In an interview with the Telegraph, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband revealed his plan to lift the ban on building new onshore wind farms if Labour wins the General Election. Here’s an excerpt:
The Shadow Energy Secretary pledged a Labour Government will overturn planning rules that currently require local community support to approve proposed turbines.
If he wins office he plans to use a ministerial “written statement” to remove an obligation in the national planning policy framework for community concerns to be “appropriately addressed”, a stipulation that has effectively blocked onshore wind projects for a decade.
The onshore wind ban was introduced by then-Prime Minister Lord Cameron in 2015, who was so worried by the backlash from Nimbys over a rash of planned wind farms that he gave local communities across England the right to block them.
“The onshore wind ban was a deeply unfair measure… and we want to lift it,” Mr. Miliband told the Telegraph. “At the moment, it’s easier to build an incinerator than it is to build an onshore wind development.”
Those plans are certain to generate a backlash, as they already have in Wales where the Labour Government has created zones called “pre‑assessed areas for wind energy”.
Mr. Miliband said: “People have different views on the onshore wind ban but we’re going to lift it.
“According to the Resolution Foundation, it [the ban] has cost poorer households six times more as a proportion of their income than middle-class households. And we’re going to get the fairness thing right.”
That has prompted a surge in planning applications for giant wind turbines up to 800ft tall, two to three times larger than any yet built in the principality.
Protest groups have sprung up everywhere from Anglesey in the north to Powys in the south. Similar battles are being fought across the Scottish highlands against both turbines and electricity pylons.
An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists. The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“. Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.
The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events. This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.
There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers. One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist. A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future. Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.
Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”. She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.
Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process? A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.
The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events. Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.
As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia. Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:
You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.
Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line. It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work. It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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