James Macadam is right to point out that climate change campaigners must revise their sanctimonious rhetoric if they want popular appeal in a time of belt-tightening and penny-counting. However, the ill-informed ramblings of climate camp enthusiasts, the footsoldiers of the movement, are relatively harmless. Far more worrying is the language emanating from the government itself, which has taken on dizzying heights of aloofness and abstraction.

This week Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, declared that opposing windfarms should become ‘socially irresponsible…like driving through a zebra crossing or not wearing a seatbelt.’ A cabinet minister was not only dismissing the well-evidenced and widely-supported arguments against wind farms as one would a 14th century astrological treatise, he was denying that any debate at all over this issue was legitimate.

This stance is extraordinary. Firstly, the reasons to oppose windfarms are numerous and compelling. They are inefficient, economically nonsensical (as anybody from the Dutch government can tell you) and do not offset a milligram of carbon as they cannot actually replace oil or coal fired powerstations. They are also breathtakingly ugly – anybody who argues that what a nice rounded Shropshire hill needs is 50 metres of dazzling white vertical steel rotating at a speed that distracts the eye has the same aesthetic accomplishment as the satirical tourist commenting on the frame of a Veronese.

Miliband’s equation of supporting wind farms with basic road safety is a ludicrous non-sequitur. Driving through zebra crossings means murder – this can be proved empirically by trying it. Opposing wind farms is voicing a democratic right – write a letter to your MP against them and see how many people are suddenly struck down dead. This is only one example of how language has been twisted by the government to buttress the sanctity of environmental policy.

After all, this is just a policy. Windfarms are one of a number of ways posited to reduce CO₂ emissions and our reliance on non-renewable energy. Each of these ways needs to be tested on its own merits, which means scrutiny and debate. Instead, environmental policy is being slowly distanced from oversight and examination, becoming fetishised under the ubiquitously trumping argument of ‘if we don’t act now we are all doomed.’ This is not a good way to make policy.

What is most troubling is the government’s attitude to the legitimate concerns of local people over the impact of windfarms on their communities. Miliband was talking at the screening of the climate change film The Age of Stupid, and his patronising comments no doubt went down well with the audience possessing SW postcodes and reusable Waitrose carrier bags. For rural communities faced with the huge environmental and infrastructural upheaval of windfarm construction, Miliband’s words are deeply insulting.

Protest about the bulldozing of local shops to allow road widening so that articulated lorries travelling at 3mph can carry 50 metre supports through one’s local town or village, crippling the quality of life for residents, is clearly ‘socially unacceptable’ to Mr Miliband. This is the forecast for my local area, Powys, where an estimated 600 hundred windfarms will be built across largely virgin upland areas of outstanding beauty. The effect on the local tourist industry can only be estimated, the noise pollution that this ‘next generation’ of windfarms creates will be heard for tens of miles.

By declaring those wanting a debate over windfarms and those with concerns for their local communities as yobbish ne’er-do-wells in the same bracket as football hooligans or road criminals, the government is displaying a reckless abandon with democracy akin to a banana republic. It also shows just how out of touch with reality some elements of the environmental movement have become, or how willing they are to subscribe to potentially authoritarian means to promote their agenda. The majority of environmental campaigners do not – those for whom belief in local democracy is as entrenched as their green convictions. It is up to them to make the case for a green agenda that respects and welcomes debate and scrutiny, not crushes it.

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