Trouble Ahead: what did the anti-Navitus campaign achieve?
The local campaign against the Navitus Bay offshore wind farm extended a long Dorset tradition of militant opposition to anything that is experienced as an alien intrusion, but its tone became more mean spirited. The campaign gave priority to the preservation of picturesque sea views, over the need to protect our coastal environment from the effects of climate change. And no holds were barred when it came to presenting distorted information to whip up opposition. The visual and noise impacts of the wind farm were routinely exaggerated, and the reality of human-caused climate change was frequently denied.
Keeping them out of “our sacred south”
Arm the rabbits with tigers’ teeth
Serpents shoot from the soil beneath
By pain in belly and foot and mouth
Keep them out of our sacred south.
(from ‘Corfe’, by Mary Butts, written in 1922-1925)
A green-tinged conservatism, chronicled in Patrick Wright’s 1995 bookThe Village that died for England, was a distinctive feature of Dorset history for much of the twentieth century. Mary Butts’ poem ‘Corfe’, subtitled ‘A Song to Keep People out of Dorset’, expressed its often whimsical, sometimes militant, always elitist tone. Participants were a diverse group, including pagan mystic Llewellyn Powys, Tory historian Sir Arthur Bryant, broadcaster and journalist Kenneth Allsop, and prolific author of local guidebooks Rodney Legg, as well as bohemian writer Mary Butts. Many of these guiding lights spent much of their lives away from Dorset, but they all claimed a special affinity to its land. This, they believed, gave them a special responsibility to protect it from alien incursions, whether by the army, property developers, tourists, or oil prospectors.
This century, new intruders have been targetted – renewable energy projects, and particularly wind farms. Some of the earlier militancy has survived, though the tone has become more prosaic. The focus of new opposition groups, like Dorset Against Rural Turbines, Tolpuddle Against Industrial Turbines, Challenge Navitus, and the Poole and Christchurch Bays Association, has often been centred on the narrow self-interest of retired incomers and second home owners. Lip service is paid to concerns about impacts on wildlife. But the main aims are now to preserve cherished views, to avoid imagined falls in property values, and (a complete turnaround here) to counter perceived threats to the tourist industry, particularly in resorts like Bournemouth and Swanage.
Moving out to sea
Some opponents of inland wind farms, including Dorset CPRE, felt initially that Navitus Bay might take some of the pressure off them, and were encouraged by Conservative Party policy to promote offshore rather than onshore wind energy. Then UKIP’s opposition to all wind energy began to find a ready audience (though what the massive expansion of fracking favoured by UKIP would do to cherished Dorset landscapes has so far escaped that audience’s attention). While local Conservative MPs were careful not to allow their opposition to Navitus Bay to be interpreted as disagreement with government policy, the anti-Navitus groups, Challenge Navitus and (especially) the Poole and Christchurch Bays Association (PCBA), were not so constrained.
Challenge Navitus is mainly Swanage based, and its NIMBY characteristics were apparent early on. Four years ago, Andrew Langley, its founder, proposed that one way of reducing the visual impact of the wind farm would be to move it further west, alongside the Jurassic Coast (Purbeck Gazette, August 2011). That way, he implied, Swanage residents would be protected from having to glimpse any turbines from Swanage Bay. Once it became clear that preservation of views from the World Heritage Site might become a key issue in last winter’s Planning Examination, that suggestion was quietly forgotten, and Challenge Navitus’ position turned to more broadly-based opposition. Their key argument was that the visualisations produced by the developers and displayed at community consultation events deliberately under-played the likely visual impact of the wind farm.
The PCBA, a self-appointed body that claims to represent local Residents Associations, mainly in the conurbation, seemed undecided as to whether to oppose wind energy as such, based on exaggerated perceptions of its ineffectiveness and denial of the reality of human-caused climate change, or to argue that the wind farm was in the wrong place, and that it should be re-located to the North Sea. They brought in outside ‘experts’, of dubious repute, to question the whole basis of government policy on energy and climate change. Lord Monckton, the well known climate contrarian, made the aims explicit at a joint PCBA/UKIP meeting in January 2014. Navitus Bay, he suggested to a fired-up audience, should be used as “a method of getting all wind farms throughout the UK stopped forever.” Phillip Bratby, another climate contrarian and seasoned anti wind farm campaigner (who achieved some notoriety after the May General Election by describing each of the first three Secretaries of State at DECC, Ed Milliband, Chris Huhne, and Ed Davey, as “more dangerous to our country than Adolf Hitler”), was brought in as the PCBA’s ‘energy expert’. His submissions to last winter’s Planning Examination combined unrealistic assumptions, distorted evidence, flawed calculations and extensive quote mining to support nonsensical claims that wind farms increase, not reduce, carbon emissions and that they contribute to national economic decline.
Decision time
The Planning Examination hearings were imbalanced affairs. The PCBA and Challenge Navitus were allocated seats at the conference table, alongside statutory consultees (local authorities, Natural England, etc) and encouraged to give lengthy presentations of their case. In contrast, groups broadly supporting the project (East Dorset Friends of the Earth and Poole Agenda 21) had to sit at the back of the room, and were only allowed to make brief comments at the end of each session. Yet it seems from the Examining Authority’s Recommendation Report that the Planning Inspectors were not taken in by the exaggerated perceptions of negative impacts of Navitus Bay, on noise, tourism, or World Heritage status, that were repeatedly presented to them by Challenge Navitus and the PCBA.
The key issue for the Examining Authority, and the government, in their decision to recommend against Navitus Bay was the “special” nature of uninterrupted sea views, particularly from the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Purbeck and the Isle of Wight. Of all the judgements the Planning Inspectors had to make, this was the most subjective. And it is here that Challenge Navitus and the PCBA may have had the most influence, albeit indirectly. The Planning Inspectors rejected suggestions by the opposition groups that the developers’ visualisations understated likely visual impact, and indeed agreed that one of the visuals widely distributed by the PCBA, which showed a turbine juxtaposed to the Isle of Wight and Hengistbury Head, was “grossly distorted”. But many residents were taken in by these representations.
The Inspectors ignored lengthy PCBA arguments that challenged wind energy effectiveness and denied the reality of human-caused climate change. But again, these arguments were enormously influential in the local community. They were repeated ad nauseam by PCBA Steering Group members in local meetings and the local press, and regurgitated in daily tweets and retweets from the PCBA’s PR/media relations spokesperson (whose CV includes spells as chief spin doctor for British Nuclear Fuels and then Gazprom). Their effect seems to have been to allay any moral unease residents might have felt about opposing the project, along the lines of “If wind energy doesn’t reduce carbon emissions, and human-caused climate change is not a problem, then I’m not being selfish in wanting to preserve my uninterrupted sea view.”
Although local opposition was not given much weight in the Examining Authority’s Recommendation Report, endless repetition by Interested Parties of the specialness of local seascapes probably influenced the Inspectors’ intense focus on what the Secretary of State, in her decision letter, termed “the perception of viewers standing on the coastlines.”. And the strength of that opposition undoubtedly made it extremely unlikely that the government would overturn the Authority’s recommendation to refuse development consent.
Consequences
As the opposition groups celebrate the government’s decision to scrap Navitus Bay, it is worth reflecting on the consequences for our precious coastline of continuing with business as usual. Without unprecedented global action to curb fossil fuel emissions, we are well on track to raise global temperatures more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century. A 2 degree limit, the internationally agreed target, is to some extent an arbitrary figure, and significant damage will be inflicted before that threshold is reached. But if average temperatures rise by more than 2 degrees, crucial tipping points, particularly those related to ice sheet instability and consequent sea level rise, would almost certainly be crossed, rendering the changes irreversible. The consequences for all coastal communities, including ours, would be immeasurable.
Of course Navitus Bay, and renewable energy as a whole, could only be part of the solution. But Challenge Navitus and the PCBA have, by focussing so exclusively on the visual impact of Navitus Bay, diverted attention away from the much greater potential threat to our local environment of the ‘fracking revolution’. And, whether inadvertently or by design, they have helped establish a precedent in planning examinations of offshore wind projects which accords climate protection less importance than preservation of sea views. As the current government’s plans depend so much on development of offshore wind, this will make effective action to limit carbon emissions much harder to achieve, and undermine the UK’s claim to provide leadership at this December’s all-important UN climate conference in Paris.
Alan Neale
