CRED Granville

….by an overwhelming voice vote.
October 22, 2012

Sep 21, 2012

It’s only when you dig beneath the surface of the official lies and cover ups that you realise just how filthy and all-pervasive the wind farm scam is. Why are so few journalists investigating it? Why isn’t it on the front pages every day? Are we really so cynical and decadent that we no longer expect our trade bodies, our institutions, our government departments to behave with a shred of decency?
—James Delingpole

Editor’s note: We would like to dedicate the article, below, to Derek (“I tell the truth”) Maitland—an Australian journalist who seems impervious to evidence.

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—James Delingpole, The Telegraph (UK), 9/19/12

And there’s no direct evidence that they affect house prices, in fact the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says they don’t.”

This is a quote—a genuine quote: not one devised by his enemies to satirise the outrageous absurdity of the wind industry’s specious claims—from Maf Smith, Deputy Chief of the wind industry propaganda arm RenewableUK.
I suppose how far it qualifies as a lie depends on how you construe that weasel phrase “direct evidence.” Evidence of one kind or another there certainly is aplenty. Here, for example, is a sad letter I received from a gentleman in Northamptonshire. (I’ve redacted some details because he doesn’t want his case jeopardised.)

The Farmer that owns the land adjacent to my property decided about four years ago to host a wind-farm. Despite the support of the local planning officer, the District Council turned down the application unanimously, with one abstention. The Parish Council had also voted against it. Inevitably, the developer launched an Appeal, which was heard last October/November by The Planning Inspectorate. The Planning Inspector, of course, supported the developer and granted his consent to the application.
This is, as you will well know, the usual pattern. Around 85% of appeal hearings are granted consent by PINS. The turbines are very near (within 500 metres of) six dwellings, two of which are owned by the farmer and his son. My home is one of those within the 500 metre range.
Following the Inspector’s decision, I contacted a local firm of Estate Agents to obtain a valuation of my house before the development took place, plus a surveyor’s estimate of what the value would be once the wind-farm was built. The difference between the two estimates was £100,000 (about 25% of their estimated value of the property).
Armed with this information, I embarked on a correspondence with both The Planning Inspectorate (PINS) and The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The purpose of my correspondence was to enquire to whom I should apply for compensation for this loss in value to my home. This was a somewhat acrimonious correspondence, in the course of which DECC claimed that a report issued by the Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 2007 clearly stated that there was no evidence of any devaluation in the value of properties adjoining wind-farms.

There’s not an estate agent dealing with rural properties anywhere in the land that isn’t aware of the issue. “The majority of homebuyers don’t want to live anywhere near a wind farm—it’s as simple as that,” one tells me. And if they don’t broadcast the fact too loudly, he says, it’s for two reasons: first they want to get the highest possible price for their sellers; second because often these same rural agents represent landowners who are making money out of wind farms and they don’t want to upset their clients.
Then of course there was this recent report by the Valuation Office Agency:

The decisions by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to move certain houses close to wind farms into lower council tax bands are the first official recognition that the turbines can lower the value of nearby homes.

Although property experts have long acknowledged the harmful effect of wind farms on property prices, the association has until now been dismissed by the wind industry as conjecture.

In one recent case a couple saw the value of their home 650 yards from the Fullabrook wind farm near Braunton, Devon, fall from £400,000 to £300,000 according to a local agent’s estimate.

The couple, who were not attempting to sell their house, told the VOA that the persistent whooshing noise caused by the turbines and the visual intrusion—including a flickering shadow when the sun is directly behind the blades—made their property less valuable.

The VOA accepted their argument and agreed to move the property from council tax band F to band E, amounting to a saving of about £400 a year, the Sunday Times reported.

But this was hardly news to anyone in touch with reality. The blighting effect of wind farms on property prices has been known in Britain since at least 2008 thanks the well-publicised Jane Davis case.

In a landmark case, Jane Davis was told she will get a discount on her council tax because her £170,000 home had been rendered worthless by a turbine 1,000 yards away.
The ruling is effectively an official admission that wind farms, which are accused of spoiling countryside views and producing a deafening roar, have a negative effect on house prices.

In some countries—Denmark, for example—this blighting effect is officially acknowledged, with victims receiving compensation for loss of value caused to their properties by adjacent wind farms.
For copious further evidence that wind farms damage property values, look here.
You might have hoped that this glaringly obvious, frankly indisputable fact would have been acknowledged by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the body which represents and regulates British estate agents. Instead, in 2007, the RICS commissioned the report which has been cited by both RenewableUK and the Department of Energy and Climate Change as “evidence” that wind farms do not damage property prices.
In fact the report says no such thing. But then it probably wasn’t designed that way. What it is, in fact, is a cowardly and disingenuous exercise in fence-sitting. It was commissioned from two researchers at Oxford Brookes University (that’ll be Oxford Poly in old money), one of them an expert in “sustainable development.” About half the short study is mysteriously dedicated to explaining why wind energy is popular and necessary (“the activities of man are responsible for the changes in climate that we are seeing” runs one, pull-out quote). When finally it gets round to trying to answer the question it was set, the report is inconclusive. Yes, there is evidence that the “threat” of a wind farm may have a “significant” impact on property prices. But perhaps, it suggests—though without any evidence—the opposite may also sometimes be true “if the community are actively involved in the process and enjoy some of the benefits through lower, greener, fuel costs.”
However, buried in this slippery and evasive report—in my view a disgrace to the integrity of the RICS—was one killer detail which makes an absolute nonsense of RenewableUK’s claim at the beginning of this post.

Terraced houses sited within 1 mile of a wind farm were observed to be 54 per cent lower in value and semi detached houses within 1 mile of the nearest turbine were 35 per cent lower than similar houses at a distance of four miles.”

Does that sound to you like “no direct evidence” that wind farms “affect property prices”? Thought not.
When I rang the RICS to point out how Maf Smith was representing their 2007 report, a spokesman said: “Well he’s talking nonsense.” However, when I asked whether they were then going to complain about his mispresentation of their position, they said that this was an issue for RenewableUK not for the RICS.
Well can I understand why the RICS might be uncomfortable with this issue. Though not as culpable as RenewableUK on this score their official position on the effect of wind farms on property values is at best misleading, at worst outright dishonest. Wind farms DO deleteriously affect property prices. Full stop. It’s a grotesque cop-out to say, as they do on their website, that “There is no definitive answer to this question.” It’s a lawyerly evasion worth of “Slick Willy” Clinton—not a fair representation of the facts on the ground.
What’s even more despicable, though, is the way that RICS’s jelly-like non-position on this vital issue has been cynically and ruthlessly exploited by the wind lobby. We’ve seen above, how RenewableUK have twisted that cop-out RICS report. Here’s how it has been similarly exploited by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which claims on its website:

There can be concerns from homeowners that the value of their property might be affected by the presence of a wind farm. A report published in March 2007 by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and Oxford Brookes University found that house price fluctuations were more likely to be caused by factors other than wind farms despite initial evidence there was an effect. More information is available on a Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors: Frequently Asked Questions.

This the real scandal of the wind farm scam: the way apparently respectable, official bodies are effectively colluding to hide the true facts from a trusting public. In Britain, by tradition, we are used to taking the various branches of the Establishment at their word. If something called the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors tells us that wind farms do not necessarily affect property prices then we may well believe them; if a government department like DECC doctors this claim on its official website, then we’re probably mainly inclined to trust them too; if a trade body like RenewableUK twists that claim by a further degree well, God help us, we’re probably inclined to take them at their word too—because, hey, isn’t there some kind of law requiring these people to tell the truth?
It’s only when you dig beneath the surface of the official lies and cover ups that you realise just how filthy and all-pervasive the wind farm scam is. Why are so few journalists investigating it? Why isn’t it on the front pages every day? Are we really so cynical and decadent that we no longer expect our trade bodies, our institutions, our government departments to behave with a shred of decency?

Sep 19, 2012

Editor’s note: An organization of German physicians and scientists is currently being formed in Bad Orb, Germany, at the instigation of an oral surgeon named Dr. Eckhard Kuck. The group intends to increase public awareness of Wind Turbine Syndrome. Drs. Laurie (Australia), Watts (Australia), Johansson (Denmark), and Pierpont (USA) sent congratulatory letters to the newly formed group (see below).

Dr. Sarah Laurie (Australia)
Sept 11, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
I am delighted to learn that you and some of your colleagues are meeting together to discuss the serious health problems associated with exposure to operating wind turbines.
There are a growing number of independent, ethical and courageous health professionals and engineers who are investigating and then speaking out about what is going on around the world. In doing so, we are choosing to abide by our professional codes of ethics to “first do no harm” and to place the health and safety of the public paramount.
This is a global problem, and an entrenched and powerful global industry, which has every reason to oppose what we are doing. There are clear indications that the wind industry and some of their hired health and engineering professionals do indeed know exactly what is going on and why. Public health authorities universally are refusing to investigate further.
A global collaborative approach between such concerned ethical professionals is therefore urgently required. I look forward to working closely with you and your colleagues, to share information, progress the necessary research, and to support you in your efforts in whatever way I can.
With kindest regards and best wishes to you all,

Dr. Sarah Laurie, Chief Executive Officer
The Waubra Foundation
(Click here for a copy of the letter)
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Dr. Alan Watts (Australia)
Sept 11, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
I am aware that you have joined with a small group of Physicians in Germany who are courageously committed to our profession and your Patients. A group of Doctors prepared to stand up and say what is right, not what is just safe or popular. You do not stand alone. There are others who likewise refuse to allow wind industry greed or Government ignorance or indifference to damage our global citizenry.
The advent of massive industrial wind factories into rural Australia precipitates increasing national incivility. They pit neighbour against neighbour and rent the very fabric of our once strong rural families, thereby destroying our social harmony and well-being.
They plunder our environment while enriching foreigners all under the guise of some mythical societal benefit. They take our health, our land, our peace of mind and our taxes. We surrender our precious mountains to this most gross industry. And in return they give us social chaos, environmental destruction, lies, deceit, scorn, and ill-health.
What price we pay.
The intractable health problems that have developed with the proliferation of industrial wind turbines have become a worldwide problem. The wind energy companies that are profiting are often international companies or consortiums and it has therefore become apparent that the battle to stop the insidious march of the wind turbines across our treasured landscapes must also be of worldwide proportions.
You and your group have our unbounded support. It is obvious that more doctors must accept the responsibility of their profession and to listen, understand, study and ultimately to speak out with authority and conviction. To anyone who has researched this topic there is much evidence to support it. We in Australia are actively seeking additional research and we are very critical of the various Environmental Assessments that are accompanying any applications to build wind farms largely (but not exclusively) because there is a refusal to monitor infrasound and to accept there are health implications.
A major duty of government via its planning instrumentalities and ministerial control is to anticipate, eliminate or mitigate this kind of societal disruption.
Those who endorse or profit from placing such industrial complexes near the homes of others have no inclination to safeguard or foster a civil and healthy society.
There is immense contradiction in supporting the concept of minimizing the human footprint on the earth while endorsing the destructive intrusiveness of physically massive, feckless energy wind projects.
The wind industry is based on greed, ignorance, subsidy and institutional deceit. Its propaganda rewards the greedy, flatters the gullible, exploits the well-intentioned.
Industrial wind is a fraud of enormous consequence. And people who value intellectual honesty should not allow themselves to be cruelly deceived by such industrial treachery or even by their government’s callous indifference.
I commend you and your colleagues for your efforts and wish you God speed.
Yours sincerely,

Dr. Alan C. Watts OAM
(Click here for a copy of the letter)
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Mauri Johansson, MD, MHH (Denmark)
Sept 12, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
[We wish] our medical colleagues in the Hessen region the best wishes for the founding meeting September 12th 2012 of a regional medical group to strengthen the efforts to stop further erection of giant wind turbines close to human dwellings, to avoid further illness caused by these damaging interventions. We hope your new organization will soon cover all parts of Germany and then Europe and the whole world, in cooperation with all physicians of the same opinion.
In Denmark we are for the moment 6 physicians active in the necessary work to stop more onshore wind turbines, to prevent and avoid more annoyance and illness among the neighbors, and also initiate serious and independent research to define safe noise limits and distances, risk groups, a better understanding of the mechanisms of illness and much else that so far has been only in the hands of engineers and the turbine industry, working for profits but ignoring human health.
Perhaps you could ask the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW) to establish an information base for physicians on their home page for further contacts?
On behalf of my colleagues and myself: all our best wishes,

Mauri Johansson, MD, MHH
Specialist in Community and Occupational Medicine
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Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD (USA)
Sept 13, 2012
Dear Dr. Kuck,
Today you join a small band of physicians around the world who do what clinicians are supposed to do: they take their patients seriously. Today you have announced the creation of a group of German physicians who no longer will be silent about Wind Turbine Syndrome—a global industrial plague for which there is no end in sight.
I salute you and your colleagues for refusing to allow medicine to be subordinated to the will of industry and government, or to the frenzied multitude and media who make no effort to understand that Wind Turbine Syndrome is genuine and horrible.
Even more shocking are those who mock and dismiss victims of this industrial plague—and there are thousands of victims. I refer to scientists and clinicians who have never, ever, interviewed a single sufferer. I refer to government agencies and research institutes that write ponderous reports concluding there is no merit to this illness—declaring it is nothing more than hysteria. Where their conclusions are drawn from amateur or discredited principles of epidemiology, acoustics and neuro-physiology. Where conclusions are derived from turbine noise measurements that deliberately exclude infrasound—the rapidly pulsed infrasound with alarmingly high sound pressures which noise engineers with ultra-sophisticated equipment have been documenting for years.
These engineers, who risk their health and reputations, are heroes.
Infrasound is without doubt the chief cause of Wind Turbine Syndrome—yet every acoustician and physicist employed by the wind industry denies its presence and its insidiously modulated behavior. Or, if they grudgingly acknowledge it, they declare that infrasound has no impact on the auditory and vestibular organs of the inner ear—a subject about which these people know next to nothing.
On a larger front, wind energy has anointed itself the savior of the world against the Apocalypse of Global Warming. Emboldened by this sleight of hand, the wind industry has embraced the rhetoric and fervor of a messianic movement—one with a dangerously fascist mentality. Which explains why many of our colleagues are afraid to oppose dangerously sited wind turbines. Opposition can cost them their research grants, their reputations, their jobs—and, I fear, even their lives. (There have been death threats to some of us.)
I salute you this day for refusing to allow clinical medicine to be corrupted by this delusional, jack-booted, out-of-control industry. The risk you take is high—though not so high, of course, as the risk of losing your conscience and integrity by remaining silent.
Sincerely,

Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD

Sep 21, 2012
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Editor’s note: In a short list of environmental philosophers, Aldo Leopold’s name would rank near the top. I refer to true environmental philosophy, not the Green hysteria machine of corporate wind energy. It was Leopold who coined the phrase, “land ethic,” and Leopold who exhorted us to “think like a mountain!”
I see no evidence of either land ethic or thinking like a mountain when I scan the ridgelines of Maine and Vermont, where gigantic machines entombed in cement beat the thin, delicate air once inhaled by living, breathing forests.

The entire ancient earth thinks prodigiously,
and the murmur of its great trees grows”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

It was Leopold who spoke reverently of watching the green fire go out of the eyes of a wolf he shot in his callous youth—vowing never to do so again. If you have never read his Sand County Almanac—you must. It’s a life changer.

He died in 1948, the year I was born, overcome by smoke while fighting a brush fire near his beloved Wisconsin wilderness camp.

The article, below, was sent to me by Boyce Sherwin, a friend and neighbor in my neck of the woods. The article says nothing about wind turbines—not explicitly, that is. Implicitly, it says volumes. For those of you living in rural Ontario, rural France or Italy or England or Australia, rural Maine, or wherever turbines and their headache-pounding infrasound and banshee roar have commandeered your soundscape, you will grieve for the lost symphony of quietness, where “peace comes dropping slow.”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core
—Wm. Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892)

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“Aldo Leopold’s Field Notes Score a Lost ‘Soundscape’”

—Terry Devitt, reprinted in ScienceDaily (9/18/12)
Among his many qualities, the pioneering wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold was a meticulous taker of field notes. Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where the songs originated.
Lacking a tape recorder, the detailed written record was the best the iconic naturalist could do.
“Leopold took amazing field notes,” says Stan Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of wildlife ecology and now a senior fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “He recorded his observations of nature in great detail.”
Using those notes, Temple and Christopher Bocast, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute graduate student and acoustic ecologist, have recreated a “soundscape” from Leopold’s 70 year-old notes. But the dawn chorus that Leopold heard in1940 no longer exists at the shack, Temple explains. The mix of species today is different due to changes in the landscape and changes in the bird community around the shack.
More noticeable is the thrum of the nearby interstate highway, audible at every hour from Leopold’s storied sanctuary, and the other constant and varied noises of the human animal. Since Leopold’s time, for example, the internal combustion engine has roared to soundscape dominance, whether as an airplane overhead, a rumbling motorcycle, a whining chain saw or an outboard churning on the nearby Wisconsin River.
“The difference between 1940 and 2012 is overwhelmingly the anthrophony — human-generated noise,” explains Temple. “That’s the big change. In Leopold’s day there was much less of that.”
The resurrected soundscape of 1940s Sauk County is the first to be recreated from actual data rather than someone’s imagination of what the past sounded like, says Temple. The work fits into an emerging field of science known as soundscape ecology, which seeks to explain the role of sound within a landscape and how it influences the animals — birds, insects, amphibians, even fish — that live there.
Recently, a rarefied group of scholars who work in the new field met at the Leopold Center, just a few hundred yards from Leopold’s humble shack. The National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop drew not only scientists but philosophers, musicians and others with an interest in natural sounds. Temple gave the opening keynote, which featured the reconstructed dawn chorus.
“Aldo Leopold recognized that you can get a pretty good sense of land health by listening to the soundscape,” Temple says. “If sounds are missing and things are there that shouldn’t be, it often indicates underlying ecological problems.”
The soundscape produced by Temple and Bocast is a compressed version of the chorus described by Leopold, taking 30 minutes of notes and compressing them into five minutes of recording. Bird songs and calls were obtained from the extensive collection housed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library.
The background sound on which they superimposed the bird songs is all Wisconsin, but Temple and Bocast struggled to find a place where human noise was as it would have been in Leopold’s time: “There are combustion engines on the edge of hearing all the time,” says Bocast, whose dissertation work includes a bioacoustic study low frequency sounds made by spawning sturgeon.
Citing a recent study, Temple points out that in the lower 48 states, there is no place more than 35 kilometers from the nearest road, making it nearly impossible to tune out the hum of human activity, even in places designated as wilderness. “It is increasingly difficult to study natural soundscapes that represent normality,” says Temple, noting that its not just mechanical human noise that’s encroaching. The rain forests of Hawaii, for example, no longer sound like the rain forests of Hawaii. “They sound more like the rain forests of Puerto Rico because the calls of an introduced, invasive tree frog are becoming pervasive.”
Preserving the natural sounds of a place, avers Temple, may be just as challenging as conserving the mosaic of plants and animals that help keep an ecosystem intact. Like smell and sight, “sound can be what you associate with a particular landscape,” something Leopold appreciated and wrote about in several of his well known essays.
By noting and studying the role of sound in the natural world, Leopold proved again to be ahead of his time. Science is only now coming to grips with the totality of the sounds of nature (much like the sound of an entire orchestra) rather than the individual components of the soundscape, according to Temple.
Understanding how nature’s “music” is changing and how much attention we need to pay to the sounds introduced by people, he says, are challenges for soundscape ecologists. And we have much to learn about what the noise people make does to the environment.

The massive bird kill at the Laurel Mountain wind facility near Elkins, West Virginia in early October is another example of tragic environmental consequences caused by industrial wind development.

The American Bird Conservancy reported on October 28, 2011 that almost 500 birds were “reportedly killed after lights were left on at an electrical substation.”  That report was confirmed when Stantec Consulting Services Inc. reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that 8, 250-watt high pressure sodium lamps were left on at the Battery Energy Storage System at the Leadsville substation, part of the AES Laurel Mountain wind facility.

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