This [Cape Wind project] is precisely the kind of renewable energy that pretty much every Earth Day speech since 1970 has demanded that we develop. Now that it's finally here, though--now that we're talking about particular windmills in particular places, not abstract and squeaky clean 'wind power'--people aren't so sure...But I've given my share of Earth Day speeches, and seen the effect they had. Sooner or later you've got to do something.
-- Bill McKibben, Author of The End of Nature
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Economist Magazine Wednesday, November 11, 2009
American politics Democracy in America
Blowhards
Nov 9th 2009, 16:16 by The Economist
THE first time I read that rich people in Cape Cod were organising to block the Cape Wind offshore wind-farm project because it would spoil their view, I thought it was a joke. The appreciation of a beautiful and unspoiled view is supposed to entail an appreciation of nature; wind power is the most sympathetic possible instantiation of such an appreciation of nature in the modern energy economy. To prefer that a power plant somewhere in the interior burn coal, polluting the environment, encouraging strip-mining, and pumping carbon into the atmosphere, in order to continue to be able to fantasise that the view from the sprucewood deck of one's Nantucket cottage remains the same as it was when Herman Melville saw it, or whatever, is a gross perversion of the environmentalist and preservationist ethic.