Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape

Climate change is like defence during the cold war, wrapped in hysteria of envy, class, greed and commercial interest

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 July 2009 21.00 BST

The British government is to permit the desecration of upland and coastal Britain in the hope that this will shift the climatic balance of Planet Earth. All past plans and protections are being torn up. Markets are being distorted. Local democracy is to be abandoned. Extraordinary sums of money are given to private firms and individuals. The issue is not national security or prosperity but a hope somehow to prevent a long-term rise in the level of the sea.
Where huge sums of public money are at stake, reason is shoved aside and arguments degenerate into crude politics. Climate change is like defence during the cold war, enveloped in hysteria of fear, envy, class, greed, commercial interest and intellectual chicanery. As big anti-carbon replaces big carbon in the lobbying stakes, statistics become gibberish, millions become billions and megawatts become gigawatts submerged in tonnes of CO2.
Yesterday the government announced four so-called ecotowns, as if communities were created at the stroke a ministerial pen. New ecotown is close to a contradiction in terms. The emphasis is not on conservation but on anything involving ground-breaking, construction and fees. Like Yvette Cooper's urban Pathfinder clearances, ecotowns ignore the social dysfunctionality of new towns and are carbon extravagant, built from scratch with new infrastructure for car-dependent commuters.
These arguments are not about global warming but about politics. Demand the conservation of existing communities and landscape and you will be told that new settlements are "about consumer choice", as the Co-op, hopeful developer of a Leicestershire ecotown, said yesterday. Even some greens have disowned ecotowns as nothing but executive housing estates refashioned.
The wind debate is no less dominated by a mix of politics and commerce. Turbine parks require excavating carbon sinks, concreting them and making and installing turbines and pylons, usually to distribute small, even trivial, amounts of intermittent electricity. Yet the argument is now symbolic.
Sacrificing the Lake District, the Golden Valley, the Scottish islands, even the Wiltshire vales is like Aztecs killing virgins, evidence of the machismo of power in a godly cause. This is enhanced by a rerun of town/country antagonism, with metropolitan journalists shouting nimby at their country cousins (there being no danger of a power station on Hyde Park or Clapham Common).
Both left and right are now roaming the land looking for places to anchor their guns. On the left, wind, trains, ships and ecotowns are good while cars, planes, trucks and coal are bad. On the right the vote goes to nuclear, solar and conservation. Turbines are in one month and out the next, barrages out then in. If the word sustainable can be slapped before any noun, it is sanctified. An opponent is never wrong – since in this debate facts are garbage – but hypocritical or a nimby.
I know of no better symbol of this idiocy than the single giant turbine now towering over the Mendips. Its meagre output is not even worth a pylon, yet it is a totemic slap in the face of the landscape by a farmer in league with the exchequer. It would never be allowed in the Chilterns or Cotswolds – but this is about politics, not energy conservation.
Likewise the ban-the-bombers have found a new cause in opposing nuclear power. Some would do so even if it were blessed by the Archangel Gabriel or, as in this case, by the green guru, James Lovelock.
Meanwhile not a kilowatt is derived from the massive energy surging back and forth across estuarial Britain, because the start-up costs are high and there is no lobby for the rental subsidies that have made British onshore wind the most expensive energy source on earth. Water cascades unharnessed down mountains. Buildings leak energy. Vehicles sit burning fuel at badly phased traffic lights. Nobody cares because such energy conservation does not sit on an annual report like a photograph of a turbine.
Navigating a course through the climate change debate is near impossible because of this noise. Ministers rushed to wind because it offered a photogenic quick fix. Its exorbitant cost-per-unit could be partly disguised in energy bills and its opponents could be dismissed as rural hicks. At the same time, in 2004, Blair was deriding nuclear power stations to parliament by joking that if a questioner kept talking about nuclear he would "put a power station in your constituency".
My own belief is that the quest for reduced carbon emissions must lie in conserving every drop of energy on land – especially that "buried" in existing buildings and open space – and capturing every drop of energy in the sunny sky and surging sea. But there are no magic bullets. Some balance of cost and benefit must be assessed other than by those with a commercial or political interest.
To every climate change argument there is an answer. Despoiling the landscape may generate some fraction of what is claimed but people will burn more fuel travelling farther in search of wildness. New towns may be fuel efficient, but require increased car use. Turbines, barrages and nuclear stations have their part to play, but there is no point in denying they are visually intrusive. That is why they must be tested against the concept of outstanding natural beauty which the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, now decries.
The current anger at the march of turbines and pylons across the hills of Britain is not from nimbys. Government money has lubricated most backyard owners to support wind power. It comes from those who appreciate the beauty of the countryside and who question the industrial spoliation of miles of open landscape for a pitiful net gain to climate change. They are people who object to ministers lying about "20%" of Britain's energy ever coming from wind. Nuclear power stations, barrages and solar panels are at least less intrusive and more productive.
Such a balance goes by the board under an avalanche of subsidy. I am told of a recent meeting in Whitehall at which a junior minister and a minor civil servant were up against some two dozen people from the renewables lobby – mostly in energy and construction – all demanding public money and planning easements with varying degrees of political menace. It was no contest. Fifty years of democratic town and country planning were swept aside.
Lobbyists playing the global salvation card are like policemen playing national security as a way to dodge the democratic process. It is the default mode of modern politics and is brainless accountability. Miliband may not care for the British uplands – despite their being the largest carbon sink in the land – but I sense that most Britons do.
To secure a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain requires people to be persuaded, not just terrorised into submission. This applies to wind power as well as to nuclear, to planning as well as to conservation, to taxation as well as to subsidy. For the moment, amid the clamour and the greed, I hear no still small voice of reason.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk