My own background is strongly Scots-Irish and German.  I can tell you from history, the history of Scotland and the history of my own family, that if there’s one thing the Scots are good at, it’s rebelling.  Of late Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, seems to be something of the poor stepchild in that relationship.  But now we are heartened to see the Scots rebelling again – this time over the ir own country’s mandates over heat pumps.

A group of Scottish politicians is warning that the government’s plan to force households to install heat pumps by 2033 is not feasible in rural areas, The Telegraph reports. 

Four members of parliament from different parties, all representing rural areas of Scotland, have signed a letter calling for an “urgent review” of the SNP-Green government’s proposal to require households to install electric-powered heat pumps.

Scottish buildings minister Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, introduced a reforms package to “decarbonise” Scotland’s homes and bring them in line with “new energy efficiency standards no later than 2033.” His proposed reforms of the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating system may even make it impossible to sell a home that does not have a heat pump system installed. 

Already in 2021, Scotland’s energy minister admitted that installing a heat pump in a home would cost about £10,000 and be more expensive to run than a fossil fuel boiler, which costs approximately £2,500 to install. But in rural areas, the costs of installing a heat pump are estimated to soar to as much as £32,000.

It’s nothing new, of course, for pols with agendas and who hail from heavily urbanized areas to ignore the wants and needs of rural folks.  As evidence look here in the U.S. at the Imperial City’s push for electric cars, which may be practical for a big-city commuter but sure as hell not for those of us who live in rural environments, especially with sub-zero winter temperatures.

Some Scots MPs are pushing back.

All this has led a small group of rural Scottish lawmakers to come together against the planned reforms.

The letter to the Scottish government, seen by The Telegraph, demands a thorough rethinking of the proposal. It was crafted by Fergus Ewing, a former SNP government cabinet secretary, and signed by Labour and Tory MSPs. Ewing told The Telegraph, 

By seeking to reform EPCs and forcing rural homeowners to rely on electrified heating alone from 2025, the Scottish Government is taking an approach to decarbonisation that will pose a serious risk to those living in remote areas.

Not only does it threaten to burden off-grid property owners with overwhelming costs, but it also leaves them vulnerable to extreme-weather-induced power outages and disregards the realities of inefficient rural and islands’ electricity grids and infrastructure.

Douglas Lumsden, the Scottish Tory shadow energy minister, another signatory of the letter, called the proposals “deeply unfair on Scotland’s rural communities”:

If we are to reach net zero, we need to do so in a way that is fair, affordable, and which offers choice to Scottish homeowners. Given the timescales involved, ministers must urgently review these proposals.

It’s doubtful that rural Scottish dwellers will start painting their faces with woad, sharpening their claymores, blowing the dust out of their bagpipes and forming up for battle.  But expect to see more of this.  We face many similar issues here in the States, where those of us who live in rural areas are either ignored or are having our chosen lifestyles downright threatened by big-city pols.  Our own representatives are badly outnumbered and even the ones who speak for us honestly are drowned out in the urban noise.

We can continue, of course, to push back through the usual channels, as these Scottish pols are doing.  But more and more, I think you’ll see a lot of folks out here in the hinterlands just ignore the finger-wagging.  One can already see a fair amount of this here in the Great Land, where (outside of Anchorage and Juneau, at any rate) the populace in general are some of the most “buzz off and leave us alone” types you’re liable to find anywhere.

And so one side continues to try to interfere, while the other tries to ignore them.  Sooner or later something is going to break.

The concomitant stupidity of “wind power” on grid-scale just keeps getting more and more obvious to anyone that’s paying attention.  Here Issues & Insights points out some of the more obvious issues:

There are a number of problems with wind farms:

• They eat up far more land than any of the conventional forms of energy production, as well as nuclear. It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres. Bryce pointed out in a paper he wrote for the Center of the American Experiment that it would take the land equal to two entire Californias “to meet America’s current electricity needs with wind energy.”
• Due to rising costs and logistical headaches, “developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions,” the Wall Street Journal reports. It’s “an industry in crisis.”
• Wind turbines, writes energy consultant Ronald Stein, “are now becoming an eyesore, a hazard, and a significant environmental threat” in a policy piece that asks if wind farms generate more waste than they do electricity.
• Wind farms have to be built in open spaces where power isn’t needed. Moving the electricity to where it’s eventually used destroys the landscape in between.
• In Scotland, 16 million trees, each one of them with their names surely written on every environmentalists’ hearts, have been felled to open ground on which to build wind farms.
• The late physicist David MacKay, who said “you know I love wind turbines,” believed that building wind farms is “actually a waste of money.”
• Even the government is an obstacle. Reason reported not quite a year ago that “construction on what could be a massive offshore wind farm in Massachusetts has been held up for years due to” federal reviews.

Now, author and reformer Michael Shellenberger is documenting how off-shore wind farms are killing whales.  Have a look:

Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022. This is not normal.

The government says it’s not because of the wind industry’s high decibel pile driving & boat traffic in previously pristine waters. They’re lying. And now we have the proof. pic.twitter.com/7BcVrgz04X

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 13, 2023

Holy crap!

If nothing else turned the public off of these massive wind-turbine farms – aside from the expense (oh, and all the materials that can only be sourced from fossil fuels) and the difficulty in disposing of the turbine blades when their useful lives are up, is the massive footprint these things require to develop power on a scale that’s even remotely adequate for the power grid.

This isn’t just a boondoggle.  It is fraud on a massive scale.  Look at that first bullet point:  “It takes a 6.7 million acre wind farm to produce the same amount of power that a nuclear plant could on 230,000 acres and a natural gas plant will on 150,000 acres.”

But there’s hope:

(Energy author Robert) Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of ​​solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.

Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”

Let’s hope this trend continues.  We live in a time where the nation is trillions in debt, our fiscal rating keeps slipping, Congresscritters of both parties have abandoned even the pretense of fiscal restraint, and yet the Imperial and state governments keep subsidizing and promoting this horseshit.

Enough is enough.  Let’s hope the resistance to this keeps on growing.  If private businesses or homeowners want to try wind and/or solar on their own property, fine; they are welcome to do so at their own cost, then we’ll see if they can prove efficiency or even capability in the market place.  There are in fact a few people wop know here in the Great Land who are off-grid and depend on solar (and Diesel generators) for power.  That’s fine – their choice, their responsibility.

But it’s pretty well established now that grid-scale wind power isn’t viable.