In a recent post here at Allegheny Treasures we spoke of Mr. Jon Boone’s 2009 participation in the development of The Charter of Palermo.  Readers may recall that, at the invitation of the Sicilian government, Mr. Boone, an intervenor in two MDPSC wind hearings and author of many publications about wind technology, joined more than thirty other speakers from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and Britain to present at an  international industrial wind conference entitled, “The Landscape Under Attack.”

The conference’s keynote speaker, Valery Giscard d’ Estaing, former president of France, called for strong measures throughout Europe to protect the continent’s essential cultural landscape heritage. He was followed by Raffaelo Lombardo, Sicily’s president, who vowed to keep his region safe from what a prominent Sicilian journalist, in the conference’s wake, called the “leprosy of wind.” Carlo Ripa di Meana, former Italian minister of the environment and current president of Italia Nostra, the oldest and most influential Italian conservation organization, organized the event and served as its host.  Other speakers included leaders from Italy’s nature and conservation groups, politicians such as the mayor of Salemi, a small town in southwestern Sicily, and energy experts from the University of Rome.

On the first day, Boone gave a lecture entitled, Wind Technology is Overblown, in which he demonstrated that wind can only provide supplementary energy (not power), which itself requires a lot of supplementation, in the process subverting the technology’s ability to offset meaningful levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The next day, he showed his documentary, Life Under a Windplant, which he made as part of his MDPSC testimony. All presentations were translated simultaneously in English and Italian.

The conference concluded with a Charter, a statement of purpose, which called for an immediate moratorium on wind development, a thorough examination of its costs and benefits, and protection in perpetuity for the landscape’s cultural heritage.

In today’s ever vigilant National Wind Watch, they posted a small article from the English edition of Athens based Kathimerini online.  The article, “Wind farms bill stirs up conservationists” is very significant in that it speaks of the objections raised by 174 conservation groups against a draft bill facilitating the construction of wind farms were aired at a press conference in Athens yesterday.

The article continues: “If this bill passes in its current form, we will see wind parks in national parks,” said Martinos Gaetlich of the Hellenic Society for the Protection of the Environment and Cultural Heritage. The society says the draft bill does not consider the fact that the country’s islands have very sensitive ecosystems. Those opposed to the bill are also concerned about infrastructure – roads, power lines etc – that would accompany the construction of wind farms. “If we want to turn our mountains into factories, then we can forget about biodiversity,” said Stavros Xirouhakis of the Natural History Museum of Crete.

AT NOTE:  The significant growth of industrial wind and its intrusion into the culture and environment of Europe should not be lost on the United States.  The push for rapid deployment of these huge and ineffective machines to achieve artificial political goals in the US is putting the environment, wildlife and our personal bank accounts in jeopardy, with little to show for the disruption.

Mr. Boone’s presentation and The Charter of Palermo are repeated here for your convenience:

Mr. Boone’s speech – Wind Energy is Overblown – as presented in Palermo in 2009, is provided for your convenience. A slide presentation to accompany the speech can be found immediately following the text.  The red numbers in the text correspond to slide numbers. You can download a text version without numbers here.:

Mr. Boone’s slide presentation which accompanied his remarks (modified to fit presentation format):

The resulting Charter of Palermo: