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From local jobs to clean energy, this project is right for America and right for the Cape. In years to come, the people of Massachusetts will be proud of this contribution to the clean energy revolution.
-- Greenpeace USA |
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Balancing act in Nantucket Sound
Sunday, January 17, 2010
...People opposed to Cape Wind often frame the debate as between preserving the pristine nature of Nantucket Sound versus the change that will come with an industrial-scale wind farm. I think this is a false premise that Salazar needs to examine, because Nantucket Sound is not pristine, and it is certainly changing right now, even though those changes may be hard to see.
With our reliance on fossil fuels, we are changing the temperature and the chemistry of Nantucket Sound. Those changes are impossible to see from the land and we may not notice them, but fish will notice them and move as a result. And shellfish, from large lobsters and scallops to small pteropods at the base of the food chain, will fight against an acidifying ocean that will damage their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons.
And, of course, warmer oceans mean sea level rise, and a warmer atmosphere means more energy and more severe storms, and the result of that will be an eroding shoreline and the loss of wetlands that are no longer free to migrate as sea levels change.
And this doesn't even include the obvious and news-making oil spills. I am a longtime volunteer and past board president of the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, which led the cleanup of 98,000 gallons of No. 6 oil spilled by Bouchard in Buzzards Bay on the way to the Cape's power plant.
Nor does it include the eutrophication caused by nitrogen loading from inadequate sewage treatment. So as we do nothing to change whence we get our power, we are changing Nantucket Sound for the worse. There is certainly no status quo to protect. We should be talking about what kind of change we want. No change is not an option.
Note: Click here to read this Op Ed in the New Bedford Standard Times by John Bullard, President of Sea Education Association and former mayor of New Bedford |
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