http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/news/local/cutting_carbon_is_one_way_of_creating_jobs_1_4213849

If you want to read the Calderdale Council documents about Calderdale’s Energy Future they’re downloadable here

Calderdale Councillors decided on Wednesday 15th Feb to accept this draft strategy. I think they should have sent it back to the drawing board, to do some more work on key proposals that are likely to be contentious – for example, large scale commercial windfarms and biomass energy (ie energy from burning wood and other organic materials, including energy crops and various forms of waste).

Biomass Plant in Slough - and I'm not quoting John Betjemen's "Come glorious bombs and rain on Slough..."

I think Councillors would have done well to think these through a bit more carefully before accepting the Strategy. As it is, the Working Group which the Council will set up to figure out how to turn the vision into actions will now have to work out if these – and all the other possible measures – are feasible and acceptable to the public.

Or maybe the fact that the Council has accepted the Strategy means that it takes public consent as read, for all the possible ways of reducing carbon emissions that the Strategy identifies? Including large scale commercial wind farms and biomass? So all the Working Group will have to do is figure out if the proposals are feasible (no one’s yet done that work, says Calderdale’s Environment Officer Emma Appleton), and then decide how, when, where, and by whom they are carried out. Basically a technocratic exercise.

And the whole thing sidesteps any kind of real democratic process.

This is what it looks like anyway. As ever, if people know otherwise, I’m happy to be corrected.