Reply to: Labour supporter Jack Monroe defects to Green Party

[pjclarke]

The long and short of it is that all forms of energy production have an impact on the environment.

Ffos-y-fran open cast coal mine, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil,.

Everything about this scheme is odd. The edge of the site is just 36 metres from the nearest homes, yet there will be no compensation for the owners, and their concerns have been dismissed by the authorities. To reach the 10.8 million tonnes of coal they are hoping to extract, the developers must remove 123 million cubic metres of rock(9). The digging and infilling will last for 17 years, with explosives used to loosen the rock and machines working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, generating smoke and dust. While the World Health Organisation identifies 55 decibels as causing “serious annoyance”, the planning conditions set maximum noise levels at 70dB. When local people say that the scheme will ruin their lives, I do not believe they are exaggerating.

The new coal age | Environment | The Guardian

[tomtomagain]

Take a nice green field.
Then build a tarmacked road on your field then dig a massive hole. Next fill it thousands of tons of concrete to support a giant steel structure. Dig trenches all over what remains of your green field for the cables to connect to the grid.
Charge poor people extra for the privilege of using your very expensive electricity.
Pay rich landowners to use their land.
Handover large subsidies to multi-national corporations

Your objections could easily be applied to coal-fired power stations, gas fired-power stations, nuclear power stations, solar-farms, the initial development of offshore oil fields ( apart from the "field bit" ) and tidal power.

The long and short of it is that all forms of energy production have an impact on the environment.

[pjclarke]

Wind turbines have killed more birds of prey than persecution this year - Telegraph

Erm, 4 birds killed by turbines. 2 detected illegal killings reported by October last year. Trust the Telegraph for a disingenuous headline. In 2013 in Scotland 23 birds of prey were the victims of crime, including poisoning, shooting and trapping, which number is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg, these activities being illegal.

Hmmm, 4 birds in 9 months. Regrettable, but not exactly the holocaust we were warned about.

[Flashman]

Completely agree. Once upon-a-time I worked in a wind-farm company, for each farm put up environmental impact assessments were undertaken and we found that bird strike was extremely rare.

Birds have these things called "eyes" that let them perceive the wind turbine from hundreds of meters away and this thing called a "brain" that allows them to alter their flight-path to avoid the turbines.

The idea that turbines are bird-mincing machines is .... cuckoo

Wind turbines have killed more birds of prey than persecution this year - Telegraph

Greens. Mental cases the lot of them

Build your wind turbine farm.

Take a nice green field.
Then build a tarmacked road on your field then dig a massive hole. Next fill it thousands of tons of concrete to support a giant steel structure. Dig trenches all over what remains of your green field for the cables to connect to the grid.
Charge poor people extra for the privilege of using your very expensive electricity.
Pay rich landowners to use their land.
Handover large subsidies to multi-national corporations to maintain wind turbines.

Greens

[pjclarke]

The only time I've seen Red Kites I was in a town. Some birds of prey have worked out how to use human structures e.g. towers to their advantage.

We have a pair where I live in rural Derbyshire, but the most I've ever seen were over Maidenhead. Friday lunchtimes we used to go to a curry restaurant named (from memory), The Balcony, which had a good view over the town and it was not uncommon to see up to eight Kites wheeling high over the rooftops. Quite beautiful.

[SueEllen]

So I call BS, I think its a bogus number from a crank website. I love birds of prey as much as anyone, I am thrilled at the success of the reintroduction of the Red Kite, I just don't think wind farms are anywhere near as big a threat to them as portrayed. One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

The only time I've seen Red Kites I was in a town. Some birds of prey have worked out how to use human structures e.g. towers to their advantage.

While towns and cities don't tend to have wind farms they do have randomly placed wind turbines. If birds were being killed by the wind turbines there would plenty of objects by their neighbours.

[tomtomagain]

One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

Completely agree. Once upon-a-time I worked in a wind-farm company, for each farm put up environmental impact assessments were undertaken and we found that bird strike was extremely rare.

Birds have these things called "eyes" that let them perceive the wind turbine from hundreds of meters away and this thing called a "brain" that allows them to alter their flight-path to avoid the turbines.

The idea that turbines are bird-mincing machines is .... cuckoo.

[pjclarke]

pj is correct of course. my figures were wrong because I took the lower estimate of the 13 -39 million killed by wind every year.

I wanted to be fair, rather than a propagandist or lobbyist who ignores all contrary evidence.

(39m vs .3 m PA)

Really, my 'sceptical', cat-owning bird-loving friend?

No source is given for the multimillion estimate, but would I be right in thinking you're relying on 'Save the Eagles International', the source of the photo?

Save The Eagles - this sounds like an international grassroots organisation of birdlovers championing the rights of our beloved raptors. It is not. Its pretty much one man, Mark Duchamp and his website, plus a handful of zealous mates around the world. So is Duchamp a qualified ornithologist? An experienced field researcher? An environmental scientist? A statistician? Er, no, he self-describes as a 'retired businessman'.

Bizarrely, of the pressures facing eagles, habitat loss, poaching, pesticides, poisoning, illegal egg collection, Duchamp writes almost exclusively about one risk, you guessed it, wind turbines.

So where does his 'multimillion' fatalaties number derive from? It seems to be a single press release from the Spanish Ornithological Society, extrapolated worldwide. This number implies that every turbine in Spain is mincing up 1-3 birds per day, as opposed to the more generally accepted number of 2-4 per year. One has an image of every turbine peeking out of a mound of feathery corpses, or some very happy Spanish Foxes. Verity Jones debunks the claim here

https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.c...ills-in-spain/

So I call BS, I think its a bogus number from a crank website. I love birds of prey as much as anyone, I am thrilled at the success of the reintroduction of the Red Kite, I just don't think wind farms are anywhere near as big a threat to them as portrayed. One suspects the alarmists are far more anti-Green than they are pro-bird.

[SueEllen]

If you can get full housing benefit, you're off to a great start especially with no council tax to pay. But yes it does depend not only on cost of living, but location - if you are somewhere rural and rely on public transport (or even worse need your own car) the costs mount up very fast. That's why I think people on JSA should get a free bus-pass... it's not that attractive as something to abuse and even if unemployed people did spend a lot of the time riding the bus for fun, it wouldn't exactly cost anybody anything. In fact in many cases I'd say getting unemployed people out of their house/village just to ride around on a bus wouldn't be a bad thing.

They have changed the rules on council tax so depending on where you live and the benefit you are on you have to pay 10%.

Lots of councils have decided not to implement this as it's too costly to chase people who simply don't have the means to pay.

Agree with you about the bus pass.

Lots of minimum wage and lower paid jobs are given to people who pop in and ask for work, so giving someone a bus pass would increase their chance of work.

[d000hg]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

If you can get full housing benefit, you're off to a great start especially with no council tax to pay. But yes it does depend not only on cost of living, but location - if you are somewhere rural and rely on public transport (or even worse need your own car) the costs mount up very fast. That's why I think people on JSA should get a free bus-pass... it's not that attractive as something to abuse and even if unemployed people did spend a lot of the time riding the bus for fun, it wouldn't exactly cost anybody anything. In fact in many cases I'd say getting unemployed people out of their house/village just to ride around on a bus wouldn't be a bad thing.

[SueEllen]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

Depends where you are in the country - it's been that way for years.

Anyway the issues with the welfare budget are caused by lack of housing especially in areas where there are a lot of jobs e.g. London, South East and too many pensioners not supported by enough workers.

[minestrone]

You know.. this whole... "try living off this money and see what it is like" mantra.

I could quite easily live with benefit sized income.

[minestrone]

I do feel sorry for the neoconservative right. The results of their 30 year economic global experiment are in and it has been an unadulterated disaster for all but a tiny minority. OECD countries have introduced more regressive taxes, taxing the rich less and the poor more, with the promise that economic efficiency and investment would follow, enriching us all. But no, as state incomes and the spending power of the poor contracted, so did demand, and investment rates. We were also promised that removing labour constraints and a 'flexible' workforce would reduce unemployment. The opposite has occurred - income inequality and unemployment have soared. The wage stagnation forced people to supplement their income with debt, fed by the deregulated banks, with consequences we are now all paying for.



UN CONFERENCE ON TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT



Blinkered by an elevation of profit above all other values and an unreasoning idealogical hatred of anything that looks like common provision or restraints on private companies' ability to maximise profits, the Right has had to blindfold itself and deny the overwhelming scientific concensus on climate change, a truly despicable policy revealed by Republican activist Frank Luntz in a 2002 memo to George Bush.



So, lie to the electorate, and the planet can go to hell in a handcart, just so long as our Oily friends keep the billions rolling in. Yep, that's the Right for you.

The dramatic decline in preventable child deaths over the past quarter of a century is one of the most significant achievements in human history - See more at: UNICEF STATISTICS

I hope you will be the first to get the coins out next time I am in doing a walk for UNICEF pj.

[darmstadt]

Memory can play tricks. Example?

Possibly not in the UK, but definitely here in Germany although interestingly enought they still back it, it seems to be a case of NIMBY for some:

Niederaulas Grüne gegen Windkraft | Breitenbach, Kirchheim, Niederaula & Oberaula

SPD, FREIE WÄHLER und GRÜNE klagen gemeinsam gegen Windkraft-Blockade-Gesetz - www.umwelt-kompass.com

[Zero Liability]

Socialist countries may not borrow?

I don't know if you're playing dumb, but China is not socialist in anything but its ruling party's name - well, "communist". It is a tightly managed economy but I wouldn't say a well managed one. Although that may be changing. My point is that its growth figures, whilst impressive, are part illusion. They still haven't got over the old habit of managing by the numbers (by which I mean fabricating these where required), and they've also picked up the habit of financing bubbles in markets like property, which is a massive bubble in China at the moment, and one which is unravelling.

I think if you had said an "interventionist" economy, I'd agree more, as their government certainly does do that a lot, for the purpose of boosting GDP figures, but this is not unlike many OECD countries. It's not a particularly helpful example.

There you have it, on the left, to be sure, but none of these nations would self-describe as socialist. Indeed,I am pretty sure that the socialist states as described by Dodgy exist only in his fevered imagination.

If you compare NZ to the UK, guess which one will come out as looking more "socialist". It is definitely a bit daft to call these countries "socialist", as in some respects countries like Sweden are quite friendly to entrepreneurship and capital ownership; more so than the UK.