marklynas.orgMonbiot vs Bellamy - you decide 18 August 04
Guardian columnist (disclosure: and personal friend) George Monbiot recently penned an article accusing former environmentalist David Bellamy and others of being part of an “industry of denial” on climate change. This rather rattled old David, who fired off a quick response to the Guardian letters page defending his position. In return George, never one to give an inch in an argument, has written a much longer reply, published exclusively on this website. Who wins? You decide.
Comments
Peter Winters
August 20th, 2004 at 05:56 PM
Personally I am much closer to Monbiot’s position than Bellamy’s (and Monbiot is funnier!), but I certainly don’t think we should be building wind-farms willy-nilly. Apart from potentially causing a negative impact on some of our beautiful countryside, we will give renewables a bad press with a lot of people if we don’t take good care about where they should go and what they should look like. We need to build consensus that this new technology is a “good thing” – though not forgetting it is pretty damn important & urgent!
I think the CPRE’s position makes a lot of sense – take a look at their policy for onshore wind-farms (June 2004) -
http://www.cpre.org.uk/campaigns/energy-natural-resources/energy/what-is-the-solution.htm
Peter Winters
September 7th, 2004 at 01:17 PM
Since I made my last comment on “Monbiot vs Bellamy” I have done some further reading. I didn’t realise how much I didn’t know!! Bellamy really does look ill-informed about the value of wind energy to Britain in the immediate future.
To show how well developed are the technologies for renewable energy, I really recommend this recently released book:
Renewable Energy : Power for a Sustainable Future (2004) OUP, ed. Godfrey Boyle.
The DTI recognises the potential of offshore wind-power to provide 40/50% of our renewables target by 2010 – see this document…
http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/leg_and_reg/consents/future_offshore/FutureOffshore.pdf
My view is – let Britian become a leader in various forms of renewable energy and put some serious investment behind it. We don’t need to put that money into nuclear!