I would rather protect my view than reduce carbon emissions
Jonathan Meades on the the English landscape:
The idyll has moved from aspiration to actuality. When villages were inhabited by the sons and daughters of the soil the land was a factory without a roof. Now that they are commuters’ dormitories the land is an amenity whose looks are everything. England’s countryside is today more literally picturesque than it ever was, more conventionally picturesque, more institutionally picturesque.
The National Trust and English Heritage are merely the most prominent agencies involved in turning back the clock to an age which only ever really existed in the brain of Constable and Cotman, Gainsborough and Girtin. The kneejerk antipathy to wind farms, cooling towers, transmitter masts, pylons and so on is bien pensant conventional rural wisdom just as an antipathy to brutalism is conventional urban wisdom. These agencies are instruments of antiquarian prejudice and lobbyists for policies founded on collective nimbyism.
Collective nimbyism was on full display today as the Tory Party followed through on its pledge to stop subsidising onshore wind farms.
Who wants to let wind farms ruin views? The countryside after all is as it always was, and must not be altered by humans.
Skyscraper sized masses of steel, concrete and fiberglass do not sit well in a country that wants to turn back the clock and have everyone living in houses that might as well have been built in Georgian times.
Visual reminders that we live in the world of Edison simply will not do; stuff gets made, but we must not see how.
And here, again, is Meades on how wind farms do not suit the aesthetic tastes of the British:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CWg8oR7TF6w#t=128
Carbon Counter