Election letters 2019 / At odds with the SNP’s own stance on the importance of peat
In reply to Tom Wills’ letter: A future of self-sufficiency in clean energy (SN, 13 August 2019).
Firstly to state that the following are my own opinions:
The Viking Energy and associated developments are the single biggest challenges these islands face in the coming years and have the potential to permanently and irrevocably affect the environment, ecology and quality of life of thousands of Shetland residents for generations to come.
It is absolutely incumbent on those of us who care deeply about this future, without a financial or profit motive, to make our views known in the face of overwhelming odds.
It is clear, from the attitude of the present Scottish Government aided and abetted by our own former MSP and present MP, influenced by years of intense lobbying paid for by the millions plundered from the community welfare fund, that the proposed huge industrial wind farm developments are being treated as “Offshore Wind” and that our local government is complicit in this.
I agree with a lot of Tom Wills’ arguments on the need for immediate and decisive action to avert climate change but releasing the thousands of tons of sequestered CO2 built up through millennia in blanket peat bog, quarrying over 1.5 million cubic metres of rock (and that’s just the VE wind farm) the mass of concrete and other associated activities inherent in such a huge development flies in the face of and is at odds with the SNP’s own environmental stance on the importance of peat.
Tom Wills writes: “My view is that all onshore wind farm projects in Shetland should receive similarly rigorous examination and be monitored to ensure compliance with planning conditions” and “we must also be wise to any unscrupulous developers and encourage them to do better than the minimum requirements set by planners“.
What a joke! Tom Wills knows, as well as I do, that contractors will always do what they can to maximise their own profit, flouting regulations and oversight when they can get away with it, and that is exactly what is happening right now.
Electioneering promises and wishlists are all very well, empty rhetoric and political obfuscation is not.
Dave Hammond
Reawick
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