Nimbyism will not save the countryside
The landscape impact of the so-called ‘energy transition’ is being felt across the country. Scotland’s mountains are already blighted by windfarms, and with planning rules having been relaxed south of the border, England’s uplands are increasingly threatened too. The Calderdale Windfarm, a monstrous proposal to desecrate a treasured landscape with no fewer than 65 turbines, will certainly not be the last body blow struck at our (once) green and pleasant land.
It's not just the uplands either. Solar panels are an increasing blight across the country, particularly in more southerly parts, but as far north as the Angus glens too. And the towers and pylons and cables that connect all this far flung infrastructure to market is just another set of steps towards the wholesale industrialisation of our natural places.
The doughty inhabitants of the shires are not taking this lying down of course, and as each proposal comes forward, protest groups spring up to oppose them. Recently, one group, fighting against a vast new substation designed to transfer power from a windfarm in the North Sea, managed to persuade the actor Ralph Fiennes to support their cause.
These groups adopt – almost universally – a strategy of accepting the (alleged) need for renewable energy, but argue that the necessary infrastructure should be built elsewhere. They are happy to signal their membership of the climate religion, happy for wind and solar installations to be built, just so long as they are built ‘somewhere else’.
In doing so, they reveal astonishing naivety about what Net Zero entails. We will need three times as many renewables installations if we are to decarbonise our current electricity supply. But if heat and transport become electric too we’ll need much more than that – how much more depends on how much technology improves and how much the public can be coerced into reducing demand. (National Grid’s plans for society, for example, involve everyone living in colder homes — that won’t happen voluntarily.)
But whatever the answer, it is clear that Net Zero will involve a vastly greater capacity of renewable and grid infrastructure — certainly an order of magnitude more. That being the case, wind and solar and electricity pylons are going to sprout like weeds. Arguments that they should be built ‘somewhere else’ are not going to carry much weight when Net Zero is going to involve building them everywhere.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A 2019 report for the Climate Change Committee put the cost of global warming to the UK at around £15 billion per year. The committee has also estimated the cost of Net Zero at £50 billion per year. It is clear then that the costs of this ludicrous project vastly outweigh the benefits. Pursuing it is therefore a kind of madness, a reflection of the fact that our society is in the grip of a millenarian climate cult. Restore rationality, and we can have growth and wealth back again. And we can save the countryside from the developers. But nimbyism is not going to be enough.