Green and mean: The environmental downside of clean energy

YOU can understand the frustration on both sides. Environmentalists worldwide are clamouring for bold action to end the burning of fossil fuels and plug the world into renewables. Politicians throw their weight behind a $14 billion scheme that would replace the equivalent of eight coal-fired power stations with tidal power. What do they get for their pains? Green outrage.

"This massively damaging proposal cannot be justified," said Graham Wynne, chief of the UK's normally staid Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Friends of the Earth said it was "not the answer". What is going on here? Have greens lost the plot? Has environmentalism been hijacked by big construction companies?

Or do we simply have to learn that even 'environmental' energy comes at an environmental cost?

The problem is one of scale. Bigness is often an issue for greens, many of whom grew up reading one of the movement's key texts: E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. They liked biofuel while it was about recycling cooking fat, but not when it became growing millions of hectares of palm oil in former Borneo rainforest. Solar panels on roofs are good, but covering entire deserts with them is another matter. They like small wind turbines and even small wind farms, but get very jumpy as wind power reaches industrial scale.

Small may be beautiful, but it won't change the world. You can't generate vast amounts of green energy without large-scale engineering projects, which inevitably do some damage to the natural environment...

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