Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Windfarms Beneath My Wings

‘It’s harder to take on an entire worldview than it is to correct a few made-up talking points.’ This is the quote I found in an article in The Conversation in August this year titled, ‘Why windfarms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory’. I had googled, ‘why do windfarms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy?’ It was a pretty accurate response.

Just so you know, a windfarm made me google this. To be precise, the Rampion Offshore Windfarm, located offshore from Brighton Beach in the UK.

I recently made a post on Facebook after visiting there and staying at said beach. The windfarm is only visible on a clear day, and anyone who has visited the UK knows that clear blue days aren’t that common. But I cracked one, and the beach I’d been looking at for two days suddenly revealed – almost as if it had been installed overnight – a windfarm! It felt magical. Now you see it, now you don’t. Ironically, it’s not just the weather, it’s the added emissions from fossil fuels in the form of air pollution that creates the haze that disappears this renewable energy source. (BTW, it’s hard to disappear an open cut coal mine in a wind fog. They are conveniently placed out of public view so people forget how massive and ugly they are).

I took a photo of said windfarm and put up a post. This is exactly what I said, ‘I love seeing a city committed to renewable energy. It makes me question why we are so slow on the uptake. This is Rampion Offshore Windfarm: located off the coast near Brighton, this windfarm generates renewable electricity for the region, contributing significantly to the UK’s offshore wind capacity. Stop the fossil fuel misinformation and get with the program.’

With Australia already hitting 1.5 degree warming, and international agreement amongst climate scientists that we are facing catastrophic climate change, and our quest to hit ‘net zero’ by mid-century being fraught with problems caused by policy created by successive governments funded by the fossil-fuel industry, it’s clear to me, and other people who believe scientists over bots, that we are in trouble. It seemed a relatively innocuous post. It was on my private Facebook page. Not a political page. It was for my ‘friends’. You know – the people who share my views and values. But it didn’t go there.

Thanks to the massive algorithmic spends by third-party groups like Advance and Better Australia, even as a failed candidate on a holiday with her family, I remain in their sights. Well at least still rolling around in the wash of bots and crazy anti-renewable conspiracists they farmed with their big fossil-fuel donations.

I got 1,500 comments on that post. I have a very engaged Facebook page – my posts can get from 20 to 120 comments, tops. Not 1,500. That’s ridiculous. It was a cesspit of angry men looking for a fight. Scaring people. It’s violence. I won’t engage with insane talking points from people who have a Trumpian worldview. Something in the article I found relayed as ‘bound up with identity’. In some corners of the online ‘manosphere’, concerns over climate change are being painted as effeminate. So it’s more violence against women.

Those who have profited from the fossil fuel industry refuse to recognise, and therefore reconcile with, the damage they have done. Instead, people who will be adversely affected by climate change, like the rest of us, are corralled into online hate groups because that’s how oligarchs protect themselves. While governments use citizen soldiers to fight their wars, billionaires use idiots on Facebook who have no vested interest in defending fossil fuels – except that now it’s been made a culture war. And instead of hating the people who are the real reason they are powerless and their lives are fucked – the billionaires and the massive corporations – they fight for them, and they hate the people who want a better future. For everybody and everything. It’s diabolical. But if you are a tyrannical oligarch profiting from the oil industry, then it’s evil-genius brilliant.

A man holding a baby recently called me a ‘bird killer’. What do you even say to that? That poor baby. If I’m being compassionate I’d think, ‘that poor man. He’s captured’.

So I took the post down. I won’t amplify their bullshit. I noted it also existed on Instagram in duplicate form. It had no comments there. How can the same post on one platform get 1,500 comments, and on another get none? That’s misinformation in action. It tells people: ‘Don’t speak up’. It frightens people into submission. It makes you feel like it’s hopeless.

That’s how you know you are a threat.

That’s what keeps me going.

So here’s that picture of the windfarm…

The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.