Labour’s deals with private companies will ride roughshod over a wilderness so remote there are no people to defend it
Yes, the world is getting hotter, and yes, Britain should produce more renewable energy. But what should be the price of that principle?
The Cambrian mountains in mid-Wales are the national park that never was. In the 1950s, when the official designations were declared, Wales was awarded Eryri (Snowdonia), the Pembrokeshire coast and the Brecon Beacons. The Cambrians were larger and grander than the Beacons, but less accessible and therefore less important. Three parks were thought enough for Wales.
That omission is about to lead to disaster. The lifting of the ban on onshore wind turbines by the energy minister, Ed Miliband, has had a swift outcome. The Cambrians’ near-500 square miles of mountain and moorland are the wildest landscape in Britain, at least south of Scotland’s Highlands. For wildness, they dwarf Dartmoor or the Peak District. Virtually devoid of habitation or roads, they stretch from the heights of Plynlimon opposite Eryri to the Pembroke border in the south. The Cambrians are the most precious of Britain’s neglected wildernesses.
Via a complicit Welsh government, Miliband looks set to hand parts of this landscape to private companies for a series of wind turbine projects. The proposals add up to more than a hundred gigantic wind turbines across the landscape. Some of the proposed machines will rise 220 to 230 metres, 50% taller than any yet seen in England and Wales, and more than double the height of Big Ben. They are true monsters.
