UNBELIEVABLE TRUTHS
Our best friends in the whole wide world, the Stop Botley West campaign, had a really good think about all of the things which worried them about the Botley West solar farm, and have written ten whole articles which go into loads of detail and which wouldn't at all be embarrassing had a fourteen-year-old written them. They can be found here. Because Stop Botley West are so smart and so clever and have a lot more education than us, we had a really good look at them so we could learn from what we were absolutely certain would be their brilliant insights.
Sadly, despite them having so many brains their skulls can barely keep them in their headbones, we spotted a few teensy-tiny errors, misrepresentations, and what some rude people might call lies. Not us though, we have complete belief that Stop Botley West act in good faith at all times, and we're sure that that time they went to a public forum in Witney and gave some climate denier talking points was just an example of them playing 4D chess.
1. No one's ever built a solar farm this big near houses before. This should never change: any large scale measures to respond to climate change should be small and unobtrusive, and ideally about a hundred miles away from us (Learn More)
2. It will remove thousands of tons of food each year at a time of food insecurity! If things are this bad with just climate change, think how much worse it'll be if we have fewer crop fields on top! (Learn More)
3. Large scale solar ‘farms’ are inefficient, and we have better options which don't need to be based on land near our lovely houses (Learn More)
4. Solar panels deliver no biodiversity gains or natural gains for wildlife or the environment. (Learn More)
5. Botley West may never pay back the carbon debt it accumulates in construction and removal; there is a huge amount of carbon generated just in the production of the panels. (Learn More)
6. Botley West will devastate areas around a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which definitely isn't something we're clinging to, given that most of the time we hate Blenheim Palace and everything they do. Nope, we've definitely got their best interests at heart. (Learn More)
7. Solar Panels will be highly visible when we peer through the hedges, and not even the slightest bit made of magic invisible materials. (Learn More)
8. 40 years is NOT TEMPORARY! We are absolutely shitting bricks that at some point in the future someone might look at the land near our houses and build on it, and this might happen in 40 years. (Learn More)
9. It will bring no direct benefits to us at all. Living in a world with more clean energy and fewer emissions is far too woke for us (Learn More)
10. The only people who benefit aren't us. Finally, this is our political manifesto: in this final article, Stop Botley West call for a nationalised energy system and state-run renewable power generation. Or something. We don't know, we've had to read a lot and it's all gone over our heads. (Learn More)