The windmills are spinning golden subsidies in the central German ‘fairy tale’ forest of Reinhardswald, but the payment is the partial destruction of the 1,000 year-old ancient wood itself. Work has started on the clearing of up to 120,000 trees in the forest, the setting for many of the Brothers Grimm mythical stories, to provide access for an initial 18 giant wind turbines around the Sababurg ‘Sleeping Beauty’ castle. Who is opposing this massive destruction of the ancient forest teeming with wildlife with trees over 200 years old? Certainly not the Green party, now in power at national and local level. In fact the project is being led by local Hesse Green Minister Priska Hinz who is reported to have said: “Wind energy makes a decisive contribution to the energy transition and the preservation of nature. It is the only way to preserve forests and important ecosystems.”
There is some local press interest in Germany about the destruction of part of the forest that covers a 200 square kilometre area. Nevertheless, the mainstream media generally keep well away from covering environmental destruction when the Greens are doing it in the claimed cause of saving the planet. The BBC did cover the story under the headline ‘Battle over wind turbines in the land of Sleeping Beauty‘, but that was in 2013 when plans for the industrial development were first announced. It seems that the state-reliant broadcaster is less interested now that the Big Bad Wolf has finally made a meal of Little Red Riding Hood.
Pierre Gosselin, who runs the German-based science site No Tricks Zone, has been covering the outrage felt in a number of German quarters at the plans to destroy some of the Reinhardswald forest in the interest of inferior green technology. He feels the affair shows what an inefficient and costly scam green energy is. “It’s not cost-free, it’s full of corrupt and unresponsive politicians who no longer care about democracy, and it certainly doesn’t make the environment better. It’s a nasty juggernaut of waste, fraud, corruption and ecological degradation – with dead birds, turbine vibration sickness, strobe dizziness and landscape pollution,” he adds.
The Guardian has been curiously silent over the clearing of woodland to build wind turbines in Hesse. In 2020 it was less reticent about reporting on the construction of a 3 km highway in another Hessian forest at Dannenroder. Thousands of climate activists gathered on the site north of Frankfurt, it reported. Dannenroder tree-felling would be a catastrophe, environmental campaigners are reported to have said. “Some parts of this forest are 250 years old,” noted Nicola Uhde of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (Bund), “and there is simply not much of this kind of woodland around anymore.” At the time, the Guardian noted the fate of Dannenroder was a “litmus test for the Green party” which governed the state as part of a coalition. It seems to have been remiss in not suggesting such a test with the Reinhardswald deforestation. But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.
The Daily Sceptic has reported on numerous recent examples where the lack of interest in ecological damage is a feature of green industrial development. Last month, we noted that one of India’s iconic large birds, the great Indian bustard, was on the verge of extinction due to the growth of electric power lines in its home area of the Thar desert. To reach global Net Zero, it has been estimated that new power lines equivalent to circling the globe 2,000 times will need to be built in the next few years.
Last October, we reported that wind farms in Tasmania had reduced the population of the endangered local wedge-tailed eagle to around 1,000 individuals. Across the world, millions of bats are being chewed by giant wind blades. Any animal that relies on wind currents for flight such as a large raptor is at risk of being sucked into the whirling machines. In California, the Democrat-controlled state Government recently relaxed controls on wildlife protections to allow permits to kill previously fully protected species for renewable infrastructure projects. Despite an increased risk to America’s national bird, the bald eagle, barely a peep of protest was recorded. Off America’s eastern coast, massive industrial parks are being constructed for wind turbines. It might be a coincidence that hundreds of whales have beached along the shore in recent years, but a more likely explanation is the deafening sonar noise, constant pile driving, extensive ocean building works and heavy shipping movements.
None of the above are likely to feature when the magic mirror is asked: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest one of all?”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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The term ‘economical with the truth’ seems to be appropriate for the politicians involved in that project. I guess they could recover some useful energy from the trees by shipping them over to Drax power station!
All over the world this is going on. Forests, farms, wild meadows, natural eco-systems all destroyed for the non-green project of bird choppers and solar panels. 300.000 tonnes of steel in the average bird mangler. Solar panels built on extravagant mining of minerals, some rare.
The cult’s mantra; ‘Kill Gaia to save her’.
Yes indeed this all reminds me of Peter Hitchen’s comment on covid lock-downs, ‘burning down your house to get rid of a mouse’.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it” —-Mencken
Indeed the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote Binsey Poplars about the desecration of a row of trees and his famous line about nature and the human hand.
“To mend her we end her”
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
They wrecked paradise, to put up a windmill zone
The madness continues. Greens in Germany used to be ‘green’, now they’re black in a sort of jagged cross arrangement. How much longer will the lie of climate emergency be pushed and this crazy rush to Net Zero? And what will the landscape look like when they’ve cut down the great forests, killed off the wild birds, and taken away the homes of all the wild animals? What fairytales will they tell then? Germany seems like a very sick country but then no surprise there, it’s a sick world, mentally sick, evilly sick.
Yes. Evil. That’s a word that has gone out of fashion but neatly encapsulates so much that is wrong in the world.
Cree Indian prophecy: “Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.”
It’s Easter Island all over again. Why can’t these fools see what they’re doing?
Good analogy. And the Andes. Deforested. If you travel there you won’t meet more than a few people who are clued in that the Andes at one point were heavily forested. Incas et al denuded nature (but you are never told this in the hagiographies of the noble savage). The Mayan empire (slave empire) collapsed due to eco devastation.
Excellent description “the hagiographies of the noble savage”.
Another thing the media paid scant attention to was the report years ago that the North American tribes (descendants of Oriental immigrants across the Bering Land Bridge) had actually exterminated the original palaeolithic horses that had been there for a few million years. The tribes had spread to both North & South America by about 12,000 years ago, but by 10,000 years ago, the horses had been hunted to extinction. The Ethnic Europeans re-introduced horses in the 1600s.
But, but…’indigenous’ people are ‘in touch’ with nature?
Insanity——-Keeping doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. ——-Imagine turning a beautiful country into a giant pin cushion like Germany is becoming. They have around 40,000 huge Industrial Turbines and plan to have 55,000. ———–This is total madness when all that is required are a few Nuclear plants tucked away in a corner somewhere. Those Nuclear plants would also come as a big relief to the Red Kite which has been virtually wiped out in Germany because birds of prey do not see the blades coming as they are always looking down for prey. ————I had a discussion afew years ago with a German chap from Siemens who had been working over in Scotland (Energy Park Methil Fife) for some years. He was ofcourse enthusiastic about wind and I was not. —–He put his points and I put mine and at the end of the discussion I asked him———“Can wind energy power Industrial Society”? ———–He looked at me for a few seconds as though I had just trapped his Queen on a chessboard., then he replied “I don’t know” —–I have to give him credit for one thing —-His honesty.
Can someone send this story to Chris Packham?
To save the environment the EU has been increasingly using bio fuels instead of oil. This has required the destruction of Rain Forest to grow the Palm Oil.
Besides delusion or cognitive dissonance or the characteristics of crowd behaviour as observed in the Solomon Asch experiments there must be a word to describe someone that is so passionate against something that to achieve their goals they cause much more destruction of the thing they are trying to ‘save’? Perhaps it’s as Bonhoeffer concluded and it’s stupidity, except stupidity would have random outcomes instead of a very observable consistency in one direction.
The following examples immediately come to mind:
How much CO² does 200,000 KM² of pristine forest absorb every year?
How long until a turbine needs to be replaced? Can they be recycled or do you need to dig up more minerals at source.
Scratch a Green, see what lies beneath the surface isn’t so nice.
How long before the general population realises they’ve been had?
As the article says, if it really were about CO², then Nuclear is the solution. The nuclear waste is of course concerning, but perhaps we could fling it into the sun, or drop it into the earth’s core. I’d be less alarmed to hear of this type of plan being in the works.
I recently heard about the SAFIRE project, which seemed interesting and relatively clean. The physics was way over my head unfortunately, so I couldn’t say whether it’s legitimate.
Co2 has nothing to do with pollution, toxicity or the weather.
Hydrocarbons are abiotic, clean burning and easily obtained.
The oil sands in Canada – once used are returned to nature as part of the costs of the project.
Try a lithium mine if you want to see eco-devastation. Gigatonnes of Earth clawed and dug out to provide lithium for a few hundred EVs….yet this is ‘green’….
I agree CO² isn’t linked to the weather etc. Water vapour has a bigger greenhouse effect but that’s not even included in the doom-modelling.
I was highlighting the illogical, hypothetical, circular argument being deployed.
The only way to save the planet from CO² is to denude it of all vegetation, which in itself does an excellent job of using CO² (i.e. plant food) to provide food and produce Oxygen.
Add to that the fact that current CO² levels are rapidly greening the planet, leading to abundance, and it’s clear the greens aren’t green at all, just another collectivist-creed aiming for human impoverishment.
Yes but that does not mean that cutting down huge areas or forest is a good idea. Forests are still part of the eco system whether or not there was any issue regarding climate. —But I fully understand what you mean regarding pollution etc.
What on earth is happening in Germany? They close their nuclear industry and shut their coal mines, then they buy natural gas from Russia, finally they chop down forests to install unreliable wind farms. Energy prices are through the roof and their impressive industrial might is at the point of collapse. When Germany goes bankrupt Europe goes bankrupt. Is that the plan?
The only plan is that the grifters keep filling their pockets for as long as there’s still money to be had. Afterwards, they’re planning to move elsewhere.
Yes climate change true believers always talk about “big oil” but never about “big wind”
The Greens care very much about deforestation … in Brazil, where there’s more forest than ever existed in Germany. But not closer to home. Their litmus test for “good for the environement” is usually “Is someone willing to pay us for claiming that?” They’re the kind of people who want to cream off taxpayers subsidies for the solar installations on top of their spacious family homes in suburbs but want to stuff everyone else into small appartments in huge tower blocks because packing people more space-efficiently is “good for the environment” and building such tower blocks everywhere for the purpose speculation has certainly nothing to do with that.
There’s a company which produces plant-based meat replacements which uses Beyond Meat™ as trademark. The companies which invest into Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen (proper German name of the party) also have a trademark: It’s Beyond Corruption™.
I must say, it’s all unutterably depressing, almost like some nightmare or horror film (it reminds me of parts of The Lord of the Rings). You couldn’t make it up. And you can’t wake up out of it or stop it. One feels so helpless. It is altogether tragic, God’s beautiful creation being ruined by Satan and his followers. (Chris M is very good on all this awful climate stuff.)
Sounds familiar. Germany committing acts of atrocity. History has proven, they are very comfortable destroying life.
Don’t you sometimes feel like an automaton yourself?
The people behind this are the ones who’ve also started to decorate German pedestrian zones (in Frankfurt and Cologne) with Happy Ramadan signs and they’re still implementing policies of the US democrats unrestrained by the US constitution. They’re also really hot to persecute Germans at every opportunity. The vitriolic hatred for the AfD rests mostly on two statements by formerly prominent AfD people, namely, that a period of 12 years is length-wise relatively unimportant when compated with the entire length of German history and that the so-called Holocaust Monument in Berlin would be an eyesore (which it is). But none if this matters, say German anywhere and well-trained choir will respond with Nazi.
Delicious irony – a field of wind turbines in North Rhein Westphalia is being taken down to extend an open vast coal mine
“But then it seems none of the usual climate activists have been protesting about the loss of trees and wildlife habitat on this occasion.” and “the bald eagle, barely a peep of protest was recorded”
When they poison the world with vaccine technology and erect telecoms masts everywhere at a rapid rate of knots, this will be seen more and more. It’s all in the mind.
Hope and pray for this to comes to light.