Page 7 - Phonebox Magazine November 2007

And even if there is a doubt that man is causing climate change, how dare today’s generation play Russian roulette with the future of our kids. Today we live in a world in which the health and safety boys seem determined to remove all fun from our lives. There’s a one in a thousand chance an accident might occur, and an event is cancelled. And yet, give people the slim hope that maybe there is a tiny chance man is not causing global warming, and the head in the sand brigade advise us to carry on regardless.
The global warming cynics remind me of the arguments put forward thirty of so years ago, denying smoking caused cancer.
Let me now turn to some of the other extraordinary claims made in the September issue of the Phonebox. First of all, wind power was ridiculed.
The UK is a windy place – I once read that 25 per cent of Europe’s wind is in the UK. I am not sure if this is true, but we all know the UK has foul weather and according to the pressure group BWEA “the UK has the best wind resource in Europe.”
Wind power is also getting cheaper and more efficient. Many readers will be familiar with Moore’s law, the idea that computers double in speed every 18 months or so. Moore’s Law can be tweaked so that it applies to other industries. The more we develop wind power, the cheaper and more efficient it becomes. Contrast this with nuclear power, which requires such massive economies of scale, and such a long development time that the process of improving its efficiency is much slower.
But only by building wind farms can we enjoy progress from their construction.
Wind speed varies from day to day and across the UK. For wind power to be effective wind farms have to be spread out – and this often means wind farms are near urban areas. It’s not like nuclear power, which can be generated in power stations as far from our aesthetic senses as possible, all but forgotten, until a terrorist attack,
a Chernobyl type disaster or we realise we have nowhere to put the waste.
Incredibly, one letter printed in your publication cited the example of Bedford and how the people there managed to block a wind farm – but I was confused when I read this. Surely the Bedford example shows how dangerous the not in my back yard mentality is, and why we must have greater foresight.
Another letter contrasted wind power with bio fuel – the implication that we should follow the lead of that great eco warrior of our time, George W Bush, and start creating fuel from corn. This comment, once again, falls short of the mark. Scientists believe that bio fuel created from corn is very energy inefficient and bad for the environment – while the other popular bio fuel currently used – created from sugar cane, and especially popular in Brazil, is often grown in ground that was once Amazon rain forest – with the loss of carbon to the atmosphere much greater than the carbon emissions saved through the use of sugar cane based fuel. Incidentally bio fuel has also led to higher food prices – which has been a contributing factor behind central banks upping the rate of interest – a factor behind the recent crisis in the money markets.
But, it seems to me, that the venom and personal attacks on Mr Handford, expressed in your letters page, suggest something else. Such aggressive diatribes often hide a deep rooted, even subconscious knowledge that the arguments being ventured are not based on solid foundations. Deep down, the detractors of the Emberton Wind Farm understand the lie to their arguments – it’s just that the truth is far too inconvenient.
Michael Baxter, Olney
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Phonebox Magazine 7
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