The Telegraph reports that British nobles, including Dukes and a cousin of the Queen are cashing in on tax and ratepayer subsidies to erect wind farms on their country estates.  Each turbine can net a noble £20,000 a year or more.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s father-in-law is a baronet who is pulling in “as much as £350,000 a year from eight turbines on his estate at Bagmoor in Lincolnshire.”  This may give Cameron’s un-torylike policy surrender to radical green interests some perspective.

For generations the UK could count on its aristocrats’ selfless noblesse oblige.  Country estates have traditionally been havens of bucolic green space and conservation.  Today’s gentle folk appear ready to abandon the needs of the land and bring industrial turbines to glen, wood, hillside and moor.  We’ve entered a brave new millennium of selfish noblesse spolio.

Sadly, many of these turbines end up situated in inland areas where there isn’t even much wind.  They generate not electricity, but subsidies.

The Telegraph quoted “Sir Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust but speaking in a personal capacity [who] said: “The level of subsidy available to landowners to put up these turbines is out of all proportion to the public benefit derived from them and the temptation to ruin what is usually outstanding landscapes is overwhelming. It is a crime against the landscape.”

This may well be the worst example of regressive redistribution of wealth in Britain since the Sheriff of Nottingham shook down the peasants for Prince John.

This Earth Day join us as we celebrate nature and renew our commitment to genuine conservation.  Individual freedom is the way to a cleaner, greener world.

A Wonderful World

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin’ hands, sayin’ “How do you do?”
They’re really saying “I love you”

I hear babies cryin’, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Oh yeah

For some carbon millionaires, lining their pockets legally through taxpayer subsidies and hand outs is not enough.  They choose to cheat even though they’re playing a game that’s already rigged.

The Financial Times reports that:

Oreste Vigorito, head of the IVPC energy company and president of Italy’s National Association of Wind Energy, was arrested on Tuesday in Naples. Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian business associate, was arrested in Alcamo, Sicily.

Two other men were arrested in Sicily and the Naples area, while 11 others were charged but not arrested.

Oreste Vigorito: Arrested Nov. 11

FT reports that these saviors of our planet were building wind farms that were “built with public subsidies but had never functioned.”

Vigorito had ties to Brian Caffyn, founder of the controversial “Cape Wind” project planned for Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound, which has been criticized as a poor investment for taxpayers for the energy it will produce.  Vigorito was not an investor in Cape Wind.

According to the Boston Herald:

“What we found was quite remarkable,” David Tuerck, the institute’s executive director, said at the time. “Cape Wind stands to receive subsidies worth $731 million, or 77 percent of the cost of installing the project and 48 percent of the revenues it would generate. The policy question that this amount of subsidy raises is whether the project’s benefit is worth the huge public subsidies that the developer gets.”

The Herald reports that Mr. Caffyn’s 2007 divorce records reveal that “he amassed an $82 million fortune building wind farms around the world.”

Wind power remains an interesting and potentially useful technology.  However, if taxpayers are forced to pay for it they must receive a viable return on their investment.  Conservationists should not be forced to endure wind farms spoiling undeveloped places of natural beauty.  We should not allow wind farms to ruin the habitats of birds and other wildlife in ways we would never permit to established efficient methods of power generation.

It’s time politicians require the “green” business people who will reap fortunes from wind power to bear the financial costs and risks.   It’s time government zoning and environmental regulators ban wind turbines where they threaten wildlife and spoil human enjoyment of natural beauty.

Wind yes, but only when economically viable and only with respect for the quality of life both human and wild.

This article was amended slightly in response to a request from the Cape Wind Project.

The Golden Plover is one of the species the RSPB found was harmed by wind turbines.

The Daily Telegraph reports windfarms, “can reduce bird numbers by up to half” citing a study by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The idea of generating electricity from the wind always seems attractive at first glance.  However, wind continues to generate only one percent of world power.  Increasing that percentage requires adding thousands upon thousands of new turbines.  Many people, such as those who left in protest when the RSPB endorsed British turbine plans and organizations such as Wind Watch, question whether wind power can truly be considered friendly to the environment if it takes a major toll on wildlife.  They oppose planting industrial towers midst previously unspoiled coastal and rural vistas.

In the U.S., most would have expected the late Senator Ted Kennedy (a fixture of the American left) to back wind power, yet he fought fiercely against a proposal to place turbines in Nantucket Sound, spoiling the view of his boyhood sailing waters.

Can wind power become efficient enough to operate without subsidies?  Will it be required to live up to the same conservation standards followed by other energy producers?

Let’s hope we can find a place for wind power, but let’s remember the hen harriers, golden plovers, snipes, curlews, wheatears, meadow pipitbirds and even the buzzards and not allow these turbines to blight the very environments taxpayers have subsidized wind so generously to protect.