I think it would be an excellent idea to force golf courses to put up wind power generators. This could go towards an overall carbon neutrality and make up for all the car journeys to them and the power and water resources used to maintain them.

An aspect of crazy golf would put some much needed humour back into a game taken far too seriously... Plus it would add an additional aspect of difficulty to the long par 5s if you had to time your tee off to miss the blades of the wind generator.

I doubt a load of surfers can.

Still, that's not a bad suggestion of putting windmills on golf courses.

Wouldn't all the trees all over every golf course already settle their carbon debt in terms of emissions from cars driving to the course? Mind you, they could always sell the extra carbon credit from running windmills to other companies, not to mention the profit gained from putting energy into the power grid!

But then, can you see the likes of Tiger Woods putting up with the VERY loud "whumpf, whumpf" noise of a wind farm at St. Andrews while he's trying to putt on the 18th hole?

Wave power might just help make up for the CO2 pumped into the air by all those noisy (air cooled) VW camper vans so beloved of surfers. You know, the ones with the uniform tie-dye sheets blowing out of the side door on the beach.

So surfers want to hinder the progress of (relatively) clean energy because it spoils their hobby?

It's an obvious question but still a valid one: what do they propose as an alternative? We all use energy so we've all got a responsibility to deal with the consequences of that energy use.

No, trees on golf courses will not offset fossil fuel emissions from vehicles driving to them. Trees don't magic away CO2 to another dimension, they merely store carbon, and when they die and rot away or are burnt, the CO2 is released again. If burning is used to replace the burning of fossil fuels (such as using a wood-burning stove rather than a gas boiler), then theoretically you get a benefit, but think of all the fossil fuel used to harvest and transport the wood.

And anyway, golf courses have acres of grass which was probably covered with trees before they were built.

Matthew Marks

You gotta be kidding. The whole point of golf courses is that they comprise acres of expensively manicured grass which *doesn't* have trees on it. Of course some have pitiful clusters of trees around them, but that doesn't exactly make a productive carbon 'sink'.

As for the 'VERY LOUD' wind farms - have you actually seen one? The enormous wind farm on Gran Canaria for example is virtually inaudible when we visit a relative who lives nearby.

What I can't figure is, how come every time a company looks at doing a project like this - they always seem to decide from the outset that they're going to do it right where someone else has a conflicting interest. Whatever happened to the 'planning' stage in project management?

Sean.

I live in Denmark. There are windmills all over the place, so listen to someone that has actually lived near a wind farm. I can see a bunch of them beyond the end of our road. They're mounted about 1km offshore but visible between the buildings.

They are exuisitely graceful and elegant because of the way the blades spin slightly out of sync with each other. An array of white windmills, sails rotating against a blue sky gives you that warm fuzzy feeling of harnessing the power of nature without spilling out ghastly waste products.

You can only hear them if you get right up close and then they make a wonderful deep-toned 'swoosh'. Most people who complain about the aesthetics of wind farms have never been anywhere near one. Anyone who appreciates the aesthetics of golf should 'dig' wind farms. They look so clean, and they operate in complete safety even when unattended.

Compare with a nuke plant or a CHP installation: Chimneys, smoke haze, cooling towers, high security fences, the accumulation of dangerous waste products, ugly, monstrous architecture which doesn't even move, and which (in the case of nukes) are always at risk of causing major disasters, genetic mutations, cancer and so on if not continually supervised. (That makes them ideal terrorist targets too. Would Al Qaeda be interested in blowing up a windmill?)

They key word here is British *Isles* - i.e. surrounded by WAVES. Not using them for energy is absurd. Plenty of wind too, and I'm not just talking about the warm guff breezing out of the politicians mouths.

If wave farms are even one tenth as elegant as wind farms, I'm almost sold on the aesthetics alone.

They aren't protesting the wave power project. They are protesting *about* it.

Don't they already have these? I was playing a course just last week with a windmill. It wasn't so bad... The next hole where you had to shoot the ball up the ramp into the clown's mouth was a lot harder.