Something I read yesterday: Rebecca Solnit's latest essay. In the comments at the bottom of the essay you will find the words 'Flower Power' and maybe those lessons learnt at the time of the Vietnam war will also influence us today. After all it is still in living memory, and when you see the crowds protesting whether in London or America there is a lot of elders participating. And with the win yesterday in Hungary of overthrowing a right wing authoritarian leader there is always hope.
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Listening to the news this morning and one item jostled against the other. How our defence spending had been neglected over the years and the problem with enough energy to be on tap in the future. Well wind turbines to a degree are saving us from complete disaster but many people are staring at them with disgust, not me by the way. They remind me of a scene in H.G.Wells' War of the World'. You can see how my childhood was coloured by the books I read ;)
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| One of the first Illustrations of War of the World |
Anyway to get back to wind turbines there is a big hoo-ha about 34 giant turbines to be put up on Walsaw Moor, not far from here and a stone's throw from the Bronte's moor. It will be somewhere near Hebden Bridge and Haworth, the place where the Bronte sisters lived in the Rectory there with their father.
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| Haworth Rectory |
It will cause a lot of disruption on the moors, though I think people are agitating more over the sight of these giant turbines. There will be of course disturbance of the wildlife, especially my favourite bird the curlew and yet I have mixed feelings about whether they should go up or not. Practically they give us clean energy which is not disruptive of the climate. We seem further away from such things as nuclear fission? and Nuclear energy takes time to build the power plants and of course involves some risk.
The trouble with the people of today is they want to stay in the time warp they see around us, whereas the human condition always moves on. Whether it is rebuilding after war or technology advancing in a way that changes the order of things.
Paul Kingsworth calls it The Machine that is running the show. It is the balance of power, technology, wealth and ideology. The balance that is out of kilter at the moment. It is well known for instance that war puts vast sums of money into a few people's pockets, it is in itself a distraction.
I remember maybe twenty years ago driving south on the M6 and an apparition appeared, a majestic construction of a wind turbine framed by steep hills on either side. If we had them here then, I had never seen them. The wind turbine was a thing of great beauty as its blades slowly rotated in the breeze, but still generating a huge amount of electricity. Now there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of wind turbines around the world.
ReplyDeleteThe Orange Warmonger calls wind turbines "windmills" and is against them simply because they affect the view at his Aberdeenshire golf course. He tried to stop the development of that particular "wind farm" and because he did not get his way he continues to deride "windmills". In fact he knows nothing about wind turbines and the benefits that they are already bringing to the world. I am sure that his enormous bank balance has grown even bigger because of the war upon Iran that he launched because Benjamin the Vengeful egged him on.
ReplyDeleteWe have many wind turbines in farm fields west of my city and I don't know why people think they are ugly. What a good idea to use the wind to create power with their giant arms spinning. It's a cool sight to see.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are downsides to wind -- the danger to birds, for example, though I'm not sure who dangerous those turbines really are. It still seems far preferable to fossil fuels.
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