One of the small but telling scandals of our age is the polite silence surrounding balsa wood. Not the stuff of children’s model aeroplanes, but the industrial-scale harvest that feeds the fashionable addiction to wind turbines. Balsa became the miracle ingredient of the green priesthood: light, strong, resin-friendly. And so the forests of Ecuador were stripped with the zeal of a Victorian naval yard, only without the dignity of purpose. Criminal gangs moved in, communities were gutted, and tracts of land were left as bald as a ministerial briefing note. All this so that Europe could congratulate itself on its moral cleanliness while importing a product cut from other people’s hillsides.
The turbine itself is a monument to selective blindness. One begins with a thousand tonnes of concrete—an unlovely material normally denounced by environmentalists until the moment it becomes necessary to bury it under a wind farm. Add a steel tower with a carbon footprint large enough to keep a small nation in warmth for a decade. Crown it with vast blades made from fibreglass, petrochemical resins, and the aforementioned balsa stripped from South American forests. Then transport it all by lorry, ship, and crane, every step soaked in diesel. Install it in a wind regime that fails to meet the advertised output for all but a few postcard days a year. This, we are told, is progress.
We are further assured that the “lifetime carbon payback” justifies the exercise. That is true only in the same sense that a government budget is “balanced” when one introduces assumptions about perfect weather, flawless machinery, and twenty years of uninterrupted operation. The turbine must spin at its daily optimum for two decades, the wind must behave like a Swiss railway timetable, the grid must remain stable without the usual frantic interventions, and the maintenance crews must exist in a state of immaculate readiness. The moment reality intrudes—repairs, downtime, suboptimal wind, or a cold still winter—the ledger curls up like an old leaf and deposits itself in the bin.
Then comes the end of life, that undisclosed chapter in the Book of Green Miracles. The blades cannot be recycled; they are not aluminium cans. They are thermoset composites, cured forever, doomed to burial. So they are chainsawed into pieces and entombed in vast pits, where they will outlast most of the modern political class. One wonders whether future archaeologists will conclude that the early twenty-first century worshipped giant fibreglass idols until the cult ran out of subsidies.
But the greatest deception—the one so ingrained that ministers repeat it without hesitation—is that wind replaces conventional generation. It does not. It decorates it. Behind every elegant white tower stands a gas turbine humming away like an anxious understudy, ready to spring on stage the moment the wind drops. That backup runs inefficiently, gulping fuel in stop–start cycles that nobody includes in the official figures because it ruins the story. The whole scheme resembles a child’s puppet theatre: all charm at the front, frantic scrambling behind.
Why are we investing in this? Because it is symbolic. Because it makes the correct people feel virtuous. Because it allows officials to commission glossy reports full of charts trending in pleasing directions. And because nothing flatters a modern government more than a technology which is large, visible, and useless at the precise moment one needs it.
If we possessed any genuine environmental seriousness, we would build nuclear plants and grid storage systems, and stop pretending that intermittency is a virtue. We would stop chewing through rainforest timber to construct machines that are nowhere near as green as the press releases suggest. Instead we cheer the arrival of another imported turbine, another scar on the landscape, another concrete tomb for future generations to puzzle over.
A civilisation that congratulates itself while paving fields with foreign timber and unrecyclable plastic, all in the name of purity, is not merely declining; it is losing its mind.
Verbal Alchemy 