Ed Miliband has just green-lit Britain’s second-biggest solar farm by overruling his own planning inspectors and slapping it down on 4,000 acres of prime farmland across Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. Thousands of inefficient, Chinese-made solar panels and a bunch of giant batteries are now going to cover what used to be productive fields.

His own inspectors warned the scheme would trash the local environment, put historic buildings at risk, damage people’s health and well-being, and create traffic chaos.

Miliband ignored every single one of them. This is now the third big solar farm he’s rammed through in just a few days. Skeptics are saying he’s frantically signing these things off before Andy Burnham gets the top job and shuffles him sideways.

The One Earth project will surround villages like North Clifton with solar panels on every side. Some farms will be completely boxed in. Local homeowners get zero compensation when their properties lose value. On top of that, the inspectors flagged a very high flood risk from the River Trent. An Oxford professor called the whole thing “extraordinary” given the flood danger. What’s the point of a planning process if the minister just waves everything through anyway?

Miliband’s excuse?

“The only way to have energy security is if we take a pro-growth approach to building more clean energy.”

What a joke. This isn’t energy security — it’s ideological vandalism. We’re destroying our best agricultural land, handing the contracts to foreign investors (Spanish and Danish outfits this time), and covering the countryside with low-output Chinese panels that only work when the sun shines and need massive battery backups.

All of this while we have cheap, reliable hydrocarbons sitting in the ground that could power the country properly without wrecking farmland. Or we could build proper land-efficient nuclear plants that actually deliver serious power on a tiny footprint. Instead we get this net-zero madness: 30 big “clean energy” projects approved in record time, Lincolnshire turned into a solar battleground, councils bypassed, and local people told to shut up and take it. Climate Communism.

CO2 isn’t killing the planet, it’s feeding it. The real damage here is the self-inflicted wound of ripping up productive countryside for intermittent, foreign-made junk while pretending it’s some kind of victory. Energy security doesn’t come from surrounding villages with solar panels and batteries. It comes from using what actually works.

If you would like practical advice on how to combat solar factory installations in your area, Paul Burgess has compiled a paper on how to object to a solar factory.