Christopher Booker writes for the UK’s Sunday Telegraph. On 4 July 2015, he posted “Why are greens so keen to destroy the world’s wildlife?” From this posting he said:
”All in all, wherever we look, this pursuit of the dream of “carbon-free energy” is creating an ecological catastrophe. Like so many of the great crimes of history, this one is being perpetrated by people who imagine they are doing something praiseworthy. In this case, possessed by their delusion that they are battling for nature and the future of the planet, they are in fact doing as much as anyone to destroy the very things they kid themselves they are trying to save.”
Booker provides some examples supporting that statement:
“Last week’s scenes of green campaigners exulting at the decision by 10 Lancashire county councillors to reject an application to erect a drilling rig for fracking near Preston – on the grounds that it would have an “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape” – recalled a piece I wrote in January, headed “Which ‘environment’ do ‘environmentalists’ really care about?”.
“On that occasion, the greenies were celebrating the refusal of a previous fracking application, just when they were welcoming plans to add a further 24 wind turbines 400ft high to what is already England’s largest onshore wind farm, looking down from the Pennines on Rochdale.”
“When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) last year, he produced a report comparing the environmental impact of a fracking site to that of wind farms. Over 25 years, he calculated, a single “shale gas pad” covering five acres, with a drilling rig 85ft high (only needed for less than a year), would produce as much energy as 87 giant wind turbines, covering 5.6 square miles and visible up to 20 miles away. Yet, to the greenies, the first of these, capable of producing energy whenever needed, without a penny of subsidy, is anathema; while the second, producing electricity very unreliably in return for millions of pounds in subsidies, fills them with rapture.
Josh, the cartoonist, illustrated Professor MacKay’s comparison in the posting on WUWT that follows:
Booker added that millions of birds and bats are killed each year by the wind farms.
He notes another report on destruction of US hardwood forests:
“…. ecological devastation being wrought over thousands of square miles of hardwood forest in the US to fuel power stations in Britain…”
He notes another report:
” …. where thousands of square miles of rainforest, brimming with life, are being replaced by sterile palm oil plantations to meet the EU’s targets for “biofuels…… killing off the last orangutans across a huge area of Sumatra.”
And another report:
” ……Twenty-five years after 1,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest were flooded by the Balbina dam, to produce a mere 250 megawatts of electricity, less than 1 per cent of the 3,546 islands it created still have any significant wildlife left. Billions of animals, birds, reptiles and insects, not to mention the former forest‑dwelling Indian tribes, have vanished.
To read all of Booker’s posting click here.
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 