The Renewable Energy Foundation are an interesting campaign group. They are pro-renewable, but anti-windfarm. While their concern about carbon emissions are genuine, they seem excessively opposed to wind, while citing tidal power, solar power and biofuels as alternatives. But tidal power is a technology that needs a couple more decades to become viable, solar power is next to useless in a country with so little sun in winter, when it most needs it, and biofuels need plenty of resouces - to produce the 12GW of electrical power needed to reach the government’s 2010 renewable target (of just 10% of our power being generated by renewables), at 200 GJ per hectare per year (a rough estimate of grown biofuels’ capability), we’d need 1.89 million hectares of land - that’s nearly a third the UK’s current arable farmland. The 5000 wind turbines needed would only take up 120,000 hectares.

So being pro-renewable and anti-wind doesn’t leave much room for manoeuvre, really, which is why perhaps they advocate the highly renewable option of, er, scraping as much North Sea oil as we can and relying on CO₂ sequestration, another technology that is still in early stages, to cover for it.

Alright, they could just be concerned citizens who object to windfarms for aesthetic reasons (while being more than happy to see our countryside turned into a giant oilseed rape factory), but given they’re backed by “anonymous wealthy individuals” (the only prominent one being Noel Edmonds), it makes one suspicious. I get even more suspicious when you find out David White, the author of their scientific report on the inefficacy of windfarms, is an oil refinery expert who spent over 30 years with Exxon. The report itself is scaremongering, although individual windturbines are variable in output, that variability is balanced across the system (especially over a large landmass like the UK), and no data are given to show how much ‘backup’ from coal-fired power stations, that supposedly will wipe out the carbon savings, is actually needed.

I’m not excessively pro-windfarm - it’s unlikely they can provide more than 20% of our electricity without becoming costly, and the REF are right in saying that electricity generation (the largest emission producer) is only part of the solution - reducing emissions from transport and improving energy efficiency, while investing innovation in other renewable technologies, are also important. Windfarms are one part of a multi-threaded approach, but are still an essential part - we are the windiest country in Europe, the technology is mature (Denmark, a far less windy country than us, gets 18% of its power from wind) and you cannot ditch windfarms when there is no viable short-term alternative to producing energy without producing CO₂ emissions.

“Today’s decision is a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry.”

The decision to allow a a Muslim pupil, Shabin Begum, to wear the full jilbab to school worries me. I believe that rather than the policy of tolerance it is made out to be, it’s a micrcosm of a bigger problem, namely the legitimisation of religious extremists as representatives.

The school in this case has been made out to be some sort of intolerant, racist, anti-Muslim body, when actually it was quite tolerant - it allowed Muslim girl pupils to wear trousers, tunic and headscarf, which easily satisfies the Qu’ran’s guidelines on covering the body apart from the hands and face. The school was more than happy to compromise the rules on school uniform to fit with those laid out in scripture, but this compromise wasn’t enough for an extreme conservative like Ms Begum, who wanted nothing more than full surrender.

To claim this is a victory for all Muslims like she has is erroneous, since not all Muslims wish to subscribe to such an extreme interpretation of the rules; many are able to live their life under more moderate rules, and wear more moderate styles of dress, and still feel happy that it squares with holy scripture (or maybe it’s just the Muslims I know). This decision lets conservative Muslims the ‘right’ to speak on behalf of all Muslims, when there is little evidence that they have this right of representation.

OK, how a schoolgirl dresses is pretty small in the great scheme of things. But a much bigger issue is the new legislation on banning ‘religious hatred’, which follows exactly the same lines. As Nick Cohen has pointed out, by privileging religion, an highly variable and contingent quality, as the factor that defines people, it lumps all followers of a faith together and empowers the most devout and extreme religious figures to assume that they speak for all of them.

Why have we got into this situation? Because Labour keep on passing shitty anti-terror laws, like letting the state imprison people without trial, which will inevitably be used to target and victimise Muslims, moderate and conservative, in Britain. Rather than reconsider these mistakes, they decide that the best way of remedying this is to pass more shitty laws, in an attempt to appease the affected, or rather, to appease the most extreme and vociferous of the affected. State tyranny is being excused by pandering to religious tyranny.

Last night (having had to delay the relaunch while biting my nails watching Manuel Almunia’s unlikely ascent to hero status), I was in too much of a hurry to properly credit some of the extra things on the site to other people, but I should, so I will. I don’t just use WordPress on its own, but also some of the lovingly crafted plugins for it, such as Kitty’s Spaminator, the WordPress del.icio.us plugin and the Amazon Media Manager, to make the site even funkier; they are all thoroughly recommended.

Also, a big thankyou to Jess for the diplodoci/brontosaurs observation, which inspired me to draw the site’s new logo.

More: Oh, I forgot the excellent glish.com for instructions on how to do the liquid three-column layout.

Right. qwghlm.co.uk should look very different. I got sick of the turquoise green, so have some pale lavender instead.

As well as the colour and style revamp, the biggest change is that I’ve ported the blog from my own hand-coded system over to WordPress, the highly respectable state-of-the-art CMS software, which is fab and cool etc. There’s also post categories an incorporated linklog, better navigation, some extra things like what book I’m reading ATM, and lots of other things.

I’ve also heavily restructured the site, deleted some cruft, updated the content etc. There’s lots of redirects going on to help those who have bookmarked particular pages (like my RSS feed) or have come from out-of-date links so nothing should be too broken. But if it is, then let me know in the comments.

This site has been tested heavily in Firefox and IE6 on Windows, and much less so with Safari and Firefox on Mac. It might look shagged up in one or two places - if it is then, again, let me know. I’ve already noticed one major bug in IE which I’ll fix by morning. Fixed it - it was the Peekaboo bug.