Haven’t seen any anti-wind power signs among the demonstrators at the Occupy Toronto actions taking centre stage downtown, but it may be just a matter of time.
The battle raging over wind farms across rural Ontario may seem far from the financial towers at King and Bay, and a little incongruous to the anti-corporate greed message of Occupy Toronto organizers.
But anti-wind activists across the province have also adopted the language of the disaffected and disenfranchised to fight turbine projects – not to mention, copped techniques from the famous manual on non-violent resistance developed by Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute to turn rural opinion against wind.
Anti-winders, however, also trade in the language of climate change deniers.
For those of you out there who read this and wrote to voice your displeasure, please consider the following addendum by way of a trip I took to Manvers in the Kawartha Lakes region in mid-August, a few weeks removed from the official start of the provincial election.
There on the cement floor of the local arena where the pee wee Mustangs play their home hockey games, a couple of hundred locals filled up the seats to watch Wind Chill, the award-winning doc on one upstate New York town’s fight against wind turbines. The film was being shown in rural communities across the province as part of Wind Concerns Ontario’s “Truth About Wind Turbines Tour.”
If you didn’t know thing one about wind power, you might come away after having watched the film thinking that wind farms now dotting the Ontario countryside will end up as graveyards to a failed and misguided attempt to push wind on the masses.
The experience in other countries, where wind is supplanting nukes, would tells us differently.
But in Manvers and other communities across the province where there’s already a healthy distrust of government – and signs on farm fences to prove it – it hasn’t taken much to turn locals against wind. Green energy has become the new fascism. And the Libs’ Green Energy Act to push wind power, the “Greed” Energy Act.
To hear those opposed to turbines tell it, efforts to establish wind as a renewable, viable energy source of the future are being pushed by “huge foreign-owned companies” in the name of profits, and on the backs of Canadian taxpayers via huge government subsidies, or “hand-outs.”
It gets more conspiratorial. Wind developers “are not being honest,” they’re “hiding the truth” about experiences in other countries with wind energy, including about their adverse health affects.
The truth is a little more complicated, but in rural Ontario, where power from wind has for decades been used in farming, all of a sudden the “rush” to wind power has become “dirty business.”
How did wind power get such a bad rap?
Much was made during the recent provincial election of the loss of local autonomy over wind power projects in turning public opinion against turbines. And certainly, that has played a role.
But arguably, no other group has played a more pivotal part in the blowback against wind than Wind Concerns Ontario.
WCO’s efforts contributed to the PCs’ near virtual domination of rural Ontario in the recent election.
The group, founded in 2008 to fight a wind power project in Innisfil, now boasts 57 chapters in nearly three dozen counties across the province. Some 78 municipalities in the province have called for a moratorium on wind turbines as a result of the group’s campaign against wind.
Even before the writ was dropped on Ontario Election 2011, WCO was taking to Liberal-held ridings to spread the word against wind, at so-called “information” meetings.
I use the word information advisedly since proponents of wind were absent from the discussions.
At the Manvers meeting in mid-August, one brave soul among the gathered stepped to the mic to ask why. The intent of the meeting seemed to be to “incite”, rather than educate, this speaker said. Another thought it “inappropriate” to show a film on the U.S. experience with turbines, when laws in Ontario are different.
But they were both quickly shouted down.
There was some liberal paraphrasing of studies purportedly linking turbines to adverse health affects – disputed by the Ontario Medical Officer of Health, by the way.
But perception is reality, in the wind debate. The mere annoyance caused by turbines, to those who don’t like what they look like or claim advers impacts from inaudible sound waves, seems to have trumped rational debate on the subject.
Anti-climate change scientists have waded in, questioning the link between coal pollution and premature deaths in Ontario to argue against wind. Among them, Dr. Ross McKitrick, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.
But Wind Concerns Ontario is not the only group framing the wind debate.
There are others. The Society for Wind Vigilance and Wind-Watch.org use similar messaging and claims about adverse health impacts, both exaggerated and unsubstantiated. Like, for example, linking the “visual health effects of wind turbines” to depression and mental health.
The reaction in Ontario communities to the efforts of these groups is not uniform, enviros point out. Areas where wind farms have existed for a number of years have a more positive outlook.
Does the backlash in rural Ontario to wind farms solely revolve around the fact the Libs have taken control over decision-making away from local municipalities? Arguably, the Green Energy Act does nothing of the sort.
There are still environmental laws in place to protect local interests when it comes to the siting of industrial wind turbine projects. These must take into account potential impacts on the environment, heritage and local water supplies.
Would handing back local control to municipalities alter the negative perceptions of wind power in rural Ontario? More to the point, do small municipalities really want the responsibility?
The reality is most of them have neither the staff nor expertise to develop workable wind development policies.
Environmentalists say that most local concerns are being addressed with a little more attention to the siting of wind farms. And that doing more to cut locals in on the financial benefits of wind projects would go a long way toward allaying fears.
But the debate may have already been poisoned for the Libs to boldly go forward when it comes to wind.
