[Mb-civic] Tilting at Windmills - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Tilting at Windmills
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By Anne Applebaum
The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 19, 2006; A17

"Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants 
rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose 
spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes."

-- from "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes

To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green 
grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to 
watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.

But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than 
ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer 
of birds and bats. As for the still-young wind industry, it is "an 
environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few 
truths and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies." 
Far from being clean and green, "corporate wind is yet another 
extraction industry relying on false promises," a "poster child for 
irresponsible development."

Such attacks -- those come from http://www.stopillwind.org/ , the Web 
site of Maryland anti-wind activist Jon Boone -- are not atypical. 
Similar language turns up on http://www.windwatch.org/ , on 
http://www.windstop.org/ , and on a dozen other anti-wind sites, most 
started by local groups opposed to a particular project. Their recent, 
rapid proliferation is not an accident: After languishing for years on 
the eco-fringe, wind energy has suddenly become mainstream. High oil 
prices, natural gas shortages, better technology, fear of global 
warming, state renewable-energy mandates and, yes, tax breaks have 
finally made wind farms commercially viable as well as clean. 
Traditional utility companies want to build them -- and thus the 
traditional environmental movement (which supports wind energy) has 
produced a handful of untraditional splinter groups that are trying to 
stop them.

They may succeed. Already, activists and real estate developers have 
stalled projects across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. In 
Western Maryland, a proposal to build wind turbines alongside a coal 
mine, on a heavily logged mountaintop next to a transmission line, has 
just been nixed by state officials who called it too environmentally 
damaging. Along the coast of Nantucket, Mass. -- the only sufficiently 
shallow spot on the New England coast -- a coalition of anti-wind groups 
and summer homeowners, among them the Kennedy family, also seems set to 
block Cape Wind, a planned offshore wind farm. Their well-funded 
lobbying last month won them the attentions of Rep. Don Young 
(R-Alaska), who, though normally an advocate of a state's right to its 
own resources, has made an exception for Massachusetts and helped pass 
an amendment designed to kill the project altogether.

The groups do have some arguments, ranging from the aesthetic -- if you 
are bothered by the sight of wind turbines on a mountaintop, which I am 
not (or, anyway, not when compared with the sight of a strip mine) -- to 
the economic. They are right to note that wind will not soon replace 
coal or gas, that wind isn't always as effective as supporters claim, 
and that some people are going to make a lot of money out of it (though 
some people make a lot of money out of coal, and indeed Nantucket summer 
homes as well).

But they also reflect a deeper American malady. The problem plaguing new 
energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" 
movement. The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is 
BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything." The 
anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to 
liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass 
movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant. Indeed, the 
founders of Cape Wind say they embarked on the project in part because 
public antipathy prevents most other utility investments in New England.

Still, energy projects don't even have to be viable to spark opposition: 
Already, there are activists gearing up to fight the nascent biofuel 
industry, on the grounds that fields of switch grass or cornstalks 
needed to produce ethanol will replace rainforests and bucolic country 
landscapes. Soon the nonexistent "hydrogen economy" will doubtless be 
under attack as well. There's a lot of earnest, even bipartisan talk 
nowadays about the need for clean, emissions-free energy. But are we 
really ready, politically, to build any new energy sources at all?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801188.html?nav=hcmodule
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