An Bord Pleanala has backed Clare County Council's decision to refuse planning permission for a wind farm in West Clare. Good: but less good are the grounds for the decision - that it was based not on the inherent futility of wind-farming, but on the inadequacies of the proposed wind-farm in feeding the national grid.
Renewable energy is the great myth of our time. It ranks with those canals which promised investors they would flow up hills in the 18th century, the all-purpose arsenical cures for gout-and-syphilis in the 19th century, and the tiny pyramids which would improve anything within them in the 1970s.
Such cretinism could only exist if a common-sense amputation had occurred first. And since much of the ecological movement has had a complete lobotomy, it's not surprising that its most extravagant claims about what is environmentally possible make the anti-gravitational theories of 18th century canal-water seem as logical as the mechanics of the wheelbarrow.
Perhaps the most pitiful gesture towards the theory of renewable-energy is windpower. A few minutes' contemplation will assure you that it can't begin to meet the merest tithe of our vast energy requirements. It exists only because of tax-breaks made possible by fossil-fuels and Brussels europiety: meanwhile it causes vast visual and aural pollution, even as it devastates wild-life.
Wind is not cheap. Wind is not simple. Wind is not predictable. Wind is not safe - least of all for birds, as the experience of Spain has proven. Millions of bats and birds, including thousands of raptors, are killed by the threshing blades of Spanish windfarms every year. These massive bird-blenders thereby increase the life expectancy of the tens of billions of insects, uneaten because of this wind-churned avian massacre. This is a good thing only if you belong to the royal hispanic society for the protection of mosquitoes.
Windpower is the soft and morally lazy alternative to the real alternative to carbon-fuel, uranium, if we are to cut back on carbon-burning fuels - as many say we must; though I must say the evidence seems ephemeral. But accepting the theory of carbon-as-villain, if the world is not to slide into a vast recession caused by the absence of power in which millions die of hunger, we need another, non-carboniferous source of energy. And wind is not it.
Oh to be sure, wind makes us feel better, with Breughel paintings of Dutch women in white caps and clogs and children skating across the ice, while mill-wheels turn against a Flanders sky, its ozone layer still virginally intact above it. But what did people do with wind the moment they got the chance to find energy elsewhere? They abandoned it. Why? Because it doesn't produce enough reliable, predictable energy.
Wind is dangerous
What's more, wind is dangerous. What has done more damage to Ireland in the past 50 years - wind-power or nuclear-power? Stupid question. Nuclear-power has done us no damage: but windpower has killed scores of people, devastated crops, raised seas into homicidal rages, and turned blameless rooftiles into lethal projectiles.
In one of those idle moments of bog-standard witlessness that goes with his trade, a Government Minister - can't remember who - said recently of Sellafield that there was no evidence that nuclear power actually created energy. With all the vast battalions of its overpaid advisors, can a Government spokesman really not do better than that? Perhaps he knows he doesn't need to, because this country is so sunk in an intoxicated lethargy of moral superiority on such matters that the media can be relied on not to ask the necessary questions which would puncture such fatuity.
So such self-induced intellectual torpor will probably remain untroubled by the evidence from France, the least carboniferously-polluting country in Europe, which has invested hugely in nuclear and water-power. Ninety per cent of its energy is non-carbon based. And the country which historically has most to fear of divided atoms, Japan, produces some 50 per cent of its electricity through the tamed son of Hiroshima. Both have windy coasts: neither is deluded about the real usefulness of wind.
Wind doesn't work. Since electricity can't be stored, in even the windiest corner of the world, winds will subside, and there'll always be need of power-stations.
The huge Welsh wind factory proposed for Brecon will consist of 165 towers, each 150 yards high, spread over 50 square miles. It will be the vastest eyesore and earsore in the UK. And it will produce just 1 per cent of the power generated by the single nuclear power station at Wylfa Head in Anglesea.
Wind-power is simply a pious luxury which makes eco-goodies feel all the better, as the mills thresh birds from the sky and consume vast amounts of carbon-created energy through their capital-grants, their tax breaks, and the old-fuel technology which made them possible.
Not least of all, windpower is ugly: the windmills along the upper Shannon are sanctimonious vandalism. They've destroyed a wonderful skyline for little good, and they are the precursor of huge mountain-top magi-mixes which will produce bird-pulp on an industrial scale; but they will make little or no difference to our fundamental dependence on fossil fuels.
So contrary to whatever twaddle you might read from the Greens and their media eco-groupies, there's not the remotest possibility that by 2005 wind-power will enable us to meet our vapid undertakings at Kyoto. But of course, we never intended to meet them. In a world of vacuous greenery, we simply wish to be judged well by our own meaningless standards; which, rather mysteriously, we never actually then manage to meet.