The governor is correct that reclassifying hydropower would wreck Initiative 937. That exposes the true purpose of the measure, to force a massive investment in the only form of renewable power even remotely practical - wind. That is accomplished by extracting the funds from the ratepayers of the Northwest, through utilities that today and in the future mostly need no additional power to meet their load.

Grant Bosse, the editor of New Hampshire Watchdog, said the move by RGGI has little to do with lowering carbon emissions. He said the economic collapse and slow recovery meant fewer emissions, fewer producers purchasing permits, which meant a loss of projected revenue for the nine states. "This has everything to do with revenues and nothing to do with the environment. This is driven by a desire for more state revenue."

Why should we spend millions of dollars to destroy wildlife habitat, kill bats and eagles, pollute our headwaters, fill valuable wetlands, polarize our communities, make people sick, mine rare earth metals - just to ensure that we can consume as much or more next year than we did this year? The costs of industrial wind far outweigh the benefits ... unless you are a wind developer.

We are presently at a critical point in New Hampshire. Foreign wind farm companies are rushing to construct huge wind turbine projects along NH's ridgelines, in ways that will forever change the landscape of our state, unless we act now. We need to institute an immediate state-wide moratorium on such projects, before we reach the point of no return.

"We find it absurd that the Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Fish and Wildlife Service, could reasonably conclude that three oil and gas operators should face prosecution for the incidental killing of seven birds at the same time it considers permits to kill between eight and fifteen bald eagles."

The "view" is what attracts people to Vermont as tourists, as transplant Vermonters, and it is what keeps many of us here even when we could be more financially well-off elsewhere. ...Before we destroy our views of our mountains, perhaps we should try to calculate the tremendous value of our views.

The Massachusetts Departments of Public Health and Environmental Protection continue endorsing noise guideline and noise sampling protocol tools which, both agencies admit, do not adequately address, nor properly mitigate the unique noise characteristics associated with Industrial Wind Turbines (June 30, 2011 letter from MassDEP to Falmouth Selectmen & Health Agent).

The truth is that the project's benefits to Maine are ambiguous, while the costs to our state are clear and real -- nearly $200 million will need to be subsidized by Maine families and businesses. This is the wrong direction for developing a new industry and antithetical to improving Maine's business climate and reducing the energy bill burdens on Maine families.

Today, the wind power generated in Ontario is both expensive and useless. The province actually pays hundreds of millions of dollars to other jurisdictions to take surplus power off its hands. Energy-intensive companies are leaving because their hydro bills are too high. And taxpayers are stuck with 20-year contracts that will add billions to their hydro bills (and/or the provincial deficit).

The more large-scale wind development I see on our mountaintops, the less I like it. Not the sight of the towers and turbines themselves, but the clearing, blasting, filling, leveling, grading and overall destruction that can be required to build high-elevation wind-tower pads, service roads and transmission lines. God help our ridges if what happened to the Lowell Mountain Range is the first step in Vermont's path to energy independence.

The wind-energy lobby has sought such permission for years, insisting that eagle-kill permits ought to last longer than the current limit of five years. Last April the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed, and it published a Federal Register notice saying it planned to extend incidental-take permits to 30 years so as to "facilitate the responsible development of renewable energy."

Apart from being ugly, noisy, expensive, inefficient, destructive to wildlife and incapable of doing the one thing that notionally they're supposed to do - "reduce CO2" - they are also BLOODY DANGEROUS.

Now Marble River’s turbine are on line. The noise is compounded with Noble’s turbine noise levels. The noise and the sun flicker on people’s homes is clearly abuse of the people in their homes. The wind town law of 50 decimals is not acceptable. This law must be changed to protect the people.

Is wind part of the answer to our need to diversify our energy sources? Yes. Is the Tuttle-Willard ridge the best place for wind power? No. There's too much at stake. Our insatiable appetite for energy shouldn't be a tradeoff for healthy forests and wildlife habitat. As the SEC discusses Antrim Wind Energy's plan, the wind will be blowing on Tuttle Hill. Let's hope the wind keeps blowing through that spruce.

For an industry all puffed up about its supposed environmental virtue, green energy sure is attracting a dirty crowd. Witness its latest entrant, Italy's Mafia. The mob knows a good fraud when it sees one. Mafia soldiers have moved in on the something-for-nothing world of green energy.

I realized I had a story that was bigger than just the effectiveness of wind energy. You can like it or you can hate it-that isn't the point. What this is about is government and business rushing ahead with new technology without ever making sure it's safe. A car manufacturer would never get away with releasing a new model without extensive safety tests. Same goes for food, appliances-anything. And yet these machines just kept going up, and up, and up.

Wind energy continues to flunk the market test. Ontario buys wind energy at a price 50% higher than it would have to pay for electricity from natural gas. (A new natural gas facility can make money selling electricity at 7-8 cents a kilowatt-hour. Ontario buys newly installed windpower at prices of about 11 cents per kilowatt-hour.)

When Ontario's auditor general looked at the Liberals' renewable energy policies in 2011, he found they (a) rushed into the field without knowing what they were doing (b) failed to develop a business plan (c) did no internal audit work ...(f) grossly over-estimated the number of jobs they would create. As a result they have added billions of dollars to the cost of electricity Ontarians will be paying for years to come.

Biodiversity that takes centuries to evolve cannot be reinvented overnight, neither can the bald eagles that nested in a 100 year old cottonwood tree at Fisherville be expected to accept a Tupperware nest platform on a pole somewhere, when their instinct tells them they should be in a natural tree somewhere else. Legislation is purportedly in place to protect species at risk - that's why it is there. Legislation that can be bought, and then twisted to serve the needs of development is not legislation. It smacks of a corrupt system of the worst possible kind perpetuated by money and greed.