A recent study by the Pembina Institute found that there have been only six complaints about wind energy in the province during the 12-year period surveyed.
Wind Noise, Health, & Safety
“It is erroneous to interpret the reasons as establishing a precedent for the degree of proof required to establish a decrease in property values in these circumstances,” wrote Justice Healey in her decision. “…this court was invited to, and did, engage in a legal fiction in order to cast the plaintiffs’ case in its most favorable light. That legal fiction involved accepting, without requiring the plaintiffs to prove, that they were currently experiencing a decrease in their property values as a result of the announcement of the wind project.
No other province in Canada has a longer history with wind energy than Alberta, which has 20 years of experience with utility-scale wind farms. Yet, unlike some parts of the country, we don’t tend to hear much about it, so my colleagues and I wondered whether, in fact, we were just missing something.
Jamie Baxter from Western’s Department of Geography and his team explore the conundrum that while a relatively strong majority of rural Ontarians actually living with turbines in their farming communities (69 per cent) support them, the level of positive feedback in the control community was surprisingly low (25 per cent).
Researchers found 69% of residents surveyed in an area home to one of Ontario’s first large turbine projects support them, but support dropped to 25% in a community that didn’t have turbines, said Jamie Baxter, a geography professor at Western University.
One of the B-movie monsters of wind energy that hasn’t lurched out of the woodshed recently, the splitting maul still stuck in its thick skull, is the favoured meme that somehow the World Health Organization (WHO) has agreed that wind energy causes health issues and has issued proclamations against it, or favouring extraordinary setbacks.
The Senate today passed a motion by Greens Health Spokesperson, Dr Richard Di Natale, calling on the Australian Vaccination Network to disband and to cease its “harmful and unscientific scare campaign against vaccines”.
Expectations can make you ill. Fear can make you fragile. Understanding the nocebo effect may help prevent this painful phenomenon.
Assessing the quality of medical literature is challenging. Assessing the quality of wind energy and health related literature is easier, because the number of people publishing in the field is smaller, and their often very strong biases and very significant conflicts of interest are well known and easy to discover. The weaknesses of the base material of those concluding wind farms cause health problems is also easy to assess and confirm.
It is one of the most comprehensive collection of conspiracy theories I have seen in a while. The site itself offers a fascinating study of how conspiracy theorists operate – and, potentially, tells us a little bit about climate skepticism and wind farm health fears.
