Opinions
Briefly, the idea is that a wind farm on Horseshoe Shoals will reduce toxic emissions that are warming the planet and generating predictable negative impacts on life forms, sea level and vegetation. Proponents call the wind clean power, or green power, in any event, non-polluting power atmospherically.
To combat damaging fossil fuel emissions, a developer wants to construct some 130 turbines with rotating blades in what detractors say is nearly sacred public property, a natural national treasurer in Nantucket Sound.
This column has been largely neutral, a bystander with a ringside seat to what has proved to be an exciting, educational dialogue with understandable biases on both sides of the issue.
Why neutral? Because the fella who pens this weekly offer of opinion does not sail the Sound, does not have a waterfront home with a threatened view and is not overly emotional about global warming insofar as the author will have passed on to a hotter place by the time the effects of warming actually choke life as we now know it.
This issue has been such that a book was even written about it, which this writer has not read.
What he has done, however, is visit the wind farms in Southern California's San Gorgonio Pass between L.A. and Palm Springs, one of the premier windy places in the States, and peruse the commentary of those who have more knowledge of the global issue.
Two comments stand out: One is by Lloyd Crawford of the National Wind Watch, an on-line anti-wind coalition. He claims, though I know not from whence his figures, that producing just 5 percent of the nation's electric energy with windmills would require 10 million acres of wild and rural (we might add offshore) space. To underscore that observation, history shows wind turbines fall far short of stated capacity.
[Read the full column in Friday's edition]
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