Cape Wind Book Review

[Vogon_Glory]

Like anyone with at least moderately pro-environmentalist sympathies, I’d heard of the proposal to put a wind farm in Nantucket Sound, and I’d also heard that the proposal was being fiercely opposed by many of the people who either lived there or had summer houses nearby. With no cable TV and a pokey dial-up internet connection, I knew that I was getting only a small part of the story. While I’d read that there were supposedly environmental concerns about the Cape Wind project, I strongly suspected that there was an awful lot of NIMBY on the part of the wealthy people owning summer property on the shores of Nantucket Sound. I also knew that there was a lot of emotion and polemics, and much less in the way of useful information for me to form an opinion.

I highly recommend Wendy Williams' and Robert Whitcomb's Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound (NYC: Public Affairs, 2007) as a summer read for environmental activists as well as for those who want alternatives to fossil fuels. The authors make a very strong case that the fight against the Nantucket Sound has little to do with a genuine concern about the environmental consequences of off-shore wind turbines and far, far more to do with NIMBY activism by wealthy property-owners who would be bothered by viewing the wind machines off on the horizons from their exclusive water front properties. The authors track the growth and development of the Cape Wind opponents’ organization and political clout, while undercutting those opponents’ claims that the Cape Wind turbines would supposedly threaten migrating birds, endanger whales, or prove to be a hazard to navigation.

What folks outside of the Cape Cod area learn from reading Cape Wind is that Nantucket Sound is anything but a pristine seascape, having been fished, bottom-dragged, and dumped in for centuries. Readers also learn that environmental studies have disproved the wind farm opponents’ contention that the turbine blades would prove a serious danger to birds. They also learn that the proposed site for the wind farm, Horseshoe Shoals, is extremely shallow and that ocean-going commercial vessels and also most yachts have drafts too deep to pass over it.

What is very interesting about Cape Wind is the political maneuvering against it, and by whom. A Wall Street Journal book reviewer made much of Senator Kennedy’s opposi-tion to the Cape Wind project and his legislative maneuvering against it. But authors Williams and Whitcomb also point out that much of the most recent political maneuvers against the wind farm have been made by conservative Republicans like Virginia Senator Mark Warner, Congressman Don Young of Alaska and also Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

For DU readers, as well as Democrats in general, Mitt Romney’s actions are as noteworthy as the environmental costs of Cape Cod’s continuing reliance on fossil fuel-fired power plants, the success of wealthy and politically-powerful property holders at putting their aesthetics ahead of the interests of New England electricity users, the use of bogus environmental arguments for NIMBY agendas, as well as incipient New England electric power shortages. In 2008, American voters are going to the polls to replace an administration that tailored its energy policy to the specifications of the oil and coal industries with at least one of the candidates willing to let his constituents freeze in the cold, cold dark to cater to wealthy second-home owners in Massachusetts’ Barnstable County.

Since the sensationalism-driven corporate media place-holders and throw pillows aren’t willing to examine the Republican candidates in action when it comes to dealing with the issues, it looks like that job is up to us.