The Idiot Wind Blows No Good

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads headin' south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot, babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe

Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind" is an appropriate anthem for the latest comments by Australia's Prime Minister concerning wind farms. After describing them as "visually awful" he followed up with the conspiratorial remarks that "Up close, they're ugly, they're noisy and they may have all sorts of other impacts".

Of course, aesthetics is subjective, and taste is the only accounting of taste. Perhaps Tony Abbott is being quite honest when he says that he finds wind farms 'ugly'. Almost everyone who heard the remarks, with the possible exception of the feckless Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce, immediately thought of a comparison between the relative ugliness of coal power versus wind farms (with The Guardian conducting a rather one-sided poll).

But the aesthetic side is merely a distraction. Abbott's complaints, coming from his visit to Rottnest Island in Western Australia, turned out to be the first complaint about the wind turbine ever received. Even if wind turbines were silent and looked like trees Abbott would still find an excuse to criticise them.

Because ultimately it's not about wind turbines. It's about renewable energy targets. Abbott is, in his heart, a denier of climate change, as famously reported: I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change (ABC 7.30 Report), The argument [behind climate change] is absolute crap. (The Australian). The aesthetic condemnation and the implication of health effects (even if soundly rejected by health professionals) is about his wedge politics on the issue.

On an even wider level however, one can only wonder how it is that Australia has ended up with such a bumbling buffoon as Prime Minister, and for how long we have to put up with this? Politicians should be utterly condemned when voicing mere opinion and speculation contrary to scientific evidence. Their role should be to implement public policy on the available of the best available evidence. Policy needs to be derived from the facts, not the other way around. Whilst the universe may not care what a silly person believes, when that silly person has power we do have a situation.