DOMINIC LAWSON: Most people support the idea of net zero, until they’re faced with the prospect of giant turbines or an army of pylons wrecking their views

How much is a beautiful view worth? When it comes to buying a home, a lovely aspect can mean almost everything — you need only read through estate agents’ particulars or look at the huge premium commanded by coastal properties.

But a beautiful landscape cannot be given a precise monetary value, and it’s not just a matter for property owners.

The notion of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ — as the popular hymn puts it — is at the heart of what countless millions of adults treasure (with a strong element of nostalgia) about this country.

And if you were to ask them what it means to ‘protect the environment’, they would probably define it as preserving this vista.

Yet in the world of policy-making, this is not the case. In recent years, governments and environmental lobby groups have become as one in defining everything in terms of CO2 emissions.

Global warming is the fixation, and all policies are judged according to the extent to which they contribute (allegedly) to mitigating it.

Giant solar farms could be built in Britain in future. Pictured is the Darling Downs solar farm near Dalby in Queensland, Australia

Toxic

To this purpose — without beginning to quantify the costs or the feasibility — the British government, under Theresa May, passed a law mandating so-called ‘net zero carbon’ by 2050.

It is the need to meet this requirement that lies behind other laws now causing increasing consternation, as the clock ticks down.

It will be illegal to buy a new car which is not substantially electrically powered after 2030, for example; and homeowners off the gas grid (such as the Lawsons, as it happens) will not be allowed to buy a new oil boiler after 2025, but must instead purchase heat pumps.

Then there is the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zones (Ulez) into the outer reaches of the capital, as mandated by the London Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.

Protestors in the Roman village of Silchester, Hampshire, where there are plans to build a solar farm the size of 120 football pitches in the countryside. They are pictured in August last year

It was widespread opposition to this in the parliamentary constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip which enabled the Tories to retain the seat at the by-election last month, when all the national trends pointed to a Labour victory.

This was especially toxic (in the political sense) because Sadiq Khan’s proposal to levy heavy penalties on older diesel cars and vans would bear down on the least well-off vehicle owners.

But these revolts against the climate change consensus among policy-makers will be as nothing to those which will face the government (most likely a Labour one under Keir Starmer) as it attempts to enforce the inevitable consequence of the commitment to replace fossil fuel energy with electrification based on renewable sources.

It will confront, head on, this nation’s love of its beautiful countryside and heart-felt idea of what ‘preserving the environment’ really means.

 Electricity pylons run across Romney Marsh in Kent from Dungeness nuclear power station

This, or at least the physical reality of what such a policy would involve, was set out with startling clarity in 2011 by the late David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to what was then the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

David Cameron had come to power a year earlier, having rebranded the Conservatives with a tree logo, and as Opposition leader had ferociously whipped his MPs to vote for Ed Miliband’s 2008 Bill mandating an 80 per cent cut in UK CO2 emissions by 2050.

MacKay, a professor of physics and author of the book Sustainable Energy — Without The Hot Air, was no opponent of the then-government’s commitment to move from fossil fuels to renewables, but that year he delivered a lecture to the Royal Society setting out what would happen to our countryside if a government were to meet its objectives.

Royd Moor Wind Farm in Sheffield

He pointed out that renewable energy is ‘inherently diffuse’, so that huge tracts of land were needed to generate the required amounts of kilowatts.

Quoting his book, MacKay told his audience: ‘Let’s be realistic. What fraction of the country can we really imagine covering with windmills? Maybe 10 per cent?

‘If we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the country with windmills, we would be able to generate 20 kilowatt hours per day per person.’

Neglect

But this, as he went on to point out, was not even a sixth of what the average Briton actually used.

Taking solar into account as well, MacKay concluded: ‘Whatever mix of renewables you take, they all deliver about 2.5 watts per square metre.

‘It means the total land area occupied by renewable energy sources to supply today’s lifestyle would be about half the United Kingdom.’

Traffic passes a sign for the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) near Hanger Lane in West London

Nuclear power, by contrast — which is entirely CO2-free — produces about 1,000 watts per square metre: but successive governments have been scandalously remiss in their neglect of that industry. And also of our shale gas resources, partly on the grounds that they are a fossil fuel.

Yet in terms of disfiguring the countryside, consider this: to produce the same amount of energy as a single shale gas site, you will need a wind farm 725 times the size or a solar farm 460 times larger (and gas, unlike wind or solar, does not depend on having ‘the right weather’).

Now we see the consequences, exemplified by the experience of Jaqueline Wright and her husband, who thought they had found the home of their dreams 15 years ago in rural Worcestershire. But with the construction of a 90-acre ‘solar farm’ in their vicinity, they told the Sunday Times last week of the sudden change in their once idyllic vista: ‘It was all green fields, cattle and crops. Now it’s all solar panels — a sea of grey.’

People take part in a protest against the Ulez expansion in Orpington, South East London

Better get used to it: this is the future, though on a much vaster scale. Many thousands of acres, not just 90.

The next generation of onshore wind farms — which Labour say they are committed to introducing, in contrast to the Conservative embargo on them when Cameron realised the local opposition to his idea of ‘greenery’— may be more productive per acre than when Professor MacKay gave his forecast.

But that is because the turbines have become so colossal. As an anti-wind farm campaigner, Lyn Jenkins, said of the latest proposal for them in her part of rural Wales: ‘With the turning circle they have, it would be like 20 Blackpool Towers revolving simultaneously.

The late David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to what was then the Department of Energy and Climate Change, observed that half the landmass of the UK would need be covered with wind and solar farms to supply the country with its existing energy needs from renewables 

‘More, in fact, as they are larger. And they will be lit up to prevent air ambulances and rescue helicopters crashing into them. It will be devastating, and yet the people of North Wales are asleep about what is happening.’

Hypocrisy

The people of East Anglia are certainly not asleep about what is about to happen as a result of the massive electrification programme.

Last November, the head of National Grid, John Pettigrew, said: ‘We will need to build about seven times as much infrastructure in the next seven to eight years than we built in the last 32.’

EDF’s Sizewell B nuclear power station in Suffolk

We are talking about new pylons, on a monstrous scale. And the residents of East Anglia are in uproar about the plans to run 50m-high pylons across their countryside, including the edge of Dedham Vale, immortalised in the masterpieces of the artist John Constable.

In a piece for the Conservative Home website, Richard Rout, deputy leader of Suffolk County Council, observed of the East Anglian scene: ‘In the recent West Depwade county council by-election, the Green Party made another gain in an area impacted by the proposed pylons.

‘The hypocrisy of the Green Party is mind-boggling. They at once extol the virtues of renewable energy, and then seemingly oppose any attempt to produce or transmit it.’

Former prime minister David Cameron realised local opposition to his idea of ‘greenery’

Hypocrisy, indeed. But it is a national hypocrisy, in the sense that the British public indicates, in opinion polls, that they are largely (though less so than previously) in favour of ‘net zero’; but when the reality of what that will cost them becomes clear, they oppose the very measures designed to achieve what they say they support.

This is often described as nimbyism, with justification. But, in the words attributed to the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, ‘Tip’ O’Neill, all politics is local.

What that means, in this context, is that if any political party thinks that voters will tolerate the desecration of their local view, even if they are told it is for the sake of global environmental concerns, then it is deluded.