Professor Bellamy speak with forked tongue

Professor David Bellamy, the British naturalist, is coming to Victoria to speak out against the wind farm proposed for Bald Hills in South Gippsland. Bellamy has been a longstanding critic of wind farms and has led a worldwide crusade against their implementation.

At least, he has been a longstanding critic since 1989. Before then, he enthusiastically embraced them, as the Cambridge News Online points out:

"Wind power has quickly developed from being an outsider to being perhaps the most attractive alternative to traditional methods of electricity generation."

"There is reason to argue that wind power has its uses both on the large and the small scale."

"...for the large electricity generating organisations themselves, wind power can play a part in meeting our national electricity requirements alongside the other sources of production."

"Estimates do show that eventually wind power may be able to provide us with up to 20% of all our current energy demands - so things are looking promising."

"Power from the Wind", a video documentary produced in 1989 by the CEGB, Powergen and National Power, UK.

Okay, anyone can change their minds. 1989 was 15 years ago. There have been a lot of windfarms erected since then and their impact can be more clearly assessed. Obviously the Professor feels quite differently about them now:

First of all they are not wind farms, they are wind factories causing high rise industrialisation of landscapes that have been protected to-date by one of the best aspects of democracy, Britain's local planning laws, laws that are now being swept away.

“This will not so much be a farm for making energy out of wind as a farm for making money out of the taxpayer.”

But this is the same Professor Bellamy who on 24 May this year was a strong advocate of building a Skyrail in the Galapagos Islands. What he said then:

"This is the 21st Century, we have got to get some 21st (Century) answers," he said. "I do actually think a skyrail put in the right place would put a lot of the money in and save the problem." "Mass tourism, if it is done properly, is doing marvels around the world," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "The Galapagos Trust and the Darwin Institute are doing marvellous things. They are getting 85,000 tourists through there but they are strapped for cash."

So it's all right to put a monorail in place with all the attendant destruction of underlying forest floor which is the normal by-product of a construction phase, and risk to small wildlife, the noise and visual impact, because it will bring money to the Galapagos locals. There is no environmental benefit in a skyrail. It's purely commercial.

Professor Bellamy is obviously passionate in his stance against wind farms. But he needs to be treated with caution if he can support the construction of a purely commercial venture like a Skyrail in the environmentally-sensitive Galapagos Islands on the one hand, and denigrate the construction of wind farms which bring direct benefit to the power grid on the other.

I agree that wind farms are not the total solution. They can reduce dependance on fossil fuelled energy on a small scale, that is, providing electricity for some hundreds of homes by contributing to the regional grid. They are a contributory alternative to fossil fuels, not the sole replacement. I support their construction on land that is not environmentally sensitive, but I don't support their construction in areas such as coastal tourist spots. I have personal experience of wind farms, I visit one of them regularly, and I have yet to see one bird carcass on the ground. I am sure birds occasionally fly into them, but then they also fly into glass windows and power pylons.

The noise produced by a wind turbine can be noticed if you are within a couple of hundred metres as a regular 'whoosh-whump' rather like a loud heartbeat, every second or so. But unless you live within five hundred metres, you won't hear it, and it certainly won't drive you insane. Living within five hundred yards of a major road would produce more noise.

The wind farm debate is a emotive one. Facts are often obscured by overblown rhetoric, on each side of the argument. Make up your own mind. But treat Professor Bellamy's remarks with caution.

Comments

[scruss]

Thanks for bringing this all together. I wonder who's paying Bellamy now?