I like green buildings. They are well built, efficient, quiet and user friendly, and are not wasteful of energy and resources. The top stuff.

I like green building consultants. In many projects, the architect’s good ideas and great plans and the engineer’s designs for having good things in a building are shot out of the sky by the project managers and the quantity surveyors, who are quite happy to spend R200 000 on the furniture in the manager’s office but skimp on the glazing and the noise control and the silencing of the air-conditioning plant. But when there is a green building consultant, things change. If no account is taken of noise and energy consumption then the green building consultant will not allow the building to have any Green Star rating, so people will know, hey, it is not that well built.

But I do not like people who claim to be green but really are not. Who draws the cloak of greenness over them to make themselves seem caring and kind? I do not like them because they are often false. Often, they are really stupid. Now its all very well to say so, well, they just have a different view from you, Mac. Which they do. But it is quite another thing when the influence of the green movement is to cost everybody money just so the green people can feel warm and comfortable, a bit like a vegetarian wearing leather shoes – quite happy to use the hide as long as somebody else eats the meat that somebody else kills.

Some things in the green movement are really stupid. Here is an example, a report from Bloomberg News: “Germany’s rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is set to worsen for a second year, the first back-to-back increase since at least the 1980s, after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to shut nuclear plants led utilities to burn more coal. The nation, which is seeking to lead European climate-protection efforts, probably will produce higher greenhouse-gas emissions in 2013.” So, that wuz cleva wazent it? Merkel did it to make the greens happy. Did she or they think that shutting down eight nuclear power stations (which produce no CO2) was going to result in the 8 000 MW generation shortfall being met by wind turbines? By hamsters in cages? By very fit hamsters in cages? Nooooo. It’s all being met by coal, which produces CO2.

Next example – Siemens’ Austrian CEO, Peter Loescher, has been given his trek pas. Has been fired. Terminated. The reason given is that a “Green energy disaster sinks CEO”, (which is how Bloomberg News headlined the story). Simply put, Siemens put about a billion euros into a solar venture with an Israeli firm and has now shut it down.

Apparently the Chinese solar panels under- cut the Siemens offers. Oh dear! But what did Siemens think? When you think ‘huge volume, simple product, simple manufacture’, do you think German? Or the Far East? So by the ‘green’ behaviour of Siemens pushing solar like mad, they set up enough of the market for the Far East to take it and now, we suspect, to dominate it and ultimately to deny any other firm access to it. Just stupid.

But, like all good operas, we have saved the best for last. When many of the environmental-impact assessments (EIAs) were tabled in the past years, one question by respondents to the EIA was: What effect will 156-m-high turbines have on surveillance radar belonging to governments and the South African National Defence Force?

The answer given by the EIA people was, in effect, we will deal with that later. But now the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has released a report that says, hello, it may be a problem. The problems that may result if a wind farm is within line of sight of an existing radar are false tracks, loss of radar tracks and high false alarm rates.

Apparently, locating a wind farm out of line sight of existing radar is a sure way to eliminate all these problems. Since the average wind turbine is 156 m high, ‘line of sight’ is a pretty far distance – about 70 km. So have the people whose turbine blades are shipping now been warned that their site may not be suitable, radarwise? Ouch!