By Jo Nova

Every day the Greens sound more like Skeptics

Finally, the wheel turns and the Greens start to realize their bedfellows might be the environmental wreckers and industrial profiteers that they thought they were working against. Finally there is a point where the price of “climate action” can be too damn high. And somehow, the ends does not always justify the means.

Make no mistake, Bob Brown was the face of the Greens in Australia for decades. He was in politics for 30 years, and Leader of the Australian Greens. He was Mr Green himself on the Australian scene.

Four years ago he surprised a few people when he spoke out against the idea of putting the largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere on remote Robbins Island off NorthWest Tasmania because it would spoil the view and kill birds — something climate skeptics have been saying for years and about nearly every industrial wind park.

Now he’s going further and saying the “free for all” with wind farms must stop. He’s even using the ugly term “profiteers” to describe the Tasmanian government setting up a 200% Renewable Energy Target to soak up carbon penance money out of the mainland. Of course, wind power is still essential (how could he say anything else?) but some of these wind farms — a small number — will do more damage to the environment than they will prevent. The wind farm developers are “not doing it in the service of the planet” you know.

This all very well, but ten years too late. When skeptics were predicting exactly this outcome — that Green policies would wreck the environment, where were the Greens? They weren’t saying “let’s listen to the climate deniers” — or climate deniers are people too you know. All their talk of  building communities was the Gucci fashion show of hipster vegans who would just as soon demonize half the population as have a coffee with them.

As usual, the Greens biggest failure — and they condemn birds and whales with it every day — is that they can not do maths. They want to micromanage a bit of a wind farm here and a bit there — without doing the sums. To meet their own “climate targets” Australia needs to install 40 wind turbines every month, and 22 thousand solar panels every day. Where will they go? Where exactly will those gigawatts fit among the gum trees, and the ten thousand kilometers of high voltage lines too?  That’s eighty million kilometers around the globe.

That Robbins Island mega windfarm — by the way — now has approval, but it has to turn off five months of the year, so it doesn’t hurt too many orange-bellied parrots.

Matthew Denholm, The Australian

He was concerned the Tasmanian government’s pursuit of a 200 per cent renewable energy target – to allow surplus power to be exported to the mainland – was driven by “profiteering” under the guise of climate action.

The Bob Brown Foundation continues to fight the 100-turbine wind farm proposed for Robbins Island by ACEN Australia.

“The real driving reason for that (200 per cent renewables target) is profiteering by people like ACEN, moving into a lucrative new market which is being forced by the exigencies of climate change,” Dr Brown said.

Bob Brown is also opposed to the windfarm being built to the west of Cairns in the Daintree National Park, a project he calls “appalling”.