Cape Fear

By Amanda Griscom Little, Grist.org. Posted January 18, 2006.

A long-simmering disagreement within the environmental community over a plan to build a massive wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., is now boiling over into a highly public quarrel.

The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket Sound south of Cape Cod.

Kennedy -- a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement -- was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up alongside with a banner that read, "Bobby, you're on the wrong boat" -- a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development.

In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape, privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.

That, in turn, prompted about 150 environmental advocates -- including global-warming authors and activists Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, Bluewater Network founder Russell Long, and youth leader Billy Parish -- to circulate a letter asking Kennedy to reconsider his position. "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency," it read. "Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

Signers of the letter also included "Death of Environmentalism" authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who made the quarrel far more personal -- and nasty -- in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle last month. They called on Kennedy to step down from his position at NRDC, and took a swipe at his famous family by criticizing "the privileged patricians of a generation for whom building mansions by the sea was indistinguishable from advocating for the preservation of national parks or big game hunting in the wilds of Africa."

Kennedy shot back this week with his own opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, calling Shellenberger and Nordhaus's attacks "dishonest vitriol."

Choosing Sides

The venture at the center of all the fuss -- the Cape Wind Project, being developed by Cape Wind Associates -- would be the first major offshore wind installation in the U.S., and one of the largest wind farms in the world. It would produce enough electricity to meet nearly 75 percent of demand on Cape Cod and nearby islands Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, with peak output of 420 megawatts.

The permitting process for the project, which began in 2001, is nearing completion, and Cape Wind is widely expected to get the green light from the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service within a year. If state permits for the sea-bottom transmission lines are obtained, as expected, construction on the wind farm could begin mid-2007 and be completed in roughly two years.

The Humane Society of the United States, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a handful of local and state conservation groups have raised concerns about Cape Wind. On the other hand, a number of major national environmental groups have been supportive, including Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, World Wildlife Fund, and NRDC. Some, though, are waiting to officially endorse the project until the final environmental impact statement comes out later this year and clears up uncertainties about avian impacts and other issues.

Amanda Griscom Little writes the Muckraker column for Grist Magazine.

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