"Renewable Energy Foundation" is anti-renewable front group

[bananas]

A new article in the Guardian about this sleazy front group:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/may/18/renewable-energy-foundation-wind-farm

Will the real Renewable Energy Foundation please stand up?
The Renewable Energy Foundation says it is not against windfarms, but its critics disagree

Posted by Leo Hickman Wednesday 18 May 2011 12.24 BST

Will the real Renewable Energy Foundation please stand up? This is a question being asked with increasing intensity within the UK's renewable energy sector.

The REF styles itself on its website as "a registered charity promoting sustainable development for the benefit of the public by means of energy conservation and the use of renewable energy", but some prominent voices within the industry have long felt that the charity is little more than a front for anti-wind lobbyists. For example, newspapers that routinely run anti-windfarm stories, such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, often turn to REF for helpful statistics and quotes.

The REF's critics believe its name is misleading and they want it to be open and transparent about its real "agenda". The public face adopted by REF today does certainly seem very different to the one it nurtured when it launched in 2004. As this Guardian article shows, the tone used at the launch event was one that was openly hostile to the wind industry. Its then chairman, the broadcaster and vocal anti-wind campaigner Noel Edmonds, and chief executive Campbell Dunford spoke of the "grotesque political push" for a technology that was helping to cause the "industrialisation of the countryside".

In the years since its launch, REF has modified its tone and made a point of regularly stating that it is not "anti-wind". For example, in 2007 there was an exchange of views in this paper between Polly Toynbee and John Constable, REF's director of policy and research, in which Constable said:

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Sourcewatch has an article about this sleazy front group:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Renewable_Energy_Foundation

The Renewable Energy Foundation is a front group or a think tank opposed to the widespread introduction of wind farms.<1>

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This was pointed out on DU back in 2008 by OKIsItJustMe:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=159831&mesg_id=159831

<snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Energy_Foundation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) (founded 2004) is a United Kingdom based lobby group whose main activity is campaigning against wind turbines. The group funds reports which typically show renewable energy technologies to have inferior performance, be expensive, or unreliable, and advocate abandoning existing public support schemes for renewables.

According to the Guardian (July 15, 2004), REF is backed by ‘anonymous wealthy individuals and hopes to gather the 80 or so groups opposing wind farms around the country’.

[Name removed]

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[kristopher]

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