UK: Green v green

Environmentalists are used to fighting battles. But with environmentalism going mainstream – wind farms, biofuels and nuclear power stations, for example, are fast becoming some of the most controversial issues in British politics today – environmentalists increasingly find themselves skirmishing with one another as they see-saw between pragmatism and idealism.

The Lewis wind farm – rejected by the Scottish Executive earlier this week – is merely the latest example.
The Scotsman reported that “environmental agencies welcomed the news” of the massive wind power project’s demise, thanks to concerns about impacts on rare peat bog and birdlife habitat. Yet according to the developers Lewis Wind Power – a coalition of AMEC and British Energy – the wind farm would have made a substantial contribution to reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. With climate change at the top of the list of political priorities, most now agree that Britain desperately needs to expand its renewables sector. How this can be done without major negative impacts on wildlife and landscape remains one of today’s toughest challenges.

Wildlife groups such as the RSPB have a particularly difficult task in deciding where they stand. The Lewis wind farm’s impact on the landscape would have been substantial – with 181 turbines each standing 140 metres tall, erected on massive concrete bases drilled into the fragile peat surface and connected by dozens of miles of new stone roads, this was unavoidable. And while the developers insisted that strenuous efforts would be made to mitigate the effect on birds, including not putting turbines in areas important to rare species such as merlins and golden eagles, the RSPB objected strongly to the proposal.

Yet the real-world result of defeating the wind farm is that the electricity that would have been generated cleanly from the wind will now be generated using conventional means – a mixture of coal and gas. This in turn will worsen climate change, which will in the long run have a far more serious effect on fragile habitats such as Lewis’ peat moors than any number of wind turbines, as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Indeed, global warming is now thought by many biodiversity experts to be the greatest extinction threat facing the planet today. Up to a half of all species could be consigned to oblivion with just two or three degrees of further warming.

Guardian