Letters / Fishermen and tax-paying workers will lose
Do the offshore wind farms presently being proposed around Shetland and Scotland have anything to do with being environmentally friendly, or is it all about companies making profit from the subsidies provided by the government; out of the taxes we pay for the privilege of working for a living?
Is the SNP government trying to appease the Green Party by attempting to enhance their own environmental credentials and profit from selling or renting off the Scottish seabed to the highest bidding wind farm developer; who appear to depend on our taxes providing subsidies for their profits?
Oh, what a tangled web could they weave, to gain from those they would deceive?
In order for the SNP government and the developers to gain, someone else must lose.
The losers possibly being every tax-paying worker in the country, plus the fishermen who will lose the seabed they depend on for a living; where they work in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous working environments in the world, the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean.
This is where the government propose to build wind farms, where they would not be accessible for maintenance in anything other than the finest of weather conditions.
When alternatively, they could build them on a barren and uninhabited coastline all around the country; where the wind farms could benefit from the naturally occurring offshore/onshore sea breezes in even the calmest of weathers.
Building on the coastline means they could access the wind farms in all weathers from the roads they will require for their construction, and to maintain and repair them in the event of a breakdown or catastrophic failure.
More importantly, this would allow easier access for the developers when they use some of the profits they will have gained from our taxes and would have set aside; to decommission the wind farms when they become less profitable after the subsidies cease, or at the end of their working life and return the habitat back to the pristine landscape that nature had provided before their wind farms incursions into the natural environment.
William Polson
Whalsay
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