After our despairing commentary earlier this week, Booker returns to the fray with a vengeance in today's column, firing a 24-gun broadside against the wind farm madness.

This is the policy which that fool Gordon Brown launched on Thursday, calling it "the greatest revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power", estimated to cost us £100 billion or thereabouts for the luxury of having the lights go out.

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You are being too negative,think to the future when tourist come to Britain and gaze in awe at the thousands of derelict masts."What on earth were they for" the will gasp,obviously the natives must have worshiped them.
This will put Easter Island to shame.

It's OK if you can't get or install the turbines, he hasn't got the £100billion either.

This is what I call a 'policy for announcing'. As you may recall, it's like the case of tinned sardines, for buying and selling, you're not supposed to eat them.

Gordon will proceed to do nothing, as his part in this is over. The announcement has been made, we have a plan to meet the daft EU carbon targets. When the time comes the flap will be over, nobody will remember the scare, much less their part in it, and anyway none of the other countries will meet it either. Of course, the other countries might have acted to safeguard continuity of supply. But as you say, Labour will be long gone before this one comes home to roost.

Time to stress the Health and safety problems with wind turbines.What is a safe distance from human habitation these things need to be? What will the maintenance and decommissioning costs be?
No doubt Gordon Brown will attempt to sneak these outlays onto PFI,but there is no guarantee that the developers will take any more interest in wind farms after they have taken their profits.

This is a repost which is relevant to this thread.

Professor David J.C. MacKay, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge has produced a popular book “Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air”, which can be downloaded from his website http://www.withouthotair.com/ and a four page executive summary http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sust ... nopsis.pdf

Don't worry, folks. Tony Blair says we have to do it :

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 231724.ece

... so it must be the right thing to do.

For more on the madness see

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/01/london_array_shell_pullout/

Shell is not known for its charitable works and being one of its small shareholders I would like to keep it that way.

When the lights do go out will we be allowed to kill the lying scumbags from the British Wind Energy Association? Perhaps by then they will have fled with their ill gotten to some country with reliable power supplies.

I recall a year or so ago this policy for offshore wind generation was announced by Mr John Hutton MP, who looks a bit like Himmler only without the sense of humour. He said that we had to have 7000 offshore turbines erected by 2020. I make that 12 years to go, which is 4380 days, implying that 1.6 turbines will be erected every day for 12 years. This is obviously bullshit, it is clearly not going to happen, and it took a few seconds to realise it. It's good the see that some of the MSM have finally started to cotton on to it. Now can someone please tell the Green Tosser to get his head out of his arse? By 2010 he's going to be the Prime Minister, and this is a grown up problem he will have to deal with, which cannot be solved by putting a windmill on his roof or sucking up to Zac sodding Goldsmith.

Is anyone prepared to do a "line-by-line" type comparison of Christopher Booker's figures and calculations with those of Prof. MacKay to see where they diverge and why?

I think it would be a very useful exercise whatever the result. This kind of breakdown comparison, containing plenty of nice numbers to fix one's attention on, has the capacity to throw lots of light on the various arguments involved and should uncover any hidden or missing assumptions etc.