Godfrey Bloom

As I and my colleagues in UKIP have to remind people, the wind doesn’t always blow. Today is a beautiful early spring day in Yorkshire. It’s crisp, fresh, and clear, with a few clouds, but big blue skies. And very little wind.

It shouldn’t need pointing out. But it does. Again, and again, and again. When the wind doesn’t blow, wind farms do not produce any electricity.

So even if we built a million wind farms, when there is no wind, there will be no electricity. A million times nothing is nothing.

When the wind doesn’t blow... When there is no electricity... down will come baby, cradle and all. Electricity is the blood of today’s world. It does the work of many million men, it cares for the infirm, it seals us from the elements, and it moves the immobile.

Of course, not even the wind-bags are quite so stupid as to have forgotten this completely. They know that for every wind farm that has been built, we still need conventional generating capacity. But this is expensive.

Look at it this way. You have to pay for the wind farm to be built, once. And you have to pay for its backup system to be built so that you don’t have a power shortage when there’s no wind, once.

But we pay more than twice. It costs more to produce electricity from wind power than to produce it using conventional methods, coal, oil, gas, nuclear. So in order to make wind power a viable commercial enterprise, the government requires that energy suppliers (the people you pay your bill to) buy a proportion of the energy they supply to you from “rewable” suppliers (the people who actually generate the electricity). This legislation is called the “renewables obligation”. Generous subsidies are also available to wind farm operators. Plus, we still have to pay for the maintenance of the backup system too, even though it is not doing anything, when the wind is blowing. We pay for all of this through taxes and higher, and higher and higher and rising bills.

If you have just started a family, do not expect your bills to stop rising before your children have left home, finished university and got jobs... If there any jobs available, of course. That is the reality of the absurd policies that the government have committed us to.

Back to wind farms.

Each turbine in a wind farm is only capable of producing so much electricity. This is known as its “installed capacity”, and it is measured in watts. The bigger the turbine, generally, the more electricity – watts – it is capable of producing.

There is also an optimum wind speed for any turbine. This is the speed that the wind needs to be moving at, in order to produce the maximum output. For example, imagine a light bulb attached to a treadmill. If you don’t run, the light won’t shine. The faster you run, the brighter the bulb will burn. If you run too fast, you may blow the bulb. You have to run at the right speed. So it is with a wind turbine.

My colleagues and I have argued it like this, “wind farms are only productive around 30 per cent of the time”.

The British Wind Energy Association – big fans of windpower, as you might imagine – have taken issue with this. They say that it is a myth.

Myth: Wind farms are inefficient and only work 30% of the time Fact: A modern wind turbine produces electricity 70-85% of the time, but it generates different outputs depending on the wind speed. Over the course of a year, it will typically generate about 30% of the theoretical maximum output. This is known as its load factor. The load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50%. A modern wind turbine will generate enough to meet the electricity demands of more than a thousand homes over the course of a year. http://www.bwea.com/energy/myths.html

There is no “myth” about the 30% figure. What they’re trying to say is that the wind blows more than 30% of the time. This is splitting hairs.

It’s the difference between walking at a normal speed to get to a place and running twice as fast to the same place in half as much time. You cover the same ground, no matter how fast you move.

So we could have said “the wind only blows 60 percent of the time and only half as fast as we need it to”. It would have meant the same thing.

In fact, the way we’ve said it is the most general possible way of explaining how useful wind farms are. If we thought wind farms only worked 30% of the time, we’d know that we only have to make up the 70% some other way. It would be that simple.

But if there is no wind – as happens from time to time – 100% of their installed capacity must be generated in a normal way. For every wind farm that you build, you need to build an equivalently-powered power station.

So it makes no difference whatsoever what the load factor of wind farms is – 30, 40, 50, 60 percent – you still need to match conventional for wind.

The BWEA have tried to make it look like wind farms are only a little less productive than conventional power stations by saying “The load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50%.” This may be true, but it’s true for a very different reason. Wind farms only produce electricity when the wind blows. Power stations produce energy when there’s demand for it. The demand increases and decreases throughout the day. So power stations, on average, only operate at 50% of their possible output, only because we don’t need them to operate at full power.

It seems that people are more upset with the style of my criticism of Greenpeace than with its substance. In their silly complaints about me ‘supporting terrorism’ or ‘advocating murder’ – neither of which I have done – they only raise the profile of the criticism I have made of their behaviour. They make it all the more obvious that it is a criticism which they simply cannot answer. They are attacking the man, not the message.

Let me be clear. I have not ever supported or advocated terrorism or murder. It is only fantasy that allows Greenpeace to turn criticism of them into a celebration of a death.

Greenpeace like to play the victim. They like to be the poor, put-upon David, to the Goliath: the government, corporations, or whoever. But the truth is that Greenpeace is a very powerful organisation, with a great deal of influence, for which it is almost completely unaccountable.

I don’t believe that the influence Greenpeace has is legitimate. I don’t think that what it has done with its influence is right. I think that it has caused a great deal of harm, for which they should be held accountable. I think it is time that somebody stood up to these people.

Let’s start with the facts. In 2007, Greenpeace’s income was over 200million Euros. That’s a billion Euros every five years. That amount of money buys you a lot of influence and a lot of propaganda. Some of them might look like unwashed hippies, but the volumes of cash they have at their disposal has brought them closer to the political establishment than you might think. See for yourself...

You have just seen the man mostly likely to be the UK’s next Prime Minister prancing around on the roof of Greenpeace’s headquarters, taking advice from them on the energy policies he has drawn up with their approval. Did you ever wonder why the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties suddenly became committed environmentalists? Did you ever notice that you’ve not once been given the chance to choose between parties that take -different stands on the climate issue? Well, now you know why. Powerful and well-funded groups like Greenpeace have called the shots, and squeezed democracy out of politics. The result is the bizarre image of David Cameron holding a press conference in front of one of the boats that has been used to commit acts of sabotage and the obstruction of lawful activity.

Of course, Greenpeace can only get their way so often. And the environmentalists that now populate the top tiers of the political establishment can only give them what they want so often. When they don’t get their own way, Greenpeace appear to clash with their Westminster chums.

I have an interest in military history. I know what it means when a seat of power is occupied and an aggressor’s flag is raised. This symbolic act says that Parliament is no longer sovereign. Their flags demand that we “change the politics...” But it was already changed. It changed the moment Cameron surrendered to them on their own roof, two years previously. Cameron, like many politicians, seems to be less concerned with what you or I think – after all, we have no choice in the matter – and far more concerned with what Greenpeace think. Greenpeace want to change the way politics is done, but they don’t want to do it through the ballot-box, and through winning us over in democratic debate. They don’t think they need to persuade you of their argument. Greenpeace do not believe in democracy.

Greenpeace have been able to use their financial muscle to delay and obstruct. Any new power station, airport expansion, road building, factory or other civil infrastructure must meet Greenpeace’s approval. If it doesn’t, Greenpeace will send in the protestors and the lawyers.

Protestors are effectively teams of unpaid workers. They stage high profile stunts such as the rooftop occupation of Parliament. They terrify local residents into believing that they are being exposed to harm.

This is intended to whip up local support, and to attract attention to themselves and to make their campaign appear to be a spontaneous and popular protest, not one organised and directed by a £multi-million international organisation.

There are often legitimate objections to developments of all kinds. I am involved with campaigning against the many hundreds of windfarms that have been put up, against the wishes of people living near them. But Greenpeace aren’t interested in protecting the rights of people living near planned developments. They are only interested in using such people for their own ends. Once they have established protests under their own control, they move against the very things we all rely on for our day-to-day lives: power stations, businesses, and transport. These things are bad for the climate, they say – the issue is not the lives of those affected, either by the construction, or those that need it to be built.

While the protestors make Greenpeace’s actions look like people power, their team of lawyers mount legal challenges against the plans of government or businesses wishing to build.

Greenpeace’s actions have threatened energy production in the UK. They have mounted challenges to every attempt at fuel exploration and production, or the construction of conventional power generation plants, and to nuclear processing and power generation. Through decades of lobbying, protest, scare-mongering, direct action and legal challenges, Greenpeace have contributed to the UK’s failure to maintain its energy infrastructure. The result is that what we have left is in imminent danger of collapse, and energy experts warn that we face imminent shortages. Increasingly weak governments have given in to the pressure from these bandits. And as we can see with Cameron, he’s given in to them before he’s even taken office. Expect things to get worse.

When we are finally faced with the reality of Greenpeace’s influence, energy costs will have soared. We will be left with a dilapidated electricity supply, and a hugely expensive, poorly integrated and heavily subsidised network of ‘renewable’ electricity producers, that only actually produce energy when – i.e. if – the wind blows. Bills will rise. Costs will rise. Households and businesses will suffer.

This is already showing signs of happening. Thanks to recent government’s inability to stand up to Greenpeace and their kind, our bills have already risen sharply to subsidise the green energy sector. And this is already having a dramatic human effect. During the winter of 2008/9, there were 37 thousand more deaths than there were compared to the non-winter period, and 12 thousand more than the average winter. By a wide margin, the cold has affected the elderly more than any other part of the country. The people who deserve the most respect and help are vulnerable to colds and flu, cannot negotiate icy streets, and are left to freeze in their homes. Meanwhile, Greenpeace tell us that “climate change” is “the biggest issue facing mankind”. I beg to differ.

It’s not just on these shores that Greenpeace uses its muscle to get what it wants. Greenpeace is a global organisation, and just as with old people in the UK, the effects of Greenpeace’s toxic influence are most obvious where people are the poorest.

In 2002, many parts of Africa experienced a terrible famine. Across Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mauritania, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabe, Mozambique, Malawi, and Lesotho, more than 13 million people faced starvation. That summer, it was revealed that a shipment of 17,000 tonnes of food aid from the USA was sitting in storage in Zambia while millions went without food. Greenpeace had lobbied the governments of many of the countries affected by the famine to not allow the food aid into the country. Some of the shipment was genetically modified (GM) crop, they told the African leaders, and it would poison people and the land. Just as they have here in the UK, Greenpeace had terrified people and governments into doing as they were told.

The other African countries affected by the famine soon dropped their ban on GM, allowing the US food aid to be milled before being distributed. But it took Zambia until December before it allowed 60,000 tonnes of food aid to reach starving people. By this time, the famine had gripped even more of the continent. Now nearly 40 million people faced starvation. It was during this time that Greenpeace told the Zambian government that if it allowed GM crops into the country, it would be denied access to the UK’s organic food market – a market that Greenpeace, through its campaigns of spreading fear and terror, had created.

It would be impossible to calculate how many people have been killed as a consequence of Greenpeace’s actions. They have used their cash to impose their environmental ideology with a callous disregard for some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Greenpeace might answer that the cash that allows them to act in this way proves that the public are behind them, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Of the 6.7 billion people on the planet, just 2.8 million people worldwide donate to Greenpeace last year. That’s little more than a twentieth the number of people who faced starvation in the 2002 Famine. That’s less than the number of elderly people there are here in the UK. But which cause sets the political agenda?

Greenpeace supporters might try and argue that they are protecting the world’s resources, and saving endangered species. At first, this seems like an unquestionable and worthwhile aim. And this is how Greenpeace make their money. They tell people that they are ‘saving the whales’. What they don’t tell people is that they commit illegal acts of sabotage and acts of near piracy in order to achieve their aims. They don’t tell their donors that their mission to save the whales endangers human lives. They don’t tell their donors of the way they use their funds to pay for expensive and high profile PR campaigns against their targets to win a political and ideological battle. They don’t say they will use their funds to subvert democracy. They don’t tell their donors that their money will be used to deny starving children of food aid. They don’t tell people that the consequences of their actions will be to turn Britain back to the dark ages. They don't tell people that this is their intention.

The last line of defence for Greenpeace is that they have “Science” on their side. But they don’t. Time and time again, Greenpeace abuse science in order to raise the profile of their campaign. They terrify people with stories about cancer, environmental Armageddon, and exaggerated climate change ‘facts’. These lies are used to help win public support.

One such case of Greenpeace mythmaking is that of Brent Spar. The installation had come to the end of its useful life. Shell planned to dispose of it by sinking it in deep waters, in the North Atlantic, a few hundred miles away from Scotland. This had the support of the UK government, and had been properly assessed as the safest and most human and environmentally-healthy option. In fact, sunken vessels such as this make excellent habitats for sea life. But Greenpeace launched a worldwide campaign to boycott Shell. They claimed that the Brent Spar still contained over a hundred times as much oil as Shell had said. They said this would have a devastating effect on the local environment. It was a lie. But Shell had been so damaged by Greenpeace’s stunt that they gave in to their demands, and the plans to dispose of the Brent Spar were abandoned.

In Zambia, on the rooftops of parliament, and on the seas, what Greenpeace claim are merely attempts to save the planet, are in fact battles to further its own interests and its own influence. Disobey Greenpeace, and the full force of their publicity machine, activist-terrorists, terrorised-protestors, and legal teams will descend upon you.

In this battle for power, Greenpeace are indifferent to the plight of the people their actions affect. The blind pursuit of their ideological objectives gives them a sense of ‘higher purpose’. Democracy and lost lives are merely ‘collateral damage’. And anyway, nobody is holding them to account.

In summary, Greenpeace...

• ... Threaten business, jobs, and the economy
• ... Use lies and bad science to terrify the public and to blackmail companies and governments
• ... Have been a significant cause of our energy infrastructure’s imminent collapse
• ... Hold an illegitimate influence over the democratic process
• ... Put lives at risk here and around the world
• ... Force governments to make policies which cause deaths
• ... use fear and terror to spread their propaganda and secure their ideological goals
• ... are almost completely unaccountable for their actions
• ... are completely undemocratic

A few people have got upset, because my words in my Copenhagen video have been twisted to make it look like I support terrorism and murder.

This is nonsense. I stand against it. That is why I made a stand against Greenpeace in Copenhagen.

Greenpeace are the ones with blood on their hands.

And look who it is supporting them. Look who bends to their demands. Look who makes public gestures to them. That’s right – your elected representatives.

Take a stand against Green violence. Stand against Greenpeace.

I have been asked why I believe that there has been no global warming for the last decade or so. It has also been suggested that we've made it all up at UKIP HQ.

There are four organisations which provide global temperature data. Graphs from the data follow, with links to the data, so that you can see for yourself.

First, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

GISS actually shows a slight increase over the period. But there may be good reasons for doubting it. If you follow Steve McIntyre's amazing blog, and his surfacestations.org project, you will have read about how this data may have been contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect, as well as a host of other problems with it. In any case, the other graphs simply don't agree with this one.

The Met Office now produce the UK's version of the data, which is also taken from ground-based weather station data.

As you can see, CRU shows exactly NO warming whatsoever over the era.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville produce data from satellites. This overcomes the problems of human error, and contamination from changes in the geography of a weather station site.

The UAH data shows a slight cooling.

Remote Sensing Systems also produce data from satellites.

This shows slightly more cooling.

I doubt that this will have any impact whatsoever on those who choose to believe the scare stories about polar bears melting, and demand that we should all eat lentils. I am getting less worried about such people, because, as the "Climategate" scandal goes on, and as more and more evidence that the IPCC does not live up to its reputation emerges, we don't need science to demonstrate that the whole thing is an extortionate scam.

It seems that some people are able to write, without ever having developed the ability to read or listen.

This is what I said:

"Well done the French, for sinking one of these things".

This is what I did not say:

“Well done, the French, for killing a man”.

It seems that some people are so desperate to get their climate alarmist nonsense to stand up, that they have to give it legs by making me out to be some kind of fan of murder.

They ought to pay closer attention to the things I actually say. But since they can't, they have to resort to lies.

A few blog posts ago, I made the point that what concerns us most is not climate at all, but weather. Weather is what we actually have to put up with. When we leave the house to go to work in the morning, it hits us in the face, stops the car working, and makes the road hell. On the other hand, occasionally – not often enough – it is pleasant. Climate, though, is something abstract. It apparently takes teams of scientists to tell you what the climate is, never mind what climate actually means. It is my view (and many others, of course) that this abstract concept has become highly politicised.

I have been even more persuaded of my position this week. I’ve been looking into wind farms yet again. Wind farm sceptics (they’re not all climate sceptics, by the way) are concerned that often the wind doesn’t blow. Electricity is hard to store as is wind. So you need to have the same generating capacity in conventional hardware as you have with wind. I.e. you still need to build just as many conventional power stations as you would if you decided not to build a single wind farm. These plants will remain redundant, yet will still have an operating cost. Worst still, in order for wind to be commercial viable, you have to subsidise windfarms a whopping 250% of the cost of the electricity (based on a 2MW turbine). The economic argument just doesn’t stack up to anyone with even half a brain. But on this occasion, I was more interested in what would happen to people if the turbines stopped, as often they do, when there is a cold snap. (Cold snaps are usually accompanied by high pressure, meaning no wind).

What I found was quite a shock. Forget what happens if the windfarms fail. Forget about windfarms altogether for the moment. Let’s just concentrate on what actually happens when it’s cold.

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS),

In the winter period of December to March 2008/09 there were an estimated 36,700 more deaths in England and Wales, compared with the average for the non-winter period... . This was an increase of 49 per cent compared with the number in the previous winter 2007/08. This is the highest number of excess winter deaths since the winter of 1999/2000, when excess winter mortality was nearly a third higher than in 2008/09.

Here is the graph they provide

According the United Nations, climate change allegedly kills 150,000 people a year. I find that figure hard to believe, because it turns out that people are being killed by things like malnutrition, which is blamed on climate change. But if we decide to accept it, for the sake of argument, these 150,000 deaths occur in a region much, much larger than the UK, and from a population much much larger than the UK’s. That figure is one that Greens like to bang on about. But look, every year in the UK, between 25 and 50 thousand people die prematurely, because of the cold. That’s between a sixth and a third of the global number of people allegedly being killed by climate change, yet the UK is just 1% of the world’s population.

I’m not going to use these deaths to make a cheap point about wind farms. The fact that we have our priorities terribly, terribly wrong speaks for itself. We fail the elderly population in this country, and our politicians are trying to get away with it by pretending to be ‘saving the planet’. There should not be a single death from cold in this country.