Separatists are going to great lengths to present Scotland as a renewable energy superpower – felling millions of trees in the process
The outcry over the Scottish executive’s admission that 15.7 million trees have been felled on publicly owned land since 2000 to make way for wind turbines has been understandably loud but mostly for the wrong reasons.
There is probably more biodiversity under a wind farm on heather moorland – a unique British habitat recognised by the 1992 Rio Convention on Biodiversity as being rarer than rainforests – than in a conifer monoculture. Spruce are designed to be grown for thirty years then felled anyway before re-planting, likely for burning in power plants. Sure, they absorb CO2 while they are growing but, if you are hung up on carbon, that can be replaced next time around by planting other ones elsewhere as mitigation. So felling trees and shoving up some turbines instead isn’t as bad as it sounds.
However, the incoherence of marching trees up to the top of the hill then chopping them down again does raise a number of questions, not least the extent to which influential vested interests, including wind companies, may be holding sway over the Green-Separatist coalition. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/the-snp-are-turning-net…/
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