The case for wind turbines

Anything other than a 100% renewably powered future is a mirage. Nothing else can happen because other sources of fuel will run out. And the sooner we get there the better. Because in the meantime:

“global CO2 emissions since 2000 are tracking the high end of projections used by the IPCC, which far exceed 2oC of warming by 2100”.

Those are the words of Professor Corrine Le Quere, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. In my words (with a little help from Hobbes), without radical change to our energy production system, life for our descendants is going to become nasty, brutish and short.

Climate change isn’t going to mean more balmy summer evenings on which to enjoy a G&T on the veranda. It’s going to mean hell on earth for billions of people. Desertification, drought, severe and prolonged flooding, several metres of sea level rise. Hundreds of millions of climate refugees will need somewhere to call home. The chances of all this having no effect on Wales? Nil.

Where next for Occupy? Reclaim the land!

The emergence of the Occupy movement in Swansea and Cardiff has brought Wales into the global Occupy movement and activists are to be commended for their actions of highlighting the deep social injustice in Wales.

However Occupy is an essentially urban movement and the next stage in Wales for this movement should be for it to link up with this years upcoming rural struggles.

Rural struggles should not be underestimated, Wales has a proud history of revolt in the countryside: most famously the Rebecca riots of the 19th century saw widespread violence and proerty damage against toll house, but there are many more. More recently, the first popular defeat of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government was inflicted by people of the nearby Forest of Dean who quickly mobilised against the planned privatisation of forestry, forcing a u-turn by Cameron and Clegg.

This June to coincide with the Royal Jubilee a new rural campaign will be launched across Wales. Exposing how corporations who run renewable energy companies are acting like robber barons, using Crown Land which does not require planning permission to impose wind farms on communities which do not want them.