Forty-three owners with 72 tract of land have agreed to construct turbines. How can we allow so few to dictate to so many?

A large and quickly increasing number of residents in our county and township, as well as in neighbouring Wellington, are deeply concerned about the proposed Belwood Wind Energy Centre Project that Invenergy is seeking approval for. Seeing that there seems to be little awareness of how close to Orangeville this massive proposal will be, we would like to draw your attention why we, and many more residents in this area, do not deem the proposed site appropriate.

Now that most of twelve California wind turbines retrofitted for Minnesota winters are finally operational, several cities have acknowledged to the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota that the $5 million project may be more suited for generating PR-both good and bad-than producing significant quantities of power.

Identifying those of us in the audience who were not First Wind employees, attorneys, lobbyists, contractors or consultants, First Wind's attorney complained "these people" are running all around the state opposing wind projects.

The tone and substance of your 3/27 editorial ‘Wind must be part of energy mix’ suggests you, as is true of many Vermonters, have been simply co-opted by wind power advocates with little or no homework done on what impact industrial wind power would have on Vermont’s environment, economy and quality of life.

I firmly believe that when the history of our era is written, future generations will look back with puzzlement and wonder why we spent so much time and effort on global warming fears and pointless solutions like the Kyoto Protocol.
Editor's Note: The pdf version with charts is available via the link below.

Renewables may not help much with global warming, but the nation might still benefit from all the new jobs that would come from building and operating them. Recent work by professor Lloyd Dumas of the University of Texas at Dallas predicts that happy result. Dumas cites research showing that if 20 percent of future power plants are renewable, they will create two to three times more jobs than if they all burn fossil fuels. It's the same argument we hear from consultants hired by local governments to estimate the employment that a tax-financed subway or stadium would create. Both they and Dumas conveniently forget that the money to pay these newly employed workers is unavailable for spending by consumers or investment by businesses. Workers who used to produce those goods move to other jobs, possibly after a spell of unemployment.

Most shocking of all is new evidence that the need to switch on and off base load fossil fuel power plants, to provide back up for unreliable wind turbines, actually gives off more carbon emissions than keeping them running continuously, thus negating any carbon savings from wind. Alas, only when our governments have allowed thousands more turbines to disfigure Britain’s countryside, not least by their grotesque bending of the planning rules, will the futility of the ‘great Wind Scam’ finally be recognised.