourList

Ed Miliband is at it again...

Read his latest piece on Labour List

There are some good comments... let us hope that he reads them.

Save the Whales

Man-made noise is blamed for driving whales to their deaths, according to an article in The Times by Frank Pope on October 12th

This includes - among other things - wind farm noise.

Back in 1970, before Greenpeace was founded, I led what may have been the first-ever Save The Whales Protest, outside the Japanese Embassy in London.

When - or if - our oceans are criss-crossed by wind turbines, what will happen to the whales?

A very important book

This is the book that everyone should read:

The Wind Farm Scam,
by John Etherington

The spectre of global warming and the political panic surrounding it has triggered a goldrush for renewable energy sources without an open discussion of the merits and drawbacks of each. In The Wind Farm Scam Dr Etherington argues that in the case of wind power the latter far outweigh the former. Wind turbines cannot generate enough energy to reduce global CO2 levels to a meaningful degree; what’s more wind power is by nature intermittent and cannot generate a steady output, necessitating back-up coal and gas power plants that significantly negate the saving of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to the inefficacy of wind power there are ecological drawbacks, including damage to habitats, wildlife and the far-from-insignificant aesthetic drawback of the assault upon natural beauty and the pristine landscape, which wind turbines entail. Dr Etherington argues that wind power has been, and is being, excessively financed at the cost of consumers who have not been consulted, nor informed that this effective subsidy is being paid from their bills to support an industry that cannot be cost efficient or, ultimately, favour the cause it purports to support.

THE AUTHOR: John Etherington was a Reader in Ecology at the University of Wales, Cardiff. Since his retirement from the University in 1990, he has devoted himself to researching the implications of intermittently available renewable electricity generation, in particular wind power.
He is a Thomas Huxley Medallist at the Royal College of Science and a former co-editor of the International Journal of Ecology.

To find out more, and to buy the book, go to:

www.staceyinternational.co.uk

"Man-made monsters"

James Delingpole once wrote an article with a title something like... "Why I hate Cornwall." I apologise in advance if I misquote him, it was a few years ago and I can't find a copy of the article online, but it stayed in my mind because he made such a good point.

The reason he gave for being annoyed with Cornwall was that it was the place that had started the fashion for wind turbines, but because these turbines were such small ones, people who visited Cornwall had been lulled into the belief that turbines weren't so bad.

Well. this will no longer be the case. Cornwall Council's strategic planning committee has approved plans to build twenty 410 ft high wind turbines in Davidstow, near Camelford. The headline in the Western Morning News says it all... "Council backs `man-made monsters`"... read more here

Hot rocks

Reading this article in the Western Morning News this morning, reminds me of something my father, James Lovelock, told me once. Following his travels round various nuclear waste repositories with a Geiger counter, he found that the measurements of radioactivity he took while visiting places such as Sellafield were very similar to those he obtained from certain Cornish beaches.
Granite is a more radioactive rock than many others, but anti-nuclear campaigners, concerned about the dangers of radiation, have no more reason to be frightened of going on the beach at St.Ives than they have to be nervous of living next door to Hinckley Point. Let us hope they will be enthusiastic about this form of renewable energy, that relies on the heat generated beneath the surface of the earth.

Energy crisis postponed?

From today's Daily Telegraph...

Turbine blade breaks again

A blade has broken yet again on a wind turbine in Sheffield, close to the M1 Link Road. Read more about this at this link to The Telegraph story.

"The uglification of Devon..."

This is a link to a letter from Dave Griffin of Ilfracombe in this week's North Devon Gazette concerning BT's plan to put giant turbines on the hills behind Ilfracombe. As so many of us warned, Fullabrook is likely to be just the beginning...

Something good from the RSPB

There is an interesting article in The Independent today, concerning the worrying reduction in birds such as the cuckoo, which come to Britain in the summer to breed. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have mounted a joint expedition to Africa, (in regions south of the Sahara) where these birds spend the winter. They hope to learn more about any pressures that the birds face in Africa during the winter months, which could be a reason for their declining numbers.

While we have grave doubts about the RSPB's support of some wind farms, this expedition is praiseworthy.

Britain must go nuclear

Professor David MacKay the government's chief scientific adviser on climate change has said that Britain must go nuclear to cut greenhouse emissions. He says renewable energy sources such as wind and tidal power will never provide more than a fraction of Britain's electricity needs...

Read more about this in this Sunday Times article

Yet more talk of Nimbyism

Farming Today... Charlotte Smith talks about Nimbyism...
Someone called Nick Keeble says that "everyone is in favour of wind power.."

Has he not heard of Professor Jack Steinberger, Professor Dieter Helm, James Lovelock, Professor David Bellamy, former President of France Valery Giscard D'Estaing, Simon Jenkins, just for a start...

And presumably he didn't read Leading Articles in The Times like this one, for example...

He also said something about the fact that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, totally missing the point that wind farms provide very little benefit in the amount of electricity produced, compared to the large amount of environmental damage and misery that they cause. We are not Nimbys, we are NIAMBYS, which means not in anyone's back yard.

Countryfile

Go to bbc iplayer (Countryfile, about 20 minutes into the programme) to watch John Craven interview Jane and Julian Davis among others about opposition to the wind turbines in the countryside. It was good to hear Jane Davis speak so forcefully about turbine noise, but I found myself annoyed by the programme's focus on the idea (promulgated of course by the Wind Industry and Government representatives like Ed Miliband) that opposition to wind farms is a form of Nimbyism.

One of the best answers to this was in an article by Simon Jenkins, written back in 2003, in regard to the proposal to wind turbines at Whinash. This is an excerpt, and you can read the whole of the article here

"In the calculus of beauty, I would pit the hills of Cumbria, the coast of Devon and Cornwall, the Pennine uplands and the mountains of Wales against any Constable, Gainsborough or Stubbs. They are no less fragile, and currently far more vulnerable. I would not burn a Constable if I were told it might help to save fossil fuel, if only because the benefit would be vastly outweighed by the loss. Nor would I sacrifice the landscapes that Ms Hewitt plans to destroy for so trivial a donation to the cause of global cooling as a few hundred wind turbines.

The Government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is "worth sacrificing to save the planet" is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back. "

Well, on the artistsagainstwindfarms website, we have done our best to make our answer.. but the other scientific, economic and political arguments are just as powerful, and the Countryfile programme could have given them more weight as well.

Not so "green" after all

From the Wall Street Journal.... China's ambition of powering "green cities" with huge wind farms sin't as green as it appears to be... many new coal-fired power plants will be needed as back up for the times when the wind doesn't blow. Read more about this here.