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.

In the last several months my neighbours and I have directly spoken to many people whose lives have been affected by wind energy projects. It seems like there is not a project out there, large or small, that leaves a community unaffected. We have most recently heard from Pastor Mark Harris of Mars Hill, Maine. Pastor Harris was here at the Seventh Day Adventist camp on the Gulf Shore this week. This camp sees an average of 1000 people per week through the summer season. There is only one wind farm in Maine, and it is on Mars Hill. There are 20 families whose lives have been seriously and detrimentally affected by this project, built by UPC. Some turbines are extremely close to families. Complaints have been made from people living as far away as three miles.

Wind farm projects are growing like mushrooms after a rainy day, but the air is turbulent in the wind industry. Industrial wind farms are not as nice and green as promoters want us to believe. Like an opponent puts it : "There is more here than immediately meets the eye with industrial wind generators, and often the devil is in the details."

There is enough deuterium for millions of years of energy supply, and easily accessible lithium for several thousands of years. With essentially zero long-lived radioactive waste, zero greenhouse-gas emissions and none of the safety concerns associated with fission reactors, one can begin to see the attraction of fusion power. It is the green technology with the most potential to make a real difference to the climate-change debate.

Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York. Writing in Inderscience's International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology, Ausubel explains that building enough wind farms, damming enough rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will wreck the environment. Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. "Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

Wind turbine setback bylaws for Cumberland County are clearly inadequate for protection of the rights of residents who will be living adjacent to wind turbines. They desperately need to be re-examined and amended.

But these are early days. It is one thing for St. Leon to play pioneer, to embrace the opportunities that a wind farm presents; it is quite another to force, shame or cajole people to join the pioneers against their wishes, or to expect people who have chosen to behold an open range from their property to give up that view to help electrify the concrete jungle of urban energy users.