STT’s Back

STT is back in the chair after barnstorming the Nation’s Capital.

In posts to come we’ll document the stories and efforts of the 400 or so that descended on Canberra – coming from Tolga in Far North Queensland, Coopers Gap in Southern QLD; from all over the Tablelands of NSW; a big contingent of Victorians and South Australians; and a contingent from the Golden West.

The AFP estimated a crowd of 700 – but a few sheep cockies – who know how to get the tally of a big mob right – put it at around the 400 mark.  And that count didn’t include a bunch of around 40 Victorians whose plane got diverted to Sydney due to the fog in Canberra and who arrived as the rally was winding up.

We’re told that a new outfit called “act-on-wank” (apparently on the Vestas’ payroll) were on hash or hash-tag or something with similar effect and tweeted a figure of 90 – and the media sucked it up like flies on sheep shit (journos – don’t believe everything on twitter – unless you’re prepared to eat your words later – you’ve been caught before).

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As we know numbers aren’t the greentard’s strongest point.  And after that little effort you wouldn’t trust them to sell a mob of your best young ewes or count what you shore for the day – unless of course you were prepared to give 80% of your mob or your tally away.

And the STT crowd weren’t just stepping out of the Climate Change Dept offices for their mung bean and tofu snack-sized-lunches – they burned some serious air-miles and road-miles to get there.  Hats off folks.

Our editing suite is knocking up the video as we speak and we’re putting a photographic record together too.

In the meantime here’s STT Champion, James Delingpole talking about the lead up to the Rally and telling it like it is – as always.

How Big Wind blows away its opponents
The Australian
James Delingpole
18 June 2013

SINCE 2007, household electricity prices in Australia have risen by more than 40 per cent and by next year are projected to rise by around about 30 per cent. If this bothers you then the place you should be today is Canberra, joining the people’s revolution against what Alby Schultz MP says is the “biggest government sponsored fraud in the history of our country”.

Schultz was speaking to parliament about Big Wind, an industry so rife with “intimidation, manipulation, lies and cover-up” he believes there’s enough evidence “to justify a royal commission”. So how come, you may be wondering, so many of us have been kept in the dark for so long?

The short answer seems to be that money buys both silence and public ignorance. For just one large-scale wind turbine, a developer can make nearly $500,000 in taxpayer subsidies called Renewable Energy Certificates. Under current government carbon emissions reduction plans, some $50 billion of these RECs are to be issued, every cent of them funnelled out of your pocket and into the (often offshore) bank account of your friendly neighbourhood Big Wind outfit. Meanwhile your energy bills (part of which, by government mandate, must come from “renewables”) skyrocket.

With all this free loot, Big Wind has more than enough money to hide its secrets. It does so in three main ways: first by hiring silver-tongued lobbyists; second with lavish propaganda campaigns ranging from brainwashing programs at schools to misleading claims on their websites about all the wonderful benefits wind farms supposedly bring; third by being able to afford the world’s most expensive lawyers.

I got a taste of what I saw as this legal bullying the last time I wrote about wind farms in The Australian. A stiff, threatening letter swiftly came winging its way from a high end Sydney law firm, followed by a complaint to the Press Council. This complaint was upheld, even though my facts were correct and the supposedly “offensive” phrase came not from me but from a sheep farmer understandably incensed that his little patch of NSW paradise was about to become a Golgotha of bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes.

But I got off quite lightly. Around the world, anyone who dares to take on Big Wind may endure a campaign of smears and character assassination. It’s bad enough in Australia – just ask Sarah Laurie – but even worse in Canada, where a young environmentalist called Esther Wrightman is being sued by a $32bn wind developer called Next Era energy. Why? For creating a website in which she protested against the ugly, noisy 120m-high turbines Next Era planned to erect in her part of Ontario.

At this point some of you may be thinking: “Oh come on. There’s got to be another side to this.” And I would concede that on the surface the case for wind looks quite compelling: it’s “free”; it’s carbon-neutral; it’s eco-friendly; it boosts the economy.

Except when you examine the details you realise that none of these claims stands up.

Being intermittent, unreliable, unpredictable and enormously expensive wind is a very poor substitute for the cheap fossil fuel in which Australia abounds. It doesn’t create real jobs just heavily subsidised Potemkin jobs. (In Britain every wind industry job costs the taxpayer pound stg. 100,000 a year in subsidies.) And that’s before you get on to the terrible health problems that can be caused by the low-frequency noise of those giant whupping blades; and the devastation they cause wildlife, especially bats and birds of prey. Tony Abbott’s business adviser Maurice Newman calls wind farms “an obscene wealth transfer from poor to rich” and a “crime against the people” and wants the renewables target scrapped. He’s dead right, but if anyone has the guts to do it they’re going to face a lot of entrenched resistance from the pollies and big business alike.

The ALP, as I’ve written here before, is heavily involved, not least because of the vast sums of industry super-fund money that have been pumped into it. And if you think Big Wind’s crony capitalists are going to give up without a fight, you clearly don’t know the kind of people you’ll be dealing with. God, I wish I could be there at the barricades with the protesters in Canberra today. If ever a cause was worth fighting for, this is the one.

James Delingpole is the author of Killing the Earth to Save It.
The Australian

Now we have to disagree with the heading of the article – which we assume was the work of a lowly sub-editor at The Australian.  The tense is wrong for a start – and the premise fails to convey the sense of the piece that follows.

Big Wind hasn’t “blown” away its opponents in Australia – and while its tactics are no doubt low down and dirty – they’re up against people like the group that gathered in Canberra – who represent the views of the people who have to pay soaring power bills out of their own pockets.  Unlike the Gen-Y’s from “act-on-wank” that still live with mummy and daddy and haven’t ever had the “pleasure” of carrying the can for the household power bill.