Michael Langrish, the Bishop of Exeter (England), claimed his staff had been subjected to ‘outright verbal abuse’ over the plans to erect two 25 meter-high wind turbines in three North Devon communities. He had proposed these wind turbines to save the planet and to earn, he estimated to be about $75,000 (£50,000) per year. He announced that he has given up on this plan in a letter read at all congregations last Sunday.
James Delingpole, an articulate skeptic, posted a commentary on this event in the British newspaper the “Telegraph.” It is both witty and full of common sense. Delingpole finds the Bishop’s chagrin at the opposition somewhat puzzling:
What surprised me about your letter was that a man intelligent enough to have gained two degrees (one from Cambridge) and canny enough to have risen to the not totally immodest heights of the Bishopric of Exeter should yet be puzzled as to why his flock might object to having a hideous pair of bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes plonked next to their tranquil North Devon villages.
OK Bishop, I understand that the Church is hard up. (And why is that I wonder? Surely not because it has sacrificed most of its values and traditions in order to get down with the kids – who, by the by, hate it when squares try to be cool – and to embrace modish issues like sustainability and climate change instead of all that complicated old-fashioned stuff like belief in God?) I understand that the £50,000 a year you might have earned from the wind farm companies could have come in pretty handy.
But to quote a book I know the church doesn’t use that often these days, so forgive my impertinence in reminding you of it:
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Because where, ultimately, Bishop, do you think that annual £50,000 would have come from?
Not from the electricity generated by the turbines themselves, let me assure you. Wind energy is to all intents and purposes worthless since, being intermittent and unreliable, it has no value in a consumer-demand-led free market. The only reason the wind industry exists at all is because of the massive subsidies it receives, mostly added onto electricity bills in the form of concealed tariffs.
And guess who are the people hardest hit by these concealed tariffs? Yep, the Poor. All those people who have been driven into something called “fuel poverty” as a direct consequence of the government’s Brussels-driven obsession with renewable energy.
And as a Bishop, are you traditionally expected to be nice to the Poor or horrid to the Poor, would you say? Yep, right again Bish – see what wonders a Cambridge degree (and another from Brum) can do for you? – you are expected to be nice to the poor.
Your brother in Christ (though not in Gaia-worship)
Jimmy D
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 