Leaving The Truth Blowin' In The Wind

(Posting is iffy again for tomorrow, by the way.)

Boy, did Froma Harrop of the Providence Journal take the long way in this attack of drive-by “journalism” on Ted Kennedy, even predicting his “sorry end” at the close of this column.

This excerpt gives you a good part of the setup (describing scorn at Kennedy from “the leftish ‘Daily Show’,” among others)…

The source of unhappiness is Kennedy's efforts to kill an offshore wind farm on Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind was to be the first such project in the United States and a source of pride to environmentally-minded New Englanders. Polls show 84 percent of Massachusetts residents in favor. But now it appears that America's first offshore wind farm will be near Galveston, Texas.

Harrop tells us that a book co-written by her editor at the Providence Journal with the short, understated title of “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound" (phew) portrays the dustup as a battle between well-moneyed pols of status and “the year-round locals.”

(“Locals” where, I wonder? Harrop tells us that 84 percent of Massachusetts residents favor the wind farm, but I wonder what kind of a polling result she’d obtained if the poll had been conducted with residents of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard? And Kennedy has to represent those areas also.)

I’m familiar with this area, having vacationed there twice (with a return trip planned for next year), and I can guarantee you that we do not live in “the high-rent district”; we can rent property for rates that are competitive with shore locations in New Jersey with no problem. For that reason, I think I have a little more insight into this; as this link from “Save Our Sound” written by Cape Cod Times writer Brent Harold tells us…

It’s nice when a book sheds some light on its subject.

Can a book be said to shed darkness?

The new book on Cape Cod’s wind power controversy, “Cape Wind; Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound,” by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, has been reviewed widely, including twice in the New York Times. Many people beyond our immediate area may get their main impression of the debate from this account. Unfortunately, it will be a grossly skewed impression. “Cape Wind” almost completely ignores the issues of a very complex situation in order to tell the more marketable story alluded to in that nifty subtitle.

(According to) Whitcomb and Williams, the proposal to install 130 turbines, each as tall as a 40-story building, over 25 square miles of open water off Cape Cod’s south shore would not have occasioned so much as a ripple of controversy if a handful of wealthy and powerful men had not chosen to block this slamdunk of an idea solely to protect the views from their trophy houses.

We should support the wind farm because, while Ted Kennedy is “a crafty old senator,” Jim Gordon, Cape Wind’s president, is a tall, trim, no-nonsense sort of guy who played a tenacious game of tetherball when a youth.

You would never guess it from “Cape Wind,” but many thousands of Cape Codders who are not rich and don’t own a house with a water view have had serious concerns about the industrialization of Nantucket Sound. (Over the years, the polls have shown sometimes a majority opposing the Cape Wind proposal, sometimes a strong minority).

For all of Cape Cod this is a backyard issue. We all stand to gain from meaningful greening of energy, but we are protective of our area, which also happens to be one of the most prized recreational destinations anywhere. Saving Nantucket Sound from development is an extension of the logic and sensibility that created Cape Cod National Seashore, which 45 years ago took much of the Outer Cape out of development.

The book has reviewers shaking their heads over the story of local power-brokers trying to deprive their less well-heeled fellow citizens of the obvious benefits of the Cape Wind proposal, such as a substantial reduction in utility bills and the substitution of clean energy for a dirty electric plant and worrisome nukes. If either of these benefits had been part of the proposal we might all be looking differently at the quality-of-life issues. But, contrary to the impression left by the book, the company has never promised a reduction beyond a few cents a month. Nor will the dirty power plants be taken off line.

Harold provides a lot more depth on this issue than Harrop does in her column which I stumbled across from the Philadelphia Inquirer online (with each passing day, I am more and more glad that we no longer subscribe to that paper any more).