Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
A year ago, climate sceptics seemed to be fighting a losing battle. Then along came Climategate. Then COP15 failed. Then Glaciergate. The scandals emerging from climate alarmist circles are now hard to keep up with. We’re all sceptics now. Except of course, for the new UK government, who seem committed to this stupid idea of putting up wind farms where they are not wanted.
Chris Huhne of the Liberal Democrats is the Con-Dem coalition’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and replaces Ed Miliband, who was also a fan of wind. Here is Huhne, banging on about how great wind is at an event in Leicester Square.
I’ll return to Huhne’s silly little speech in the next post. What interests me now is the circumstances of that piece to camera. The event Huhne is speaking at is part of “Wind Week”, organised by “Embrace My Planet”, whose website proclaims them to be the “campaign to support renewables”. It goes on,
Embrace my planet is a movement of ordinary people who are supporting renewable energy in the UK, enabling you to make your opinions known to politicians and the media.
Now, fair’s fair, we mustn’t grumble when people – ordinary people, remember – we disagree with organise themselves to campaign for whatever it is they would like to see more of. Healthy debate is one of the few remaining British institutions that is capable of providing some resistance to climate nonsense. For instance, I was pleased when recently, my colleague Lord Monckton and Lord Lawson together won the motion This house would put economic growth before combating climate change at the Oxford Union. However, can you imagine the debating chambers of Westminster pondering such a direct and well-formulated question? The UK and EU are already committed to putting climate change before all else, including democracy.
Anyway, it turns out this “movement of ordinary people” isn’t quite so ordinary after all. A deeper search of the website reveals that,
Embrace is an arms-length campaign of RenewableUK (formerly BWEA), the trade association for renewable energy suppliers in Britain. While it is sponsored by companies, the campaign itself is activist-led - Embrace provides the facilities for renewable energy supporters to campaign directly to their elected representatives, as well as organise campaigning events for themselves.
RenewableUK, formerly the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), seem to have been embarrassed about their association with wind, and changed it. ‘Wind’ has become such an embarrassment that now they use the much more benign-sounding ‘renewable’. But it’s still the BWEA, in fancy dress. This is a PR war.
And just as ‘renewables’ turned out to mean, in fact, ‘wind’, what was claimed as ‘a movement of ordinary people’ was in fact a lobbying organisation for wind farm companies. These companies who make fat profits from subsidies are pretending to be a grass-roots organisation. They pass themselves off as citizens to lobby for government action favourable to wind farm operators and installers. This enables them to continue to profit from subsidies. This is a scam. Of course it is.
Imagine a big oil company had set up a similar organisation. Imagine, for instance, BP were to set up some kind of organisation of ‘ordinary people’ to change the public’s perception of its image. Imagine – just for example – that It had been accused of despoiling the environment, and so in response, it set up and financed an organisation which it populated with ‘citizens’ and other ‘ordinary people’ to lobby on its behalf in the USA. There would be an outcry. The ‘activists’ that would work with this organisation would be accused of dishonesty. Nobody would take their claim to being ‘ordinary people’ seriously, and it would be all too obvious that what they were doing they were doing for extraordinary reasons.
So why is it so different when wind companies want to spoil the environment?
The winds of change have caught the pro-wind lobby grimacing. Stuck in an ugly contorted image of its own making, it realised it needed a facelift and split to become RenewablesUK and its pretend activist/PR wing, the Embrace campaign. But behind these facades is the same old monster: bloated by subsidies, yet hungry for more. More! MORE!
