Under old planning rules, big projects took years to pass through public inquiries. Now schemes will be approved or rejected in weeks. Once the IPC has made its decision, ministers will not be able to reverse it - even the courts will struggle to be heard. This system defies modern political fashion: it is centralist and commanding. It is opposed by the Conservatives, whose formal position is to scrap the commission - although in private they want to keep it in disguise, as part of the Planning Inspectorate.

One of the UK's major wind power operators, EON UK, submitted evidence to a House of Lords select committee in 2008, pointing out that wind power needs backup from conventional fossil-fuelled power stations equal to about 90% of the wind installed capacity. In other words, once we have a lot of wind power, the paradox is that we have to build extra power stations to support it.

Rural rejecters of wind power aren't bumptious bumpkins, says Adrian Snook. We are asserting our rights as consumers and voters. ...Opinion polls consistently show strong public support for wind power in the UK with around 80% of people expressing support and only 10% opposed. Yet when this translates into local voter reaction to onshore wind development, particularly in England and Wales, support seems to evaporate. It is often replaced by deep anger and opposition. Why is this? I believe there are two reasons.

When industries look for government subsidies for money-losing propositions, a common business model these days, one of the most important strategic elements is to make sure you have a well-oiled public relations machine to keep the facts from getting in the way. Voters don't like to back money-losers, which means keeping them steadily misinformed or at least confused. Renewable energy industries - wind, solar, biomass, human treadmills - have a particularly tough job.

Bordering councils have seen our rural Fenland landscape destroyed and cluttered with this heavy and useless industry and politely declare 'no thanks'. This 'green window dressing' is causing extensive environmental damage to the British countryside and everything within it, very soon I will expose how our local wildlife environment has been abused and disrupted by those seeking the rewards of political and financial gratification.

Cash-strapped Britain is now facing a looming energy gap, priced yesterday by Ofgem at up to £200bn. This is the sum that may be required to build new energy infrastructure while meeting environmental targets. Who pays, you wonder. Well, you do, with the pain intensifying around 2015 when Britain shuts down its most polluting coal-fired power plants and our old nukes. Then, household bills could jump by 60pc - enough to make anyone's hair stand on end.

We can be fiercely protective of the green and pleasant land itself, or what remains of it. And it has never needed more protecting, because this autumn a new quango - created, symbolically, by the unelected Lord Mandelson - may usher in the biggest change to the landscape in our lifetime. ... Well, the Government wants to increase renewable energy production and is irritated that wind-farm developers are constantly being delayed, or even thwarted, by challenges from local objectors and conservation groups such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

Two Danish experts in the field of wind energy will be in Washington for the next three days to speak on the subject of wind generated electricity. One would expect they are here to brag on the fact that their country is a leader in the field and that they already satisfy, as President Obama puts it, "20 percent of the electricity through wind power." One would be wrong in such an expectation. They are here to warn us about the dangers of putting our electricity needs in the wind power basket.

This must be one of the first instances of a civilisation voluntarily and consciously going backwards. We might as well rely for our economic and industrial future on tens of millions of hamsters pattering frantically round treadmills. Hamsters only do this by night. Windmills only make electricity when it is windy. See the problem? For most of us, the truth has yet to sink in.

Despite its relatively small land mass, Scotland plays an important role in the UK in storing carbon on our land. We host 55 per cent of the UK's terrestrial carbon store. The richest stores are our peat lands, poorly-drained soils ...However, the landscapes that best accumulate carbon - our wild and windy moorlands - also offer the best sites for energy generation from wind power: Scotland has 25 per cent of Europe's wind energy source, according to the Scottish Government.

We measured industry noise at night under low and medium wind conditions. We found, in front of the boundary fence of an industrial plant we measured, a sound pressure level of 52 dBA. Then, 1500 m away, we measured the same noise at the same value (52 dBA), implying that the noise is hardly attenuated by distance. This is an extraordinary result and it took calculations for us to appreciate that the combination of a temperature inversion (where the ground is colder than the air) and the wind had caused the plant noise to travel significantly further than usual. We further discovered that our findings were actually quite well known - the phenomena is not new.

How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. ...The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby ...and campaign for thousands more.

We have to accept that the "real time" generation of electricity from a plethora of renewable energy is a seriously flawed strategy that will not get us closer to carbon-free generation any time soon, if ever. The "energy mix" is just a pretty lame excuse for the inadequacies of these puny wind and marine devices that litter our landscapes and seabed.

Miliband’s citing of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in support of his policy of subsidising the construction of many thousands of otherwise uneconomic wind turbines might appear grotesque, even comical; but not if you genuinely believe that Britain’s switching from coal to wind power for its electricity generation will save the lives of countless Africans. I have no idea whether Miliband truly believes that it will - but if he does, he is deluded.

To meet our peak demand of 56 gigawatts of electricity would require 112,000 turbines covering 11,000 square miles, or an eighth of Britain's entire land area, says Christopher Booker. ...Most alarming of all, however, in the desperation to reach EU "renewables" target, is the setting up of a new Infrastructure Planning Commission to force through thousands of these absurd objects over the wishes of local people and councils, who are now to be robbed of any right of appeal.

As if there are not enough already of these largely-ineffective and unsightly wind turbines in this region, the latest proposal is to build 20 to 30 more between Fountainhall and Oxton. The Borders is at risk of becoming the dumping ground for these monstrous eyesores and if people are concerned about preserving the natural beauty and landscape of the Borders, they have good cause to be worried by the threat of yet more turbines dominating the landscape.

"How the hell did we let that happen?" we often ask ourselves when we look at the brutalist monstrosity tower blocks which we allowed to blight our towns in the sixties. In a few decades' time we're going to be asking exactly the same question about the 300 foot wind turbines ruining what's left of Britain's wilderness. And a bit like the perpetrators of terrible sixties architecture now, no one's going to be able to come up with a satisfactory answer because, quite simply, there isn't one: wind turbines are a bad idea in almost every way imaginable.

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines.

The CBI today warns that giving too many incentives to wind risks deterring private investors from backing alternatives such as nuclear and clean coal, leaving the UK's energy mix dangerously skewed towards one source.

Europe is finally cottoning on to the costs of tackling climate change, says the WSJ edit page, as economic fears lead to backsliding on the environment: "In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive." So how to fight climate change?