Scottish government figures show that millions of trees have been cut down in order to build wind turbines to help the region meet its renewable energy goals.
The Times of London reports that more than 6,200 acres of woodland — or about five million trees — have been cut down since 2007 in order to make way for wind farms to produce renewable energy and fight global warming. But only about 1,957 acres of woodland were planted after the wind farms were built.
Scotland wants to get 100 percent of its power from renewable, but doing so has come at a high cost to the country’s landscape. The Scottish National Party, a left-leaning party that wants to secede from the United Kingdom, has often invoked renewable energy as a path to independence.
Conservative lawmakers have been hammering the government for its support of green energy at the expense of Scotland’s natural beauty. Scottish Conservative energy spokesman Murdo Fraser told the Times, “the [Scottish National Party] is so blindly obsessed with renewable energy that it doesn’t mind destroying another important environmental attribute to make way for it.”