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Hello, you're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones,

and this week I'm talking to my colleague James Meek, the author of many books of both fiction

and nonfiction, and a contributing editor at the LRB. He has a piece in the current issue of the

paper on wind power, green jobs and global capitalism. Hello James, and thank you very much for

joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. So when I look out at an array of offshore wind turbines,

I'm more likely, or I was until I read your piece, to think of all the clean electricity

they're producing

than of how and where the turbines themselves were produced.

Horn C-2 in the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast is going to be the world's biggest offshore

wind farm when it goes operational next year.

Could you talk us through how those towers come to be there?

Where do they come from?

I've always felt there was something about Britain that failed to have its imagination caught

by the sheer scale of the enterprise that has been happening for a few years now,

mainly in the North Sea, also in the Irish Sea.

These are incredibly difficult conditions, rough waters, extraordinary storms, massive feats of engineering involving, taking

gigantic cranes taller than the Eiffel Tower out into these rough seas and erecting gigantic towers with wind turbines on top of them.

This has, as I say, been happening for some years now to generate green electricity for the

...