In my more cynical moments I wonder if maybe you've got this completely backwards. What if these people aren't accidentally sullying their campaign for climate change by mixing in a laundry list of other issues; what if they're deliberately using climate change as an opportunity to present a false dichotomy to the public - "either you have to do everything we want or the planet fries"?
I think many of them have a completely distorted understanding of what the public wants - they think "let's make climate change more popular by associating it with all these things that everyone I know wants".
If you live in that sort of bubble then the Tories seem like some sort of external evil force, not a political party that a third of the adult population voted for (every time you see those graphs with a lot of people that didn't vote, remember that about half of those non-voters are children unless they've restricted themselves to adults).
It's the Pauline Kael on Nixon problem: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
They're aware of climate change deniers because they get reported. But normal conservatives are entirely beyond their ken. Does anyone do an article in a liberal publication about what a normal Tory voter is like? Not the Trump-era articles that were nicknamed "cletus safaris" where a journalist goes and interviews a bunch of rednecks in a diner, but someone who goes and talks to a few guys in a golf club, or a well-off stay-at-home-mother, or whatever stereotype of a typical Tory voter you want.
If you think that these people don't exist and most people are basically left-wing, but the Mail tricks people into being racist and that gets them to vote Tory (this is the unexpressed basic assumption of a lot of leftie activism), then what these people are doing makes sense.
One reason why a lot of political activists - I mean those in political parties - don't fall for this is that they have knocked on enough doors and talked to enough normal people that they realise that other people don't think about politics the way leftie activists do. I'm always a little suspicious of politicians who don't have a record of grassroots activism entirely because I wonder if they've ever spoken to a normal person.
"As an aside, how completely and utterly mental was it that on-shore wind was effectively banned in the first place?!" - You're showing your ignorance here James. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
As an anti-wind activist who has been personally involved in several campaigns to reject onshore wind blight, I can tell you what's happened is not that they've been banned, but rather local councils have had to earmark certain zones as appropriate for wind development, with the approval of the local community. And guess what, local communities have unanimously rejected them. It's the public who have to live with them who have "effectively banned" wind farms. The government is simply not overruling local opinion to push them through regardless anymore, as it did up until 2015.
Once you look into the court cases against wind companies for damaging people's health (eg the Enercon case in Ireland), you realise how much money the government could be sued for. Wind farms kill birds, bats, bees and whales, whilst making people, including myself, physically sick. They don't work when it's not windy enough, they don't work when it's too windy, they're the wrong shape, the wrong size and the wrong colour to be in any way "green" - rather they blight, belittle and block all that is truly green. They take energy and resources from the many and give it to the few, the landowners who make millions from them, even getting paid constraint payments NOT to generate electricity! They decimate our rural landscapes, they damage CO2-absorbing peat bogs, nobody keeps track of the carbon footprint of the installation and maintenance of these Weapons of Moss Destruction. We're just outsourcing their carbon footprint and environmental damage to the places like Baotou where the rare earth metals are mined.
Please look closer into the impacts of wind energy, otherwise I'd say you have a spot-on analysis. Above all, good on you for having a comments section rather than just preaching at us, so we can have a good old dialectic based on your starting thesis. Thank you very much for the vent space :-)
You had me until you mentioned wind farms as part of the solution. There's zero place for unsustainable, unmanageable and inefficient wind power in any attempts to tackle climate change. Nuclear is the only option. Far better to close every single wind turbine down, recycle the parts (if possible) and switch to nuclear. There are simply far too many environmental issues associated with wind energy (eg killing whales) to make it worthy of even a single penny of public money. All wind farm operators should face mandatory 25 year jail sentences should they not decommission and remove all traces of their junk.
You will never get countryside lovers to sign up to anything whatsoever that inovlves wind farms. The moment the climate lobby stand up against these toxic instruments of destruction is the moment they can be taken seriously.
Even Greta gets this now. Good on her! I knew she would, the more exposure she had to those communities ruined by wind blight.
Good read, but you needed setting straight about the horrible realities of wind energy. Happy to provide more info if needed.
Hello Matthew, thanks for engaging, but a number of factual errors in your post. Firstly, can you please provide the data which you claim makes wind energy "cheap"? Even if this was the case, this is an economic argument, not an environmental one.
The hidden costs come from two main drawbacks with wind energy. Firstly as wind levels are unsustainable, sometimes dropping to zero for weeks on end, especially in colder months, we need a baseload backup running 24x7. That's not a bug, that's a feature of wind power, or any weather-dependent energy source.
The second hidden cost arises from when constraint payments are made to STOP the turbines producing excess energy at times it's not needed. There is an argument to be made that this could be stored with batteries, but we're nowhere near that yet, if ever. Source: Renewables Obligation (RO), Contracts for Difference (CfD) and Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin ( REGO) data for Scottish wind farms https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/371-constraint-payments-to-wind-power-in-2020-and-2021
The simplicity is not nearly as simple as you claim. Firstly, when there's not enough wind - no energy. When there's too much wind - no energy. So your sentence that the wind directly turns the turbine is far too reductive, in reality there's only a narrow band of acceptable wind level which is suitable for energy production.
And then there's the question of getting this energy from the turbine to the grid, much harder if the turbines are located in the wilderness. They will need cabling, if not miles of pylons. What happens is the turbines feed the electricity into the grid, whilst also having the ability to draw power from the grid. You can sometimes see turbines spinning when there's no wind - this is them actually using electricity, rather than generating it, to keep them from seizing up.
Most worryingly for any environmentalist, who should instantly drop any dogmatic support for wind energy until further research proves their safety: whale deaths. It's yet another unpopular-with-the-corporate-faux-left theory, dismissively written off as "far right disinformation' to shut down debate, turning it into a politically divisive issue rather than just a science-based topic requiring objective research.
The harm to people is absolutely not a placebo affect (nocebo I think you mean). Look into the Cape Bridgewater Study, actually commissioned by a wind farm operator. Look into the Enercon case. But more than that, look at the loss of undeveloped natural spaces, the depreciation of housing stock, the industrialisation and corporatisation of what was Open Access Common Land. Do we really want to live in a world in which every single green space is dominated by huge spinning stars covered in high visibility white paint? My personal testimony is that the sight and impact of these appalling machines makes me angry, irritable, amygdala-hijacked and ready to lash out violently. Not because I work for an oil company, but because GREEN means GREEN. Not white! I want hills to look like hills, what better symbol of green values could we as a society have than to protect our natural landforms?
It's all well and good saying we need to make sacrifices to tackle climate change, but not sacrificing nature FFS! That's the one thing we need to conserve at all costs. If we must make sacrifices, let's sacrifice the consumerist, electronic, digital matrix, not expand it, ever encroaching onto our natural wildernesses. The Highlands of Scotland and the Welsh mountains are particularly vulnerable to this corporate blight.
Also the only thing thats good about community meetings is that because they are full of old rich people they are extremely un-diverse. So if you’re doing an infrastructure project you can go straight in with a framing of how its going to increase their house price without upsetting any renters.
In terms of getting a legitimate view on what the community thinks they are basically useless - far better to go door-to-door and talk to people. A genuinely unpopular project such as HS2 in Buckinghamshire will generate a reaction on the doorstep. Other projects such as a new housing estate will not.
The first para is just chippy, anti-normality, divisive bigotry of the type the article is specifically warning us to steer clear of. Nobody normal cares about "diversity", apart from companies being paid by Blackrock to pursue an ESG policy. The voice of a community is the voice of a community, as "diverse" or otherwise as the community itself. Certainly some of the meetings I attended in Rochdale and Halifax were as far away from your cliched stereotype as you could imagine.
Nobody is blocked or prevented from having their voice. The house price metrics give everyone, home owner or not, a guide as to the general wellbeing of an area. It's in literally nobody's benefit that the housing stock of a community depreciates, and it does near wind farms, according to the LSE's Gone With The Wind report.
The proof of community opposition to wind farms lies in the fact that there is no "ban" to onshore wind farms. Communities are perfectly free to have them in their own community, if that's what they want. But since 2015, nobody has availed themselves of this opportunity!
Good chatting Matthew. None of this is aimed at you personally, just making counterarguments for the benefit of readers. I hope this is an interesting debate for you all!
Blackrock are a multi national financial investor. Their investors pretty much exclusively care about results.
If they are pushing diversity it will be because they believe it drives results.
With regards to my point do you believe that older homeowners are representative of the views of families or the poor who are highly unlikely to go go community meetings?
Thanks again Matthew. Good points/questions. It's good that together we're looking into these issues and bringing them into the debate. Re diversity, Vanguard have now pulled out of ESG claiming it does more harm than good, and we've all seen the bank failures of recent days. The jury is out on whether the ESG policy caused or contributed to the collapses. One theory is that it's basically a cartel, forcing businesses to pay over the odds from "approved" suppliers. Time will tell... Follow the money is generally a good policy. Who benefits, and who pays?
Regarding the attendance of community meetings: these are open to everyone, and if there is a large number of older homeowners, logic dictates it's because they're more settled in an area, more invested in its best interests, more attached to the local environment, more aware of what's going on, generally more connected to local policy decision-making than the more transient sections of the community. I see nothing wrong with that.
However, as we're seeing with the ULEZ protests, it's counterproductive to sideline or namecall those people who turn up and get involved in these meetings. Indeed, that was the very point I got from this article: the climate movement needs these people on board, it needs to reach out to their needs and priorities and address them.
Rural populations will just stick their fingers in their ear, at best, or vociferously campaign against, so-called "environmental" policies that directly make their local environment worse, tangibly affecting their senses negatively. There's a common belief that the countryside is just a dumping ground for urban infrastructure.
As I said, the meetings I was involved with really were open to everyone, and the strength of feeling regarding the wind farms was far-reaching, affecting all the community. Rochdale for example is the home of the co-operative movement, and the anti-wind farm (Rooley Moor and the Scout Moor extension) protests were totally in keeping with that original pro-working class, anti-corporate standpoint.
TLDR: I'm trying to divorce opposition to wind farms from any kind of "climate denial" or "right wing" agendas. I want people on the left to see wind turbines as the bourgeois tool of oppression over the proletariat that they really are.
Ironically, I believe by going back to these Marxist principles and applying them to Big Energy (wind or otherwise - let's not forget the Peel Group who operate Scout Moor are also interested in fracking; it's the same people!), you are more likely to form a coalition across the political spectrum. Now there may well be some communities that do want wind farms, again time will tell. But by imposing them on people against their will, by minimising their legitimate concerns instead of trying to fix the technology to better address these flaws, you will just make them think the entire climate agenda is nothing but a money-making, citizen-harming scam.
If we must have wind power, it needs to be deployed much more compassionately and less corporately.
Surely needs to be a 'law' of politics that those most motivated to pursue a cause are frequently those least suited to rallying the necessary coalition behind them.
Idk, I think a successful social movement needs people like that; while ideally such movements should be helmed by moderates who can communicate ideas to a broad audience, it is also useful to have radical outriders to push the Overton window (and make the moderates seem more moderate)
I do wonder if the taxpayers alliance and some of the 55 Tufton Street people are acting in bad faith.
But certainly groups like the countryside alliance or the ramblers or the wildlife trusts or the Campaign for Rural England (who now also favour more social housing in rural areas) are acting in good faith.
In my more cynical moments I wonder if maybe you've got this completely backwards. What if these people aren't accidentally sullying their campaign for climate change by mixing in a laundry list of other issues; what if they're deliberately using climate change as an opportunity to present a false dichotomy to the public - "either you have to do everything we want or the planet fries"?
I think many of them have a completely distorted understanding of what the public wants - they think "let's make climate change more popular by associating it with all these things that everyone I know wants".
If you live in that sort of bubble then the Tories seem like some sort of external evil force, not a political party that a third of the adult population voted for (every time you see those graphs with a lot of people that didn't vote, remember that about half of those non-voters are children unless they've restricted themselves to adults).
It's the Pauline Kael on Nixon problem: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
They're aware of climate change deniers because they get reported. But normal conservatives are entirely beyond their ken. Does anyone do an article in a liberal publication about what a normal Tory voter is like? Not the Trump-era articles that were nicknamed "cletus safaris" where a journalist goes and interviews a bunch of rednecks in a diner, but someone who goes and talks to a few guys in a golf club, or a well-off stay-at-home-mother, or whatever stereotype of a typical Tory voter you want.
If you think that these people don't exist and most people are basically left-wing, but the Mail tricks people into being racist and that gets them to vote Tory (this is the unexpressed basic assumption of a lot of leftie activism), then what these people are doing makes sense.
One reason why a lot of political activists - I mean those in political parties - don't fall for this is that they have knocked on enough doors and talked to enough normal people that they realise that other people don't think about politics the way leftie activists do. I'm always a little suspicious of politicians who don't have a record of grassroots activism entirely because I wonder if they've ever spoken to a normal person.
I think this is absolutely right - tried to nod towards this in footnote 1!
"As an aside, how completely and utterly mental was it that on-shore wind was effectively banned in the first place?!" - You're showing your ignorance here James. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
As an anti-wind activist who has been personally involved in several campaigns to reject onshore wind blight, I can tell you what's happened is not that they've been banned, but rather local councils have had to earmark certain zones as appropriate for wind development, with the approval of the local community. And guess what, local communities have unanimously rejected them. It's the public who have to live with them who have "effectively banned" wind farms. The government is simply not overruling local opinion to push them through regardless anymore, as it did up until 2015.
Once you look into the court cases against wind companies for damaging people's health (eg the Enercon case in Ireland), you realise how much money the government could be sued for. Wind farms kill birds, bats, bees and whales, whilst making people, including myself, physically sick. They don't work when it's not windy enough, they don't work when it's too windy, they're the wrong shape, the wrong size and the wrong colour to be in any way "green" - rather they blight, belittle and block all that is truly green. They take energy and resources from the many and give it to the few, the landowners who make millions from them, even getting paid constraint payments NOT to generate electricity! They decimate our rural landscapes, they damage CO2-absorbing peat bogs, nobody keeps track of the carbon footprint of the installation and maintenance of these Weapons of Moss Destruction. We're just outsourcing their carbon footprint and environmental damage to the places like Baotou where the rare earth metals are mined.
Please look closer into the impacts of wind energy, otherwise I'd say you have a spot-on analysis. Above all, good on you for having a comments section rather than just preaching at us, so we can have a good old dialectic based on your starting thesis. Thank you very much for the vent space :-)
You had me until you mentioned wind farms as part of the solution. There's zero place for unsustainable, unmanageable and inefficient wind power in any attempts to tackle climate change. Nuclear is the only option. Far better to close every single wind turbine down, recycle the parts (if possible) and switch to nuclear. There are simply far too many environmental issues associated with wind energy (eg killing whales) to make it worthy of even a single penny of public money. All wind farm operators should face mandatory 25 year jail sentences should they not decommission and remove all traces of their junk.
You will never get countryside lovers to sign up to anything whatsoever that inovlves wind farms. The moment the climate lobby stand up against these toxic instruments of destruction is the moment they can be taken seriously.
Even Greta gets this now. Good on her! I knew she would, the more exposure she had to those communities ruined by wind blight.
Good read, but you needed setting straight about the horrible realities of wind energy. Happy to provide more info if needed.
Wind energy is great. It works well and is cheap. The simplicity - i.e the wind directly turns the turbine makes it cheap.
There is potentially a small amount of care needed to avoid harming birds etc but that was mostly at the beginning.
Harm to people etc is likely the placebo effect.
Hello Matthew, thanks for engaging, but a number of factual errors in your post. Firstly, can you please provide the data which you claim makes wind energy "cheap"? Even if this was the case, this is an economic argument, not an environmental one.
The hidden costs come from two main drawbacks with wind energy. Firstly as wind levels are unsustainable, sometimes dropping to zero for weeks on end, especially in colder months, we need a baseload backup running 24x7. That's not a bug, that's a feature of wind power, or any weather-dependent energy source.
The second hidden cost arises from when constraint payments are made to STOP the turbines producing excess energy at times it's not needed. There is an argument to be made that this could be stored with batteries, but we're nowhere near that yet, if ever. Source: Renewables Obligation (RO), Contracts for Difference (CfD) and Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin ( REGO) data for Scottish wind farms https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/371-constraint-payments-to-wind-power-in-2020-and-2021
The simplicity is not nearly as simple as you claim. Firstly, when there's not enough wind - no energy. When there's too much wind - no energy. So your sentence that the wind directly turns the turbine is far too reductive, in reality there's only a narrow band of acceptable wind level which is suitable for energy production.
And then there's the question of getting this energy from the turbine to the grid, much harder if the turbines are located in the wilderness. They will need cabling, if not miles of pylons. What happens is the turbines feed the electricity into the grid, whilst also having the ability to draw power from the grid. You can sometimes see turbines spinning when there's no wind - this is them actually using electricity, rather than generating it, to keep them from seizing up.
The impacts of wind turbines on wildlife run far greater than just bird deaths. Bats for example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-turbines-kill-bats/
Most worryingly for any environmentalist, who should instantly drop any dogmatic support for wind energy until further research proves their safety: whale deaths. It's yet another unpopular-with-the-corporate-faux-left theory, dismissively written off as "far right disinformation' to shut down debate, turning it into a politically divisive issue rather than just a science-based topic requiring objective research.
The harm to people is absolutely not a placebo affect (nocebo I think you mean). Look into the Cape Bridgewater Study, actually commissioned by a wind farm operator. Look into the Enercon case. But more than that, look at the loss of undeveloped natural spaces, the depreciation of housing stock, the industrialisation and corporatisation of what was Open Access Common Land. Do we really want to live in a world in which every single green space is dominated by huge spinning stars covered in high visibility white paint? My personal testimony is that the sight and impact of these appalling machines makes me angry, irritable, amygdala-hijacked and ready to lash out violently. Not because I work for an oil company, but because GREEN means GREEN. Not white! I want hills to look like hills, what better symbol of green values could we as a society have than to protect our natural landforms?
It's all well and good saying we need to make sacrifices to tackle climate change, but not sacrificing nature FFS! That's the one thing we need to conserve at all costs. If we must make sacrifices, let's sacrifice the consumerist, electronic, digital matrix, not expand it, ever encroaching onto our natural wildernesses. The Highlands of Scotland and the Welsh mountains are particularly vulnerable to this corporate blight.
Also the only thing thats good about community meetings is that because they are full of old rich people they are extremely un-diverse. So if you’re doing an infrastructure project you can go straight in with a framing of how its going to increase their house price without upsetting any renters.
In terms of getting a legitimate view on what the community thinks they are basically useless - far better to go door-to-door and talk to people. A genuinely unpopular project such as HS2 in Buckinghamshire will generate a reaction on the doorstep. Other projects such as a new housing estate will not.
The first para is just chippy, anti-normality, divisive bigotry of the type the article is specifically warning us to steer clear of. Nobody normal cares about "diversity", apart from companies being paid by Blackrock to pursue an ESG policy. The voice of a community is the voice of a community, as "diverse" or otherwise as the community itself. Certainly some of the meetings I attended in Rochdale and Halifax were as far away from your cliched stereotype as you could imagine.
Nobody is blocked or prevented from having their voice. The house price metrics give everyone, home owner or not, a guide as to the general wellbeing of an area. It's in literally nobody's benefit that the housing stock of a community depreciates, and it does near wind farms, according to the LSE's Gone With The Wind report.
The proof of community opposition to wind farms lies in the fact that there is no "ban" to onshore wind farms. Communities are perfectly free to have them in their own community, if that's what they want. But since 2015, nobody has availed themselves of this opportunity!
Good chatting Matthew. None of this is aimed at you personally, just making counterarguments for the benefit of readers. I hope this is an interesting debate for you all!
Blackrock are a multi national financial investor. Their investors pretty much exclusively care about results.
If they are pushing diversity it will be because they believe it drives results.
With regards to my point do you believe that older homeowners are representative of the views of families or the poor who are highly unlikely to go go community meetings?
Thanks again Matthew. Good points/questions. It's good that together we're looking into these issues and bringing them into the debate. Re diversity, Vanguard have now pulled out of ESG claiming it does more harm than good, and we've all seen the bank failures of recent days. The jury is out on whether the ESG policy caused or contributed to the collapses. One theory is that it's basically a cartel, forcing businesses to pay over the odds from "approved" suppliers. Time will tell... Follow the money is generally a good policy. Who benefits, and who pays?
Regarding the attendance of community meetings: these are open to everyone, and if there is a large number of older homeowners, logic dictates it's because they're more settled in an area, more invested in its best interests, more attached to the local environment, more aware of what's going on, generally more connected to local policy decision-making than the more transient sections of the community. I see nothing wrong with that.
However, as we're seeing with the ULEZ protests, it's counterproductive to sideline or namecall those people who turn up and get involved in these meetings. Indeed, that was the very point I got from this article: the climate movement needs these people on board, it needs to reach out to their needs and priorities and address them.
Rural populations will just stick their fingers in their ear, at best, or vociferously campaign against, so-called "environmental" policies that directly make their local environment worse, tangibly affecting their senses negatively. There's a common belief that the countryside is just a dumping ground for urban infrastructure.
As I said, the meetings I was involved with really were open to everyone, and the strength of feeling regarding the wind farms was far-reaching, affecting all the community. Rochdale for example is the home of the co-operative movement, and the anti-wind farm (Rooley Moor and the Scout Moor extension) protests were totally in keeping with that original pro-working class, anti-corporate standpoint.
TLDR: I'm trying to divorce opposition to wind farms from any kind of "climate denial" or "right wing" agendas. I want people on the left to see wind turbines as the bourgeois tool of oppression over the proletariat that they really are.
Ironically, I believe by going back to these Marxist principles and applying them to Big Energy (wind or otherwise - let's not forget the Peel Group who operate Scout Moor are also interested in fracking; it's the same people!), you are more likely to form a coalition across the political spectrum. Now there may well be some communities that do want wind farms, again time will tell. But by imposing them on people against their will, by minimising their legitimate concerns instead of trying to fix the technology to better address these flaws, you will just make them think the entire climate agenda is nothing but a money-making, citizen-harming scam.
If we must have wind power, it needs to be deployed much more compassionately and less corporately.
Surely needs to be a 'law' of politics that those most motivated to pursue a cause are frequently those least suited to rallying the necessary coalition behind them.
Idk, I think a successful social movement needs people like that; while ideally such movements should be helmed by moderates who can communicate ideas to a broad audience, it is also useful to have radical outriders to push the Overton window (and make the moderates seem more moderate)
I used to think this about the Overton window, but this piece by Matt Yglesias changed my mind on it: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-myth-of-the-overton-window
Great article! Fully agree with it!
I do wonder if the taxpayers alliance and some of the 55 Tufton Street people are acting in bad faith.
But certainly groups like the countryside alliance or the ramblers or the wildlife trusts or the Campaign for Rural England (who now also favour more social housing in rural areas) are acting in good faith.