Tilting at Windmills

Four families in southern Ontario are facing a $340,000 legal bill that they say is unfair (Globe and Mail). The four families tried to convince a judge that a windmill turbine farm proposed to be developed close to their properties would lower the value of that property and one assumes more importantly, negatively affect their health. They lost that case. Then they lost the appeal. The wind turbine companies are arguing that the families should pay their legal bills. It is, in civil cases, quite normal for the loser to have to pay the winner's legal costs. By doing so the court insures that frivolous cases are less likely to appear before them. The family are arguing that the companies are rich and can afford to pay their own bills. They also state that forcing the losing side to pay the legal bill will, in the future, scare people from taking things to court when they feel it is legitimate to do so.

I must confess that I find my feeling in this case to be quite conflicted. On one hand I can appreciate that it might be disturbing and annoying if there was a clear view, from my house, of a wind turbine farm less than a kilometre away. While the court said that there was no proof that property values would be lessened, I am not sure if I would purchase such a property. Despite the fact that the scientific community is unclear as to the potential health effects of living near a turbine farm, it is conceivable that some people would be affected by the noise. I think there is a valid argument to be made that such installations need to be positioned so that they inflict the least possible harm.

On the other hand, is this proposed installation and the resultant court case just one more example of NIMBY (not in my back yard)?  No one wants another nuclear plant built anywhere, but especially nowhere near people. No one would support another coal or oil fired generator. And apparently no one wants a number of windmills whistling in the wind anywhere near their house. Hydro electricity, while it may be the least polluting of all electrical generation systems, significantly disrupts the environment and the lives of people who live in that area. The people in that area have the right to protest.  I also suspect that many of the people who complain about having any sort of electrical generation plant built near them are also some of the same people who moan about the health dangers of being near low frequency electromagnetic fields generated by transmission lines. For those people the paradoxical desires to live nowhere near a hydro generating station and at the same time to disagree with the development of transmission lines corridors seems somewhat absurd.

In Canada our rate of use of electricity has since 2005, risen (indexmund). There is no reason to believe that we will reduce our consumption. In fact given the ever increasing number of devices that we all need to charge daily, it seems far more likely that our rate of consumption will increase. The electricity needs to come from somewhere. Either we find ways of producing it close to our major industrial/urban areas or we use large tracts of land to inefficiently and expensively move that power to those industrial/urban areas.

I believe that the individual should have the right to fight against the decisions of large corporate entities. I further believe that there are times when such actions should be supported by the state. Not because the state believes in the case but rather because the issue is important enough to be tried in public, in a formal setting. I think it is entirely possible that the cost of such litigation, unless it is supported by a third party, will become so prohibitive that people just stop trying. But I also think we need to accept that sometimes, some people are going to have to make some compromises in terms of creating a perfect life. Sometimes we need to accept that the greater public good supersedes our personal desires.

 Of course if we had government funded, legislatively supported environmental reviews that were effective and efficient maybe we would not need a court to decide. Or we could just start to use less electricity which would not solve the problem but it would somewhat alleviate it.