As blots on the landscape go, wind farms are not the worst. I would really like to pretend to think differently, but I don't, and can't. Beyond the pale I may be, but to my eye these things are pretty enough, in a good light. So there.

I try hard to see them as others see them, to understand how grim presences are inflicted on precious landscapes. I have done my very best to remember that these are brutish industrial installations, not benign artworks. Still, I'm not sure.

I grasp, too, that there are serious arguments over reliability of supply, and over the real total contribution, if any, that the farms can make to reducing carbon emissions. I have no desire, meanwhile, to see habitats destroyed, wildlife threatened, or visitors repelled. Just up the road from my own backyard a battle royal was fought recently over the relative claims of turbines, tourism, ancient moorland and the rights of residents. The march of the wind machines is halted, for now. But I'm not sure.

Three factors explain the feeble state of my opinions. First - and why do I feel like apologising? - the turbines do not offend me. True, I don't have to live in the shadow of the things. True, the rejected proposal for the Lewis wind farm involved construction on an intimidating scale: 181 turbines, each 140 metres high, do not add up to some cute eco-hippy project. But, and generally speaking, a wind farm seems to me a stately, unthreatening, near-natural thing.

Hence my second excuse for a thought. You want ugly? You want something that offends the eye to blindness, scars the landscape and flares in the night like something from the opening titles of Bladerunner? Grangemouth is the place. This counts, I think, as an irony.

Here we all are, panicking or stoutly refusing to panic, over tomorrow's strike. Here we are experiencing a potent reminder of the fragility of our carbon economy yet still finding time to shout the odds over wind farms and Scotland's potential - only that - as a source of renewables. The First Minister urges, sensibly, that we should all try to use public transport. But in Edinburgh LRT talks of taking its buses off the road for want of fuel.

We are being given a taste, small but real, of what is meant by energy security. One refinery in one small northern European country is threatened with closure and the oil futures price hits $117 a barrel. Work at a single refinery faces a mere two-day strike and the Forties pipeline, conveying one-third of Britain's daily oil production, may be partially or entirely shut down. These count as difficulties, not emergencies, but they feel like hard news from the near-future.

So I pick my way towards my third thought. If the Lewis wind farm is an abomination, if every wind farm development faces a righteous (even rational) challenge, what do we do instead? To be more brutal, what if our realistic choices disappear and we are left with only one question? This: do we have to hurt the planet a bit more in order to begin to save it?

You don't want a wind farm on your moors? You want to preserve Lewis, its big skies and golden eagles, intact? I have no quarrel. I have a list of problems, instead.

Around the world, items get ticked from that inventory with each passing month and I keep on asking: what remains? Amid the non-science that infests my brain there is an acceptance that global warming is happening. I would probably embrace the proposition just to avoid being mistaken for Jeremy Clarkson. I believe the threat is real.

But what became of biofuels? We can file that, I think, under "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time". Hydro, then? There might be capacity to be squeezed (though not much) from Scotland's abundant water, but in India and China people have died defending their communities from someone's rational plan to drown homes. Solar? A hobby for those who can afford it. The rest of the free energy nature is forever throwing around? We have mentioned issues involved with wind power. The best estimates for wave - and I speak as someone capable of dating Salter's Duck - say that Grangemouth might be in business for a while. You could say the same about neat ideas for carbon capture, for hydrogen cells, for you name it.

Scotland's government has noble aspirations for our clean, green future. Given the alternatives, and when prodded awake, so do I. It is fascinating, nevertheless, that a single refinery dedicated to dirty old fuels can loom so large in the week the Lewis wind farm is rejected.

I can be as patriotic as the next misuser of energy over the claim that Scotland's installed capacity of renewables exceeds its nuclear output. Three notional cheers for us. But I've seen my heating bills. We have not even begun to move beyond the carbon economy.

On the level of simple politics, the Lewis decision leaves our government with a larger problem than Grangemouth and a debt-beset management's decision to pick a fight. If "Europe's biggest wind development" is unacceptable - and if ministers would stop hiding behind spurious readings of European law - how do we get to that renewable future? More importantly, when?

I protested against the construction of Torness, once upon a time. A wee birl down the A1 with the usual suspects, bearing our self-evident truths. We were not wrong about the economic and environmental legacies of nuclear, and those facts have not altered.

The world, though, has had to turn its attention in other directions, ready or not. With Grangemouth persuading even a Prime Minister that people are on edge, and with every apology to those who have to think about energy policy, I'm left with this: if not nuclear, what?

An SNP government can abhor the nastiest fuel, in essential terms, of the lot. If it also rejects the Lewis wind farm, however, it appears to be clinging to the remnants of an alternative. "Alternatives" are the great possible-hypothetical of all political debate. But where are we, actually, and what do actually we do?

I hear no answers. None worth the name, at any rate. Go with nuclear, against every instinct? Dig coal, despite ghosts of generations? Risk a magnificent eagle on Lewis? Build another Grangemouth and hope that Brazil has found a big, deep pocket of fresh black oil? Like a great many people, I don't care for these choices.

Those greener than I, if honest, would tell you straight: reduce consumption, reduce it ruthlessly, and end waste. Our local Grangemouth problem, they would say, might even give a few an early lesson in responsible energy use. But certain realities persist.

Tell me about the condition of the planet, by all means. Just don't invite me to lecture a Third or Fourth World family on the many virtues of starving for a while longer while I judge the aesthetic merits of a wind farm.

I overstate the argument, predictably enough. Still, you tend not to notice how very pretty a turbine on a hillside can be if you own neither the hill nor the turbine.