mew wrote:I appreciate your comments Stew but whether you are in agreement with windfarms or not (I personally am), the issue of our over comsumption is surely being addressed, (if only in a small way) by the emissions trading scheme, but it only works if others buy up the spare credits.
I think carbon trading may work quite well at focusing industry's minds on reducing their CO2 emissions (if only they hadn't cocked up the administration of it when they introduced it a while ago). But that doesn't seem to address our consumerist habits at all. I don't foresee a time when the Argos catalogue gets thinner, or Christmas shopping becomes an afternoon's work. It won't stop our hunger for cars and roads. No kitchen will be complete without two dozen sockets for appliances. Growth will still be king.
But I'm well aware of peoples views on windfarms, however if they mean that another gas fired or nuclear power station is not built there fine by me.
But that's not the choice. No one is actually asking us to choose between the two. We are set to get
both windfarms
and nuclear power. The more I think about it, the worse the idea of windfarms seems to become. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that they are here to save the planet for us - they are here to enable us to go on consuming the world's resources without the discomfort of having to think about the consequenses; to go on ravaging the earth, and to make a few people extremely rich. They are about
economic growth. You see them as something pretty; I see them as representations of the way we only seem able to destroy things - monsters. We are not talking about a few scenic windmills, here, but about huge industrial complexes decommissioning the land, and enabling us to tear up the planet - 14 square miles of windfarm equates to a single power station, and that's just at current consumption rates. Our daft economy depends upon growth, so it won't stop there.
And, given a growth economy, what will we do when the land is filled with turbines
and powerstations? What sort of legacy is that to leave to our offspring - the evidence of how greedy we all were? That the countryside has to be sacrificed to the ever growing demands of the city is a mere detail, taken care of by persuading the planning authority of an
economic need.
I completely understand that they may cause damage to land in construction and endanger rare birds
I think that's really a minor side issue. The power they generate is part of a larger equation - electricity is the lifeblood of our consumerism. The two are indivisible. The nature of the way we consume is a function of the generation of electricity. Electricity is the force that drives our economy. The depletion of finite resources, the pollution of our rivers, seas and air leads inevitably from that. We have allowed ourselves to become quite dependent upon it. By sacrificing the land to windfarms we enable our greedy habits to plunder the rest of the world's resources.
ultimately if we don't generate electricity without generating CO2 then the habitats which are so cherished will be under sea water in the future. We need energy,
A mere six or seven generations ago electricity was nothing more than a laboratory experiment. Why do we presume that it is so indispensible now? Seriously, why? Just so that we can watch 114 channels on TV, have iPods with 6,000 albums on them, and surf the net? So that we can have hot water on demand, talk to people 100 miles away from our cars, and have a machine that does the washing up for us? So that we can video our children's school play (instead of actually
watching it), locate our position on he planet's surface to within 2 meters, and have muzak in every shop, lift and dentist's waiting room? So that we can have a bed that goes up and down at both ends, a bath that whirls, and an automatic pencil sharpener? It's all pretty trivial really, isn't it? I believe it would be possible to survive, happily and comfortably, on a fraction of what we use now, possibly even without it at all. It would require dramatic cultural and social changes to the way we do things now. It would require us all to become more self sufficient-ish.
But we've been consumerists like this for a mere 150 years or so. We know full well that we can live
without all the artifacts of consumption - we've been able to do that for about a thousand times longer than we have with, and developed many sophisticated cultures and civilisations along the way. What seems increasingly unlikely is that we can survive
with a consumerist habit. We
want electricity; I'm not convinced we
need it.
who can't be bothered to do there bit. 
. But everyone so far in this forum seems to be thinking that the best way to control climate change is to stop the population growing and all live in the dark with no luxuries such as electricity. However I think that we all have to understand if we are going to change the habits of the 6 billion humans on this planet then we need to make it easy for them, because unlike the few here who already understand the consequences of us doing nothing the average man cares more about football and the average woman more about shopping, interfere with either of these and its just too much trouble for them. And since everyone else is talking about children etc. I'm married and got none, intend on none, animals are far easier and emit much less CO2 