The untruths we're being told about coal and renewable power

Wind farms "kill all the birds", said
 US President-elect Donald Trump.

Who better to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump? Joe Hockey is our man in Washington. Remember his thoughts about wind turbines, back in 2014 when he was Tony Abbott's treasurer?

"If I can be a little indulgent," he asked an extremely eager radio host. "I drive to Canberra to go to parliament and so on, I drive myself, and I must say I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive. I think they are just a blight on the landscape."

Trump thinks they're utterly offensive too.

"I don't know if you've ever been to Palm Springs, California; it looks like a junkyard," he told a US radio host a few days before the election.

"They have all these different companies and each one is made by a different group from, all from China and from Germany, by the way, not from here, and you look at all these windmills, half of them are broken, they're rusting and rotting. It looks like a poor man's version of Disneyland; it's the worst thing you've ever seen."

And worse still, wind power "kills all the birds".

Read Peter Martin’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “The untruths we're being told about coal and renewable power.”

Cash register noise 'just blowin' in the wind'

L

ooking out across Lake George, about 40 kilometres north-east of Canberra, farmer Harry Osborne takes a different view to Joe Hockey.

The Lake George wind turbines that Joe
 Hockey finds offensive - makes you
wonder when he last
looked at an open-cut coal mine?

It was looking back from the opposite bank as he drove from Sydney to Canberra that the Treasurer decided wind turbines offended him.

In an interview with broadcaster Alan Jones last year, Mr Hockey described the Bungendore wind farm looming over Lake George as "a blight on the landscape" and "utterly offensive".

And he was at it again this week, telling Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews: "I can't stand those things … they're all around Lake George", confirming it is the "aesthetic" of wind farms he objects to.

Mr Osborne, who is one of Bungendore's wind farmers, with 10 turbines set on the edge of Currandooley, his property adjoining Lake George, said everyone has the right to their opinion but they should be careful in assuming others share the same view.

Read Heath Aston’s story in The Age - “Operator of maligned wind farm is no fan of Joe Hockey”.