But the real villains here are surely the coal mining/exporting companies not the local power stations. The catastrophic damage that will be done to the planet by coal exported from Australia will earn this nation a sorry place in history if allowed to proceed unchecked.

FRANK CAMPBELL: Because you loathe wind-turbines this gives you the correct morality to endorse the current status quo? Or have I misunderstood you?

D JOHN HUNWICK: Agreed, no main-stream printed newspaper would ever print an article of the quality of Hamilton’s article. Most of the these publications are produced for a mass audience of ten year old minds. Minds which love to be informed-about the footy news and the cricket.

You do, however, have one important thing going for you. You are not governed at state level by John Brumby, a man who, somewhat mystifyingly mistakes stubbornness for wisdom. He stands squarely behind every wretched step-backward decision made in Victoria for the past ten years or so. Hence instead of it being mandatory for every building in Victoria to have rain-water tanks, he gives us a desalination plant instead. (Consider the costs of rain water tanks versus a desalination plant) This is a man who has observed fifteen years of drought, without doing anything about it until the fifteenth year. A man who is an enthusiastic fan of bringing as many people to to Victoria as is possible-pity about the concomitant lack of infrastructure-The man who has ordered the sending to Melbourne the water of the Thompson river at vast expense of the farming community and negligible water for Melbourne. I could go on especially viz-a-viz the MDB but I shall, instead, stop here.

Once again Clive Hamilton, brilliant article and if you need a protester on side, I shall be happy to oblige.

Civil disobedience is a duty - well done to all the Hazelwood protesters!

As someone who has worked on development assessment for coal mines in the past, I’m pretty suspicious of someone’s motives who bemoans the “impacts” associated with wind turbines.

I can accept that noise is a real issue. All the other impacts tend to be massively overblown - again particularly when compared with coal mines.

Just found it curious.

Couldn’t Clive have just let us know that keeping power station so-and-so open for the next 21 years will increase greenhouse gases by X%?

So we have Clive Hamilton asking for civil disobedience. What then are the ethics of ramming useless wind turbines on defenceless people? What are the ethics of wind spivs who secretly sign up rentiers and gag them contractually? What are the ethics of failing to disclose noise levels, bird kills and puny, irregular and very expensive power production? What are the ethics of government denial about the deleterious effects of wind turbines and the absence of proper planning controls and compensation? Where is the admission that wind in Europe has been a corrupt farce, with turbine-saturated states admitting GGas emissions have increased not to mention the rapid expansion of fossil fuel power stations?

People aren’t fools. Civil disobedience is spreading at the very time GG reforms are struggling to be accepted by entrenched industries. The credibility of AGW is undermined by the brutal imposition of wind turbines. Big windfarms cover hundreds of square kms. The footprint is vast. The regional economic effects serious. It isn’t “development”, but a driver of disinvestment. Solar meanwhile has been strangled at birth.

A campaign to change our genetics Clive. Admirable, good luck with that.

It will also stiffen the spine of advisers to government to know that some recommendations would constitute an International Crime against the Environment, regardless of the sentiments of the current legislature.