Writing in the Times (of New York, not London), Roger Cohen points out that even though 82 percent of Brits are in favor of wind power, only one in three on-shore projects is ever built, owing to "Not in My Back Yard" attitudes. Apparently Her Majesty’s citizens are all for wind power as long as it happens in one of the colonies. (“We still have colonies, right?”)
As they adopt nimbyism in droves, touchy-feely, green, politically correct types who only eat bacon from locally reared pampered pigs and would hug any hypothetical wind farm morph into rabid reactionaries. They bleat about 350-foot eyesores, turbine noise and animal suffering. Chancellor had this to say of wind farms: “They kill bats by exploding their little lungs. They frighten horses with an effect known as ‘shadow flicker.’ ”
Aaah, the poor bats! Give me oil from the mass-murderer Qaddafi or sweet-talking Saudis so long as I don’t have a dead bat or spooked horse on my conscience.
The entire column deserves your attention. Cohen writes like a mofo, to use a crass Americanism that would be beneath him.
I’ve thought about the aesthetics of wind turbines. Sure, they don’t belong in Arcadia — but then nor do we. I prefer them to processions of electricity pylons. They have a certain sleek muscularity.
