Consultant Dan
15 June 2011
Global Wind Day: good news and bad news on climate change
Today is Global Wind Day. That is the perfect time to update my blog with the great news that Hepburn Wind won the Victorian Premier’s Sustainability Award last week.
Hepburn Wind won in the community category, for building Australia’s first community wind farm, near Daylesford, Victoria. I am a Director of Hepburn Wind.
If you listened to ABC radio this morning, you will have heard that that Australians love renewable energy. 91% of more than 14,000 people who were engaged in a conversation about renewable energy want it to get more support from the government.
The 14,000 Conversations project is the biggest grassroots climate effort in Australia. It was created by 100% Renewable Energy, to push the Multi Party Climate Change Committee (MPCCC) to support renewable energy in the carbon price package.
14,000 Conversations will be presented to the Climate Committee today in Canberra.
Meanwhile, the bad news is that the Australian is using Global Wind Day to escalate its anti-environmental campaigning. This entails shifting its anti-science activism from climate science to renewable energy.
The purpose is to make it seem that the ‘jury is out’ and ‘science is divided’ about wind and solar power. The Tea Party, for its part, is attacking Federal funding for renewable energy science in the USA.
Today’s front page of the Australian creates the narrative that science is split down the middle between evidence that wind turbines are safe and evidence that turbines create inaudible (infra-) sound, which is destroying the health of people and animals.
I was invited to attend the scientific forum referred to by the article, hosted by the National Health and Medical Research Council. It was in fact a political, not a scientific forum, constructed around the narrative of conflict.
There were 20 community, industry and NGO representatives invited to attend: 50% pro and 50% anti-wind. All the community representatives were anti-wind. Nobody from the community who supports wind, nor anyone from the wind industry spoke. Imagine an inquiry into the nuclear industry where the nuclear industry was not allowed to make a presentation!
My prediction is that the Australian and its political wing – Tony Abbott – will escalate ‘renewables skepticism’ over the coming months. Expect to see beat ups about solar panel standards, wind turbine sickness, inverter power losses and various conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet.
The real problems will come when the ABC and Fairfax journalists feel bullied into reporting the narrative, in pursuit of a false sense of ‘balance’ in journalism. That will hold Australia back, while the rest of the world embraces renewable energy and all the benefits that brings.
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