Is the Cape Cod Times editorial board in the pocket of big anti-wind groups?! Are they skewing and suppressing news coverage in service of their rabid anti-wind bias!?
!!!???
Yes, these are matters of minimal national import, but they do provide some fun drama. Jack Coleman says he left the Times after getting sick of the increasing slant of its news coverage against Cape Wind, the big wind project planned for Nantucket Sound. Apparently the editors are allied with the ruthless Alliance to Save Nantucket Sound. The hoo-ha even reached the Boston Globe.
I can't say I've been tracking the trials and tribulations of Cape Wind that closely, but everything I've seen leads me to the same conclusion: This is a group of privileged upper-crust aristocrats perfectly willing to advocate for sacrifice on the part of, say, Michigan auto workers, but who react with umbrage when their precious views and sailing waters might have to be part of the solution. Maybe a commenter can explain to me why this is not what it seems.
Comments
View as Flat
Norris Posted 11:03 am
12 Apr 2005
Where were the big time multimilliondollar groups? Nowhere to be found. The groups have put a little piece on some of their web sites but did not take the important time to go to that hearing and support this project. Our little bitty African American Environmentalist Association supported the project for the same reason we support nuclear power. It is emission free in terms of smog and global warming.
The full multibilliondollar might of the entire environmental movement should be behind this project. Maybe the prominent landowners along the ocean front have influenced this debate. You know who I am talking about. And this when some of these same people support a bioterror lab right in the Black section of downtown Boston.
And you wonder why we whine. We are given much to whine about.
Norris McDonald
Permalink
kduble Posted 9:37 am
13 Apr 2005
I, personally, don't find wind-driven devices unsightly. This doesn't seem to have ever been an issue for the Dutch. Sure beats a vista of brown haze.
Ken Duble
Permalink
bhosey Posted 3:21 am
14 Apr 2005
In my mind the hype over alternative energy sources is the path of least resistance for eco groups. For a long time they were taking a beating because they had chosen the role of truth-teller, conveying the message that combining limited resources with unlimited appetites really isn't too smart. While supplemented with a helathy interest in alternative energies, this main message of "Hey why don't you consume a little less?" wasn't swallowed too well by the general public who generally don't like being lectured to. The corporate interests and their conservative handmaidens in govenrment were all to ready to turn this message of conservation against the greens, dismissing them as elitist negative nancies.
Rather than continue looking like the bad guys (and helping themselves to the conviently timed lever of mid-east hatred), some greens have latched onto this magical idea of alternative energy sources as the sole end-all be-all solution and damn anyone who gets in their way. For someone like nuclear advocate Thomas Friedman, it's much easier to tell Nevada to "suck it up" and risk contamination of a third of their state than to tell the entire American people to "suck it up" by consuming a whole lot fewer resources.
The public sector sees green groups evangelizing the miracle of alternative energies as a reinforcement of the idea that they can consume all they want--technology will just find ways to squeeze yet more from the environment. The corporate sector increasingly sees is it as a win for them as well through government subsidies, minimized focus on reduced consumtion and market entry for their patented technologies.
And so it goes. Greens who happen to point out the negative impacts of these alternative energy projects are outspent by the corporate interests ,blithely ignored by the general public and shouted down by their own former compatriots.
For those puzzled by the opposition to the wind project, the negative impacts both environmental and otherwise are clearly laid out in the FAQ at the Alliance's website:
http://www.saveoursound.org/Faqs/Default.aspx
If we are going to make decisions about huge projects with wide-ranging impacts whether a national nuclear waste storage site or huge wind factories across the seas, then let's make sure they are informed decisions fully weighing just what it is we are getting ourselves into.
Permalink
jdhlax Posted 7:17 am
14 Apr 2005
Those who scream at us for opposing bad wind power projects either don't know how harmful they are, or just don't care about other forms of life or that more windmills will turn this planet into even more of an industrial hell. No one even knows how many birds are killed by these things, and aesthetics ARE important for both those of us who have empathy with, and connection to, the Earth, and for EVERY OTHER FORM OF LIFE, the latter of whom will receive absolutely no benefit from electricity generation. In speaking for the rest of the planet as best as I can, I say no windmills or any other unnatural human industrial contraptions or development in natural areas. Limit them to urban areas that are already aesthetically ruined.
Permalink