Wind Advisory

There is little debate that the United States must overcome its addiction to finite, polluting, globe-warming fossil fuels. So here's a proposal for a cheap, renewable, non-polluting alternative energy source: Construct four hydro dams on the lower Snake River.

That proposal, eagerly embraced and implemented by Congress, is about 50 years old, but I cite it to make the point that all energy production has environmental costs. In this case the cost was the extirpation--now nearly complete--of the mightiest salmon and steelhead runs on the planet. The proposal was made by bureaucrats and engineers who either hadn't bothered to answer such questions as "What will happen to the fish?" or answered them incorrectly and in abject ignorance, as in the case of the National Marine Fisheries Service, which proclaimed: "We can work wonders with this [fish] transportation system; we can establish runs of both steelhead trout and salmon in far greater numbers than existed before."

Conservationists have been asking the same question about the giant wind farm planned by Cape Wind Associates for Nantucket Sound off Massachusetts--arguably the most productive marine fish habitat in our nation. Cape Wind and the main permitting agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers, have had five years to provide an answer. So far they haven't.

I don't doubt Mark Rodgers, Cape Wind's director of communications, when he informs me that there aren't that many places where one finds shallow, windy water with relatively small waves and little ship traffic, and that Horseshoe Shoals (the best fishing spot in Nantucket Sound) is an ideal location for one of the world's largest offshore wind farms. On the other hand, neither are there that many (or any) places that surpass Horseshoe Shoals in its abundance of fish, sea birds and marine mammals. In fact, the Sound has been designated as "Essential Fish Habitat" under the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. What's more, it's protected as an avian migration corridor by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, as critical habitat for imperiled birds, mammals and turtles under the Endangered Species Act, and as a marine sanctuary by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because of its importance as "spawning, nursery and feeding grounds, and migration routes," its "high biological productivity and diversity," and its significance as a "premier marine oriented recreational and historic area."

The federal part of Nantucket Sound (more than three miles from shore) is also an ideal location for a wind farm because there are virtually no federal regulations for such projects. Massachusetts has outlawed industrial development in its waters because of the sound's importance to fish and wildlife.

The project is basically benign, with "minimal" impacts to fish and wildlife, avers the Corps in its 3,800-page draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) released in the fall of 2004. If you question the DEIS hatched by the outfit that brought us the Snake River dams and the flood-proof Mississippi and which has zero experience in US ocean wind farms because there hasn't been one yet, you are a rich, selfish NIMBY who doesn't want his view of the horizon marred by distant metal--at least according to large elements of the press and environmental community. Or, worse, you're a Kennedy. Or, worse still, you're a rich, elitist, gas-squandering boat angler whose aesthetic sensitivities preclude him from pursuing stripers, blues, tuna, mackerel, sea bass, scup, fluke, cod, haddock, false albacore, bonito, sharks, etc. within sight of a 24-square-mile industrial park full of tender vessels, fog horns, flashing lights, a transformer substation the size of a 10-story parking garage complete with a helicopter pad and tanks holding 40,000 gallons of transformer oil, and more than one hundred and thirty 247-foot-high power turbines whose 164-foot-long blades reach 417 feet into the sky (100 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty).

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted environmental attorney, has a new cause: defending Cape Cod property values and yachting from a wind farm project in the waters of Nantucket Sound," sniffs the San Francisco Chronicle. Snottier still is The New York Times, which pontificates as follows: "Soon, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound [the main opposition group] was filing lawsuits, mounting political pressure in Boston and Washington and, to bolster its legal case and maximize public anxiety, generating volumes of doomsaying critiques: The turbines will break up and the oil inside will spill into the sound, in a repeat of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Birds will be torn apart in 'pole-mounted Cuisinarts.' Whales will bump their heads. The annual Figawi race, the Memorial Day weekend Hyannis-to-Nantucket regatta, will have to be canceled. . . . Environmentalists across the country chafe at what they see as the hypocrisy of those supposed Greens on the Cape who oppose the windmills."

The same article quoted the Conservation Law Foundation's Seth Kaplan as saying: "How heavily do you count yachting against the number of people who die from particulate matter? The opponents say they support renewable energy. But it's not acceptable to say that you're in favor of renewable energy only as long as you can't see it."

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), only irrational people find fault with Cape Wind's proposal: "The air quality, public health and global warming benefits of the project are significant and beyond rational dispute," it proclaims. Greenpeace goes so far as to suggest that those who question Cape Wind are fronting for the coal industry.

Wind power in the right place is a splendid idea, just as marine protected areas (MPAs) in the right place are a splendid idea. But some of the big green groups are so impatient, pigheaded, and politically naïve that they are hell-bent to put windfarms anywhere, provided they go in quick. (NRDC, you may recall, is the same organization that, after powwowing about MPAs for less than 24 hours and making virtually no effort at public outreach, proposed to ban all commercial and recreational fishing, including catch-and-release, in "five ocean areas comprising some 19.4 percent of the study area: the nine submarine canyons; the offshore waters near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina; tilefish habitat between Cape May, New Jersey, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; an 18.9-nautical mile corridor of near-shore waters extending along the study area; and a band along the continental shelf break encompassing the upper slope.")