Title: FW: [globalnews] Environmental Community to Support the Cape Wind Project
>From globalnews’ own Jon Naar:
Beautifully written, important statement on which we can all take positive action as indicated.� jn
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Environmental Community to Support the Cape Wind Project
by Charles Komanoff
January, 2003
Dear colleague -
Perhaps you read the Dec. 29 NY Times article detailing
the ecological and social devastation being caused by
coal-bed methane development in Wyoming’s Powder River
Basin. The article took me back to a time 25 years ago,
in the mid-1970s, when the future path of energy
development was up for grabs and activists mobilized
to stop the fossil-nuke industry from laying waste to
natural and human communities all over the U.S.
Defending the American West from ruinous energy development
was a particularly intense, gut-level part of that struggle
for many of us, including me. I was living in New York then
but spending as much time as I could in the Northern Rockies,
hiking the high country and getting out onto the land,
meeting ranchers, Indians, environmentalists and fellow
eco-freaks. I fished for my breakfast in Shoshone streams,
played barrelhouse piano in a Montana renewable-energy road
show, and got high inhaling Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths
at 12,000 feet in the Wind River range.
Natural gas, or methane, occupied a middle position in the
energy debate back then. Gas was a fossil fuel, hence non-
renewable, but it was less polluting than coal or oil and
seemed well suited for democratically scaled small engines
and generators that could later switch to quasi-renewable
fuels like hydrogen. Gas could be the “bridge” carrying us
from our bondage in the Egypt of oil, nukes and coal to the
promised land where thermodynamically correct renewable
and conservation technologies could warm our houses and
cool our beer without draining our pocketbooks and
plundering the planet.
Conventional natural gas deposits in the Lower 48 were
running out, we thought, but there was hope that
unconventional sources would take up the slack. One such
source, coal-bed methane, promised to be especially simple
and benign; just sink a pipe and collect the gas. A few
decades later, the reality revealed in the Times is anything
but benign: the austerely beautiful Powder River Basin is
now laced with saline creeks and flammable rivers; the vast
Wyoming silences are shattered 24-7 by screaming
compressors; fifth-generation ranchers, their wells ruined,
are being forced off the land and driven to violence.
The Times article is yet another reminder of the ongoing
devastation wrought by America’s overuse of fossil and
nuclear fuels. Last month, I circulated an open letter
(http://www.cars-suck.org/littera-scripta/windfarm.html)
in support of the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound. The
immediate backdrop to that letter was the destruction of
hundreds of miles of Spanish coast by the spilled cargo of
the oil tanker Prestige. The Wyoming coal-bed methane
horror has spurred today’s letter, but there is no shortage of
relevant news: record melting of the Greenland ice sheet;
dwindling glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Rockies;
Appalachian forests and towns obliterated by mountaintop
strip-mining of coal; and of course the daily flow of oil
money from U.S. motorists to al Qaeda via the House of
Sa’ud.
Against this onslaught the projected output of the 170
turbines comprising the Cape Wind project is, to be sure, a
drop in the bucket: one part in 2,500 of U.S. electricity
production, and one part in 7,500 of all energy consumed in
the fifty states. On the other hand, 17 other proposals for
off-shore wind farms totaling over 3,000 turbines have been
advanced for the East Coast outer continental shelf, from
Massachusetts to Virginia, according to a draft brief by the
Humane Society of the United States, which opposes the
Cape Wind project. In round numbers, these proposals would
sum to one percent of U.S. electricity production. Add the
onshore wind projects underway and proposed in California
and the Great Plains, and the share multiplies. Not the 18%
share that wind supplies in Denmark, far from it, in fact, but
clearly getting somewhere.
“Wind clutter,” the towers and turbines are already being
called. For me, this is a sourly evocative phrase. When
cyclists locked their bikes to poles outside the World Trade
Center, the Port Authority guys called it “bike clutter” to
justify clipping the locks and taking the bikes. That was in
1990, before global warming from burning fossil fuels had
manifested itself beyond any doubt, before Gulf War I (or II)
had set the Middle East afire, and of course before the twin
towers themselves were reduced to ashes. And before some
residents of Cape Cod - among them, we may be certain,
shareowners in the corporations taking the methane out from
under the ranchers in the Power River Basin - rose up to
stop the Cape Wind farm from “cluttering” Nantucket Sound.
Clearly, these are people with an exceptional sensitivity to
“clutter.” From four miles - the closest approach of any of
the Cape Wind turbines to land - the full height of a tower
could be covered twice over with the width of a fingertip
held at arm’s length, as I noted in my earlier letter. But
regardless, the more windmills the merrier, I say. Not just to
multiply the numerical displacement of fossil fuels but to
make manifest the existence of an alternative - and to take
the dirty secret of energy production out of the shadows of
West Virginia and Wyoming and Kuwait and put it squarely
in front of our picture windows.
The value of the windmills, I am arguing, goes beyond
energy-share percentages to the plane of symbols and
images. That is the realm where the ecological high ground
has been pulled out from under us, where the masses of
people have been acting out their desires - choosing the
manly SUV over the prim Prius, the macho snowmobile over
the effete snowshoes, the chic halogen lamp over the clunky
compact-fluorescent. Perhaps the windmills, captivating and
alluring, can spark a change in popular conceptions of what
is desirable and help steer individual and public choices in a
different direction.
I personally find the windmills magnificent, and I believe
others will come to see them the same way. Whether it’s
form or function I can’t say, to me the two are indivisible.
The slowly rotating blades draw energy from the air and in
effect put fossil fuels back in the ground where they can’t do
harm. It’s a form of magic, is it not? And people want magic,
they want beauty, they want tangible ways of living on Earth
without destroying it. Seeing the beauty in windmills could
be a turning point, making possible a wider appreciation of
what are now, we should admit, a beleaguered minority’s
values: trust in energy efficiency, devotion to conservation,
identification with the natural world.
We need to start somewhere - the losses are becoming
unbearable - and we might as well start with Cape Wind.
Granted, this is quite a burden to load onto one project. But
the Cape Wind project is no little matter; it is already a big
issue in New England and has the makings of a national
cause célèbre. As I wrote last month, the spectacle of well-
heeled environmentalists writing checks to “green groups,”
while blocking a wind-energy project in their backyard,
discredits not just the cause of renewable energy but the
environmental movement as a whole. (A friend in Houston
reports that the project is constantly brought up in polite
conversations there as proof of the double standards of
environmentalists.) Conversely, Nantucket Sound graced
with clean, quiet windmills would begin to show the way out
of our suicidal dependence on fossil fuels and toward a way
of living in harmony with the natural world.
Following is a list of people and organizations that need to
hear that your organization and/or you as an individual
strongly support the Cape Wind project, and that you want
and expect them to do the same.
Sincerely,
Charles Komanoff / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please write to:
Karen Adams
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Northeast District
696 Virginia Road
Concord, MA 01742
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(The Army Corps must permit the Cape Wind project.)
Senator Edward M. Kennedy
2400 JFK Building
Boston, MA 02203
Fax: (617) 565-3183
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and
Senator John Kerry
One Bowdoin Square, 10th Floor
Boston, MA 02114
Fax: (617) 248-3870
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Both U.S. senators from Massachusetts are considered pro-
environment; their support, particularly that of Kennedy,
who maintains a home in Hyannis Port, will send a powerful
signal.)
Douglas I. Foy
President
Conservation Law Foundation
62 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02110
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Foy, the redoubtable long-time leader of the Conservation
Law Foundation, has been named by new Massachusetts
Gov. Mitt Romney to be Commissioner of Commonwealth
Development, a new super-cabinet position overseeing
environment, transportation and housing. Backing from Foy,
within the constraints of his possible regulatory role, will
help secure Romney’s support. Please use Doug’s CLF
addresses while he is being installed in his governmental
position.)
John Adams
Executive Director
The Natural Resources Defense Council
40 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.nrdc.org <http://www.nrdc.org/>
(Until recently, the Web site of the anti-windmill Alliance
to Protect Nantucket Sound carried a statement opposing the
project from NRDC senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
and noted Kennedy’s NRDC affiliation, suggesting that
NRDC also opposed the project. The NRDC affiliation has
now been excised from Kennedy’s anti-windmill statement.
But NRDC itself is still tiptoeing along the sidelines, waiting
for “the results of a comprehensive environmental review,”
according to its “Position Statement on Offshore Wind.” The
council’s prominence and its former identification (via
Kennedy) with the opponents call for a more assertive
stance. I suggest something along these lines: NRDC believes
that proposals to generate commercial quantities of
electricity using offshore wind turbines, such as the Cape
Wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound, will reduce the
environmental impact of energy production while also
demonstrating to the people of Massachusetts and the United
States that alternatives to the current unsustainable fossil-
nuclear system are feasible and attainable. We look forward
to reviewing the EIR for the Cape Wind project, but unless
significant new information comes to light we expect to
support it vigorously. Please urge Mr. Adams to state such a
position.)
John Knox
Executive Director
Earth Island Institute
300 Broadway, Suite 28
San Francisco, CA 94133
www.earthisland.org <http://www.earthisland.org/>
(EII’s International Marine Mammal Project opposes the
project, so unsurprisingly the Nantucket Alliance’s Web site
lists EII as an opponent, although EII, like NRDC, insists
that it has not taken a position. Neutrality supports the
fossil-fuel status quo. Our urgings for NRDC’s Adams apply
equally to EEI’s Knox.)
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