The newly Mailised Telegraph is unwise to give so much rope to it’s enfant terrible

Delingpole….dressed for warmer climes?

 

In today’s reconstituted Daily Mail now rebra Daily Telegraph, Warmist Impaler General James Delingpole has once again produced a piece quite rightly condemning the use of wind power, but doing everything else really very wrongly indeed.

For a start, this must be – what? – his 200th article to date on wind farms. Only he knows why he persists in this obsession, because the evidence was there from Holland over five years ago that wind turbines are noisy, incredibly expensive to maintain, a blot on every landscape, of limited life capacity, and (versus roughly 14,000 other forms of renewable energy right down to fart-recycling) utterly useless as a genuine alternative form. We also, of course, have the hopeless Iberian experience of more recent vintage, showing what a poor payback and high running-cost these tall white elephants have.

And yes, I know that New Labour and their fellow-travelling fluffies can’t grasp this, but they never will, James: going after them now is about as interesting as deconstructing Newton’s Universe.

Chiefly however – see The Slog’s last assault on The Great One –  Delingpole is at times a tad desperate (and overly aggrandising) in his choice of data source:

‘The renewable energy industry is helping to destroy the UK economy and drive up unemployment….says the independent study by Verso Economics.’

Verso Economics…..who they?

The highly-regarded commercial online networking site Linkedin has a very short, very white-spacey entry for Verso. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the company (listed under 1-10 employees) had, um, just the one employee. But clearly, Verso doesn’t keep this online presence up to date, because its wind-farm report is described as being ‘co-authored’. So then, there must be two. Hold the front page:

‘Successful anti-wind consultancy doubles in size says campaigner Delingpole’.

The one employee was and is Richard Marsh, an economist specialising in project appraisal, evaluation and modelling. Not climate change or energy, then? No. And call me picky, but I thought JD’s greatest ire was reserved for modellers? I mean, it’s one of the many things upon which we agree.

Still, at the Verso two-colour-no-piccies website, it’s clear that Richard now has a team.

She’s called Ruth Brown, and she too is a researcher specialising in policy and programme feasibility, development and evaluation. She has over eight years experience of providing economic and social development advice to the private and public sector in the UK. Eight years, eh? We are not worthy.

Like the Team Captain, Ruth is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and is ‘working towards a Graduate Diploma in Statistics’. So, she’s a student then.

Verso Economics consists of these two people, and was founded two years ago. The anti-wind report (Not Worth the Candle – nice title) was prepared by Richard Marsh and Tom Myers. The latter is a freelance policy advisor, not a Verso employee. Publicity is being handled by a very nice chap called Stuart Crawford, a freelance political lobbyist of very long experience who was answering  the phone there this morning. Presumably the staff were out hacking down turbines off the coast of Scotland – and if they were, good for them.

Look, I’m not trying to be horrid at Verso’s expense: I’m sure Ruth and Richard are jolly worthy. I’m merely pointing out that all over the press landscape this morning, there have been Verso says this and Verso says that snippets suggesting that half the boffins in Scotland had prepared the report; but the reality is that Verso is a relatively new, tiny company operating from a house in Kirkcaldy, and nobody on board (from what I can see) has any experience in the energy sector.

One should expect better from an award-winning journalist and ecology opinion-leader but hey – standards are slipping…as James’s colleague at the Telegraph Simon Heffer never tires of telling his colleagues and readers.

Later on, Lucky Jim goes on to assert that ‘…Until really quite recently, it was only lonely voices like Christopher Booker’s which were prepared to speak out against the great Wind Farm scam’. Assuming you have an unaltered reality on the subject of recency and loneliness, this is utter bollocks.

Even I – with my tuppenny-ha-penny NBY site on Dreamweaver six years ago – was writing virulent criticisms of wind-turbines, based on having heard about their uselessness from my good friend, the respected Dutch journalist and film-maker Leo Jacobs – the man who originally pointed me at Amsterdam Council’s damning wind-power report after five years of trials.

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The problem with James Delingpole remains the same: when writing on this subject, it’s a case for him – and all his  fanatical devotees – of any port in a wind-storm.  But it’s usually, upon examination – as in this case – a bit of a storm in a teacup. The tragedy is, I agree with a lot of what the eological doubters think – but I abhor the manipulative, arrogant way they go about taking every last tedious bit of data and blowing it out of all proportion….in exactly the same way as the Warmist fanatics do on the other side.

Not only is this irresponsible in the extreme (what if you’re wrong, Jimbo?) it continues to ignore the biggest elephant in the smallest room on the planet: the lack of fresh water to hydrate a still-growing global population. If the Earth heats up, people will migrate, and people will die. If the sea-level rises, people will migrate, and people will drown. But even if neither of these things happen and population growth is not curtailed massively, the water shortage will kill everyone.

Once again, I ask the Delingpolars to give it a rest on Warmism, and tell my why the water thesis is flawed. If nothing else, it might help them grow into long trousers. And check the credibility of their sources with rather more care.