GREEN Gen Cymru’s benevolent, community-friendly mask slips further and falls away. Revealing the true face of a company evidently interested in just one thing - its own financial best interests.

This column has already shown how GGC’s ghastly plan to build a 70-mile procession of towering energy pylons through the exquisite Tywi and Teifi valleys to connect proposed windfarms in Ceredigion and Radnor to the National Grid is riddled with fake localism.

Its claim to be “acting now to build and operate a green energy network for Wales, that will make sure 100 per cent renewable energy can flow to our homes, hospitals, schools…” is poppycock.

The crass industrialisation of the countryside it has in mind would not, as it would like us to believe, result in a wall-to-wall flow of renewable energy to all and sundry in mid Wales. The sole practical outcome would be merely to funnel power from GGC’s wish-list windfarms near Llanddewi Brefi and at Nant Mithil, Radnor into a proposed new National Grid substation at Llandyfaelog, Carmarthenshire. And that’s all. Any more extravagant claims are window-dressing.

The environmental and economic threat, however, runs deep. While a hideous march-past of pylons would guarantee ruination of some of Wales’s best countryside, uglification of the landscape would exact a heavy cost on tourism, an immensely important industry for the country.

All this was bad enough. Now Green Gen tires of its benevolent persona and goes for the jugular of anyone daring to attempt to thwart its ambitions by barring GGC’s surveyors from land along the route of the proposed pylons rollout.

Disgracefully, farmers and other landowners are being taken to court on civil grounds after the company applied for warrants to access private property. Bravely, some of these anti-pylons campaigners say they’re willing to face criminal charges if that turns out to be necessary to safeguard their freedom to decide what goes on their land.

GGC is now in line for almost certain condemnation by a broad swathe of the public which always reacts badly to shows of undisguised intimidation. People generally will not take kindly to GGC’s snarling ultimatum: submit, or ultimately risk being branded a criminal.

The landowners are acting with dignity, determination and good sense. They are interested in defence of a basic freedom, but they are also being notably constructive. For, like anyone else familiar with developments in the renewable energy debate, they know that technological advances now mean that undergrounding energy cables costs little, if anything, more than putting them on pylons. On this crucial point, it is perverse for the company to respond with silence.

Adam Price, Plaid Cymru MS for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, is right to urge the company to head away from confrontation. “We are staring at a situation”, he says, “where if the community continues with this strategy, we will see scenes of mass social unrest and opposition to these plans. Why threaten legal action against individuals within communities? Let's take a step back and have some dialogue.”

So far, however, GGC shows a crude liking for strong-arm tactics rather than the required civilised and open-minded stance.

CEREDIGION council really is scraping the barrel in its objections to Aberystwyth Gymnastics Club’s ambition to convert a long-empty unit at Glanyrafon industrial estate into a permanent base.

Planning officials say insufficient information has been provided about how many people would be likely to use the relocated club and about parking provision during gymnastics competitions.

This is silly. It would be sheer speculation for the club to hazard a guess about how popular the new place would be. They can't possibly know at a time when the transfer to new premises hasn’t even happened.

As for parking, anyone who knows this fairly spacious neck of the woods would say this is extremely unlikely to be a problem.

By all accounts, this is a superbly run organisation operating with the benefit of first-class coaches able to train gymnasts to national and international level, and willing to adopt a sound building crying out to be put to positive use.

NATURAL Resources Wales has done a thorough job of blackening its reputation over crass handling of the threat to visitor centres in Ceredigion and Gwynedd.

But it can at least hold its head up in its efforts to crack down on illegal tree-felling, which must be of mounting concern in the context of threats to wildlife habitats and the worsening biodiversity crisis.

In the most recent case, an agricultural contracting company has been fined £2,000 for cutting down 140 trees in 400-year-old designated ancient semi-natural woodland in Llandysul. The firm acted without a felling licence, and Llanelli magistrates was told it had been previously warned over similar offences.

Trees are a lifeline for us and for wildlife. They mustn’t be casually destroyed.