Re: Clyde Wind Farm ... metastasising !
It is sad how politicised energy policy has become and funny how the little people accept being told to reduce their own energy consumption, and get taxed on what they use, while the policy makers are comfortable being chauffeured or jetted about their daily lives.
So while it's obviously the right thing to keep the seas, lochs and air free of pollution, to recycle materials, reduce fossil fuel burning and find new and innovative ways to generate fuel and power without pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and raising the snowline in the process, we shouldn't feel guilty about energy consumption at all. The Universe is made of energy and as a species we are smart enough to find ways of tapping into as much of it as we need to, to keep warm, get about, make stuff and grow food without screwing everything else up in the process.
Wind farms should be part of a mixed energy policy although it seems government has no 'Plan B' and just wants to approve as many applications as it can get away with (as long as they can't be seen in Edinburgh or in Cameron McNeish's back yard) but in my part of Scotland at least, the industrialisation of the hills is already becoming too obvious.
The irony that almost all of the turbines that have been erected so far in Scotland have been manufactured anywhere and everywhere but and by foreign companies, also seems to have been lost on Government ...
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en.wikipedia.org]
... and despite all their rhetoric, it seems such a missed opportunity that the politicians in Holyrood didn't have the vision or imagination to bring those manufacturing jobs to Glasgow.
Regards nuclear power, Fukushima has given it a worse rep than ever, and yes, our crap, inefficient, dirty and unreliable old reactors do need carefully decommissioning but they also need viably replacing. While the SNP continue to oppose nuclear power, and maybe win some votes by it, in the long run, Scotland will never really be an independent nation if it can't power itself when it runs out of oil. Whether tidal and pump storage will ever have the capacity and right economics is hard to know but clean, safe, fission reactors (that don't breed Plutonium and other weapon fissiles) are ready to develop now and Thorium (not Uranium) can provide the fuel (at least until fusion technologies comes along and we are all able to power our DeLoreans with potatoes). This organisation should be lobbying Holyrood ...
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www.the-weinberg-foundation.org]
Edited 4 times. Last edit at 10.44hrs Wed 3 Oct 12 by moffatross.