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.

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Click here to read the entire essay on the Economist Magazine website