As for wind farms, it seemed a bit strange that an innovation designed to save our beautiful world wreaked unique havoc on the best landscape. When we learnt that wind power needed vast amounts of conventional power back-up because of intermittency, we started to see it as the greatest physical folly in our island story.
Yet no mainstream political party engaged with this. You could tell that they were worried about the symptoms of their own policies – hence Ed Miliband’s call for an energy price freeze. But none wanted to discuss the causes. Owen Paterson, then the environment secretary, was the only minister who dared raise doubts. He annoyed what he calls the “green blob”. David Cameron duly sacked him this summer.
In the Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture on Wednesday, Mr Paterson said of wind farms that “this paltry supply of onshore wind, nowhere near enough to hit the 2050 targets, has devastated landscapes, blighted views, divided communities, killed eagles …” When this was quoted on the BBC News, he was saying no more than millions of ordinary people have been saying for years. Yet it was very striking to hear it in public, because no other elected person charged with these responsibilities had said anything like this before.
James Lovelock was practically the saint of the enviro movement way back when and invented the Gaia idea. A few years back he said turbines were a waste of time and a blight on the landscape. I thought this might have an impact on the propeller heads, but it’s mostly about politics and money now.
Wind farms all over the UK countryside are a visual metaphor for the concurrent loss of reason and ascension of (green) theocracy. A landscape of bird chopping, bat slicing green eco-crucifixes, in James Delinpole’s inimitable words.
Make that James “Delingpole”.