What the Scarborough fiasco showed is the lie behind environmentalist and media claims that opinion polling shows the public virtually unanimous in support of "green" energy. ...And if environmentalists think they can win those battles simply by flooding the zone, as they did in Scarborough this week, rather than through reasoned debate, they're sadly mistaken.

If you live on or near North Cape Coastal Drive (Rte 14) or in Milo or Kildare or surrounding communities, there is a good chance you will fall victim to wind turbines and high voltage power lines hovering over your home. Keep in mind that under current regulations, a wind turbine can be placed as close as 1,200 ft. from your home.

These [wind] companies stand to make huge amounts of money from the "gold rush" of construction of wind turbines and a great deal of that money is coming from your pocket in the form of government subsidies. Whose interests are they looking out for? It sure isn't yours. ...If you live in rural Ontario you need to educate yourself and you need to do it quickly in order to keep your home and community as a safe place to live in.

In a recent interview with The Intelligencer, Finnegan said he has not taken a stance on the projects yet. "I'm not against wind energy," he said. "But I think it would need to be properly situated. I wouldn't want to see the countryside all covered in turbines. It's something that has to be thought out and regulated carefully." Others in the county have already made up their minds. A new group called the Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County (APPEC) has formed to oppose the proposed projects, saying construction of wind turbines on the south end of the county would violate legislation to protect migrating birds and species at risk.

"Not a single conventional power plant has been closed in the period that Danish wind farms have been developed," he says. "Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants have had to be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity and to provide backup." Mr. Lodge says it is not practical to turn coal-fired plants off and on as winds rise and fall - because ramping them up consumes more fuel (and emits more carbon dioxide) than running them at a constant rate. Thus Denmark relies almost exclusively on coal-fired plants for its own consumption and exports its wind power at whatever off-peak price it can get.

Creating electricity from wind that just happens to be blowing might seem like a cheap source of power, but it's not. As we've already seen in Denmark, its high cost requires taxpayer handouts to develop and survive. Subsidies in Denmark created a lot of wind power, but when the flow from the taxpayer subsidy tap ebbed, so did the industry. In B.C., wind power will also be subsidized. Creating a welfare-dependent industry in the province may benefit the backers of these projects, but the potential cost to taxpayers is huge and the outlook for an unsubsidized industry is grim.

It's unfortunate that it took a group of citizens to push Environment Minister John Gerretsen out of the approval process for a wind farm on Wolfe Island. He should have bowed out long before this week - a mere three days before he was to make a final ruling on the windmill mega-project proposed by Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. ...When business and community interests collide, as they do now on Wolfe Island, citizens should not feel that campaign contributions or corn roasts may be giving their opponents any kind of real or perceived advantage with their political representatives. Gerretsen should have dismissed himself from the process long before this. It's unfortunate his own constituents forced him to do so.

By allowing these wind factories to take over Essex County, they will damage and destroy the plants, animals and birds that rely on these already fragile wetlands for there existent. ...Despite what some people may think and feel, we live in a very special and beautiful place and it deserves to be protected. I challenge all who love Holiday Beach, Point Pelee, Jack Miner's, Hillman Marsh and so on, to let your voices be heard.

They seem to spring up from the green fields overnight, these turreted Cyclops, escaped from some alien war of the worlds, spinning their 30-metre-long blades into the wind. Such aerospace monoliths have no literal connections with the ancient hills and mountains of southwest Alberta; they are stranger than science fiction to pygmy horses and horsemen huddling below their wings. These are the outriders of a coming invasion. One day they may even straddle the mountaintops in our insatiable quest for more and more power from the wind. ... Perhaps those of us who think wind farms are ugly, who feel wind power is vandalizing the mountain scenery would come to see them as lofty, even noble additions to the landscape, translating the wind into light and music, if there were fewer of them, and if we knew they were truly necessary to light the homes and industries of our fellow citizens, citizens who had first done their best to treat this elegant form of power with the reverence and respect it deserves-by using it wisely.

One reason for continuing anxiety over the process is that the federal government has yet to say what role it will have in evaluating the project. The terms of reference say only that federal environmental requirements "are being determined." Rightly or wrongly, the public tends to find comfort with a federal presence in such reviews, the bigger the better. This is due partly to lingering suspicion that provincial environmental scrutiny isn't up to snuff, but it's also just the notion that the more expert eyeballs that are studying a project the better. As attractive as this project is conceptually, it must be shown convincingly that it can be done at an acceptable, which is to say minimal, ecological impact and risk.

Recently there has been a lot of he said/ she said concerning the wind energy and its attempted foothold in our community. But the most blatant report of ignorance came in the form of a story about council members visiting a working wind farm in Port Burwell. ...unlike the council members that decided to visit Port Burwell, we have made multiple trips there. The day the story was printed in the Chatham Daily News, Greg Foster and I had just returned from a visit to Goderich to talk to various farmers that are living through the hell that we are trying to avoid. We have spoken to them at great length on the phone as well.

Ask yourself if you would purchase a home surrounded by these industrial wind sites. I asked 100 people. Ninety-nine immediately answered no. The one who said yes, quickly changed his mind when I mentioned the high-power lines. Wake up, Harrow and Essex County. These huge giants are on the horizon. They will be in your backyard if you don't speak up now.

Nova Scotia has the potential to become a world leader in tidal power. But to be successful, we have to make sure we get it right economically, socially and environmentally. That's why it's disappointing and even a little alarming that Premier Rodney MacDonald's government rushed out an announcement last Tuesday on a multimillion-dollar test centre on the shores of the Minas Basin - four months before an extensive environmental report is due that is supposed to establish the ground rules for tidal development in the Bay of Fundy. ...In its haste to claim progress on green energy, the government failed to establish a regime of best practices [on siting wind farms]. No standards were put in place, for example, for minimum setbacks from residential properties, protecting sightlines, or trying to engage community ownership. This resulted in acrimony in many rural villages that suddenly found themselves hosting towering industrial turbines owned by people living far away. It wasn't until this past fall that MacDonald's government agreed to cost-share a $45,000 study with the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities on best practices for bylaws regulating wind turbine siting.

... before we rush off to embrace wind energy we must make darn sure it's not going to ruin people's lives. While it would be easy to study this to death, there has to be definitive answers to lingering questions and they must be settled before the first turbine is put in place next door to communities and homes. It's too late to try and answer questions after they're already erected. Let's get it right while we still have a chance with solid fact-based evidence so we're not looking back at what could have been done.

Wind power is not the answer to global warming. Do we have alternatives? We certainly do have alternatives to windmills but they would disrupt the lifestyle of electors and consumers. In Paris, an article in the September 2007 issue of the medical journal, The Lancet, shows with supporting calculations that it would be better to minimize human consumption of meat, for 80% of agriculturally produced methane comes from farm animals. Wind turbines won't even alter the greenhouse gas equation but by a mere .03%, as mentioned above. The way to reduce CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases is to use less energy. Governments must massively invest in energy conservation measures rather than in these wind machines. According to another research, if every English household switched for one single low energy light bulb, a fossil fuel-burning electrical plant could be shut down! Wind power would only be interesting if energy produced can be stored. It has been proposed to fill reservoirs of large hydroelectric dams, for example. An Australian method has just offered in September 2007 to store electricity in liquid accumulators. Quebec would thus be able to utilize wind energy because the major part of our electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, which is not the case for Ontario or New York where, as almost everywhere else in the world, wind power must be backed up by carbon-based generating stations.

Over the summer, the proposed introduction of what one opponent called "industrial scale wind plants" on nearby Wolfe and Amherst Islands divided these quiet, rural communities. Anti-wind-plant protest groups were formed. ...The issue is still festering on Amherst Island. These controversies illustrate that our society hasn't learned anything about how we have reached today's crisis, how running roughshod over lives and resources just doesn't work. The fact is that we can't simply create new sources of energy; we must create a new kind of society - by building and designing our new systems in humane, democratic ways with strict regulations and community input.

... in the rush to set up giant wind-powered turbines to fight global warming, we shouldn't discount growing evidence that they can significantly harm the health of their neighbours if built too close to homes. ...Environmentalists don't seem worried about wind-turbine syndrome, either. The need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions has created an atmosphere where it's tantamount to sacrilege to raise concerns about turbines. Complaints are dismissed as NIMBYism.

Some say opponents are uninformed, anti-green, against everything that is good for business, for people, for communities, for the country -- in fact, good for the planet. The industrial wind turbine has become a green icon. Saying you are "against wind" frequently leads to puzzled looks, disbelief or even anger.

Premier McGuinty no doubt has good political reasons to once again announce the retirement of Ontario's coal-fired power plants. Canadians may want the moral satisfaction of being able to say "Okay, so it's still warming, but at least, we're not contributing as much to the problem." But this moral satisfaction will come at a high price, as Ontarians see higher energy costs and reduced economic competitiveness, with no genuine compensating improvement in health or environmental quality.