Letters / ‘Is this what we wanted?’
Interesting Shetland green energy conundrum.
Folk on zero hours, low or minimum wages, state pensioners (half the minimum wage rate), folk on the living wage and many just above, now face a doubling or more of their energy bills and ongoing for at least two years.
This will suck in a significantly large number of new folk to fuel poverty, increasing the numbers of potential evictions, hunger, starvation and significant deteriorating health both physical and mental.
The renewable energy industry aided by both the UK & Scottish governments have gone into overdrive stamping on communities with wind farms everywhere and now in the seas around us without any studies on impacts to important fish breeding grounds or the fishing industry.
Wind farms sucking in billions of pounds to the racketeering energy industry, who ignore huge amounts of wasted energy, have a planning system rigged in their favour and which bars the local community of any legal rights or meaningful say in this abuse of democracy and even worse, our human rights.
The subsidies the racketeers receive are for wind farm construction, running them and now to reimburse them when the wind blows too much, and they have to shut them down.
All these subsidies are charged to the consumers as a green tax plus VAT which is tax on a tax and all disproportionally hitting the least able to afford it.
When folk start dying of hypothermia, starvation or frozen in a shop doorway having been made homeless, the government in Westminster will just party on, and in Holyrood, the Scottish Government pat each other’s backs for their efforts to attain their carbon reduction figures (nothing to do with running the country for the people).
So as the green energy project or carbon reduction option isn’t an option for over half the Scottish population, I can see only one way to reduce the effects of this massive energy industry racket and cut our now unaffordable electricity costs.
That is by ripping out storage heaters, emersion heaters etc and invest if you can in a Rayburn or sold fuel stove and head to the peat hill and gather pallets to chop up, purely to survive the winter.
I see a grim profit driven future for the majority of Shetland folk, where we have an utterly trashed landscape full of subsidised wind farms from Fair Isle to Skaw and Waas to Out Skerries and now in the seas all around us, generating electricity for the whole UK and huge profits for the industry.
Electricity that will be too expensive for Shetland folk who will shiver in the shadows of the ever-growing numbers of monster turbines.
Is this what we wanted?
Vic Thomas
Catfirth
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