ANTI-WIND campaigners have been vindicated by the ClimateXChange study into wind farm impacts ("Calls for revamp in predicting noise from wind farms", The Herald, July 2).
The results must be sending shock waves across the industry and the Scottish Government.
There has been shoddy practice allowed and communities have been left fighting their corner, abandoned by their Government which seems to only speak for those with vested interests. If past controversial approvals are re-examined and constructed wind farms compared to the developers' submitted visual impact assessments, people will be stunned at how many bear no relation to reality.
For years now campaigners have been trying to get their voices heard and the Government to, at least, admit there is a problem. We have been abused online and accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. Nothing is further from the truth. It has taken an ever-growing group of dedicated people determined to right the most appalling wrong and we are in touching distance of it ending with the subsidies being stopped.
Is the Energy Minister, Fergus Ewing, still banging the wind industry drum or is he, at last, prepared to look at the truth and listen to real people with no more agenda than to have justice, democracy, honesty and protection for people in the planning system? Communities in England and Wales have been given the powers to stop onshore wind developments, yet our Government refuses to give us that opportunity. Why?
Are we less worthy than our counterparts south of the Border? If so, many will rue the day planning was ever devolved to Holyrood.
Lyndsey Ward,
Darach Brae, Beauly.
IN his response to my letter of June 26, Nigel Willis (Letters. June 30) advanced an interesting hypothesis about Fergus Ewing's remarkable conversion from wind farm sceptic in 2007 to wind farm enthusiast now that he is Energy Minister. This was that Mr Ewing might regard these installations as a "hidden" mechanism for redistributing income from the overwhelming majority of UK citizens to (some) Scottish people through "community benefit" payments funded by the subsidies we pay through our energy bills.
The payments Mr Willis mentions are large, but they are crumbs from the master's table besides the much greater sums paid by developers to landowners in rental fees; about 10 times greater. This might suggest a further hidden strategy behind the Scottish Government's current land reform proposals; the idea that communities could acquire land from landowners for "sustainable development" - in other words, for more wind farms and more "community benefit", paid for mainly by the hard-pressed citizens of such places as Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.
If this is Mr Ewing's master plan, the UK Government has probably rumbled him. The good people of Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and the rest of the 91 per cent of UK citizens will eventually do so, too. Wind farms are an exceptionally ineffective way of tackling climate change. "Community benefits" are an exceptionally arbitrary and inequitable way of redistributing income from one needy section of society to another.
(Dr) Ken Brown,
2 Dundreggan Bungalows,
Glenmoriston, Inverness.
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