The disfiguration of the landscape by the sinister, silent wind turbines is undoubted. A vast army of the rotors will be needed to get anywhere near replacing the output of the nuclear plants, and the desire of environmentalists to replace nuclear and fossil fuel sources of energy with renewables increasingly looks like an impossible dream.

In reality, nobody has a fog what will happen. This is Virtualia, not the UK. During the last year, global warming has been predicted to lead to wetter winters, drier winters, another ice age, blazing-hot Mediterranean summers killing thousands, greater biodiversity and less biodiversity

Tony Blair has long been known to favour a resurgence of nuclear power, and no matter how the Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks tries to spin it, that is exactly what this review is all about. Greenpeace clearly recognises it, which is why it wasted no time in staging a high-profile protest. The wind industry appears to have recognised it too. For all its attempts to show a brave face yesterday and urge the review to focus on renewables, the jitters were not hard to detect.

A petition against the wind turbines, which was available to all who visited the exhibition, was signed by over 90 per cent of everyone who attended.

Yet the Government (UK) tilts, irrelevantly, at windmills. Why? Because the only way to combine efficient generation with lower CO² emissions involves nuclear power and no one wants to be the first to say so.

Their (Labour Party) renewable energy strategy begins and ends with onshore wind farms, despite the opposition from local communities.

The Government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is "worth sacrificing to save the planet" is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back.