ANTI-WIND campaigners have been vindicated by the ClimateXChange study into
wind farm impacts (“Calls for revamp in predicting noise from wind farms”,
The Herald, July 2).
The results must be sending shock waves across the industry and the
Scottish Government.
There has been shoddy practice allowed and communities have been left
fighting their corner, abandoned by their Government which seems to only
speak for those with vested interests. If past controversial approvals are
re-examined and constructed wind farms compared to the developers’
submitted visual impact assessments, people will be stunned at how many
bear no relation to reality.
For years now campaigners have been trying to get their voices heard and
the Government to, at least, admit there is a problem. We have been abused
online and accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. Nothing is
further from the truth. It has taken an ever-growing group of dedicated
people determined to right the most appalling wrong and we are in touching
distance of it ending with the subsidies being stopped.
Is the Energy Minister, Fergus Ewing, still banging the wind industry drum
or is he, at last, prepared to look at the truth and listen to real people
with no more agenda than to have justice, democracy, honesty and protection
for people in the planning system? Communities in England and Wales have
been given the powers to stop onshore wind developments, yet our Government
refuses to give us that opportunity. Why?
Are we less worthy than our counterparts south of the Border? If so, many
will rue the day planning was ever devolved to Holyrood.
Lyndsey Ward,
Darach Brae, Beauly.
IN his response to my letter of June 26, Nigel Willis (Letters. June 30)
advanced an interesting hypothesis about Fergus Ewing’s remarkable
conversion from wind farm sceptic in 2007 to wind farm enthusiast now that
he is Energy Minister. This was that Mr Ewing might regard these
installations as a “hidden” mechanism for redistributing income from the
overwhelming majority of UK citizens to (some) Scottish people through
“community benefit” payments funded by the subsidies we pay through our
energy bills.
The payments Mr Willis mentions are large, but they are crumbs from the
master’s table besides the much greater sums paid by developers to
landowners in rental fees; about 10 times greater. This might suggest a
further hidden strategy behind the Scottish Government’s current land
reform proposals; the idea that communities could acquire land from
landowners for “sustainable development” – in other words, for more wind
farms and more “community benefit”, paid for mainly by the hard-pressed
citizens of such places as Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.
If this is Mr Ewing’s master plan, the UK Government has probably rumbled
him. The good people of Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and the rest of
the 91 per cent of UK citizens will eventually do so, too. Wind farms are
an exceptionally ineffective way of tackling climate change. “Community
benefits” are an exceptionally arbitrary and inequitable way of
redistributing income from one needy section of society to another.
(Dr) Ken Brown,
2 Dundreggan Bungalows,
Glenmoriston, Inverness.
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