Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
Broadcast: 17/04/2006
Government vetos wind farm development
Reporter: Mary Gearin

While Mass Audubon's primary expertise is bird life, we also believe that other potential impacts are important and should be examined.

All renewable energies have a common fault: They are very dilute. Massive areas are needed to produce small amounts of energy. Solar and wind have strong periodicity and do not match actual electricity use.

Exercise your right as an American and be heard. Call the General Land Office at (512) 463-5001 and demand that the concerns of the scientific community be met before turbines are erected in the Gulf of Mexico. Absent that, we may finally experience Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Your [Boston Globe] front page headline of March 29, "Audubon review supports wind farm" was a rush to judgment according to Vernon Lang, supervisor of Fish and Wildlife’s New England field office, the agency lead official on the Cape Wind proposal.
Editor's Note: This letter has been submitted to the Boston Globe.

The state currently has no requirements for environmental studies of wind turbine sites. We need a law requiring wildlife surveys before and after the installation of wind turbines. Places with high populations of vulnerable wildlife should be avoided.

There seems to be no good way to properly site these turbines on unspoiled Appalachian mountains without causing irreparable damage. The State Corporation Commission has an opportunity to do the right thing by heeding the growing warnings about negative, cumulative effects its own experts are offering.

How is the legal and moral requirement for the protection of our wildlife, in this instance Brolgas, reconciled with the certainty that they will be displaced and or killed by the turbines of this wind farm?

Editor's Note:This letter has appeared in several Australian newspapers.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Brolga, and many other birds, are at a great risk and would be killed by the Macarthur wind farm if it were to go ahead. Its time to give our native companions a fair go.

Editor's Note: This letter has appeared in several Australian papers.

Wind power as the alternative source of power generation seems to be breaking through as everybody's darling. General Electric is investing heavily in it. President Bush, having lately discovered that America is addicted to oil, is supporting the admittedly clean energy that comes from wind turbines, and the environmental community loves windmills. Are we perhaps getting too far ahead of ourselves by uncritically embracing wind turbines?

Other places in Maine suitable for wind farms would not involve destroying wilderness or decreasing tourist dollars.

As a boat angler who haunts Nantucket Sound, I'm especially concerned about its fish resources. Yet whenever I have sought solace from Cape Wind and the Corps in the form of cogent answers to my questions, I've gotten only what they hope to harness--wind.

This means that concerned citizens from all over the state who love our Maine mountains must make themselves aware of this outrageous proposal, as well as the larger question of uncontrolled wind power development and the damage it will cause.

Juniata Valley Audubon asks concerned residents to contact Gov. Ed Rendell, their senators and representatives and the Department of Environmental Protection to voice their displeasure over the gross waste of almost $400,000 to study a proposal that would cause so much harm to both outdoor recreation and wildlife, and provide only minuscule amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity.

It all sounds nice and crunchy on the surface, but Whole Foods might soon find itself picketed the same way Wal-Mart is, but instead of unions it'll be environmentalists.

I feel that your paper's endorsement of the wind project is based upon an incomplete understanding of its impact upon the western mountains' nature-based tourism.

The Nantucket Sound region is a fragile marine environment on the active list under consideration for sanctuary status by the federal government. Nantucket Sound exists in the North Atlantic Flyway. It is a habitat to endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

My viewpoint was, and still is, that the huge towers (260 feet high), gigantic blades (add another 150 feet), blinking strobe lights, permanent removal of wind-hindering vegetation, and highly visible road and transmission infrastructures are totally inappropriate for wild, undeveloped, scenic and highly visible settings. And I said I thought that opponents should focus on those issues, as well as the small return in electricity for the massive public price paid, aesthetically and otherwise, and should perhaps stay away from the issue of bird mortality caused by the rapidly spinning blades. The jury is still out on that, I said, and conventional wisdom is that vastly more birds are killed by high-rise windows and free-running cats......Well, so much for conventional wisdom.

Editor's Note This opinion piece was written in response to a letter received from Lisa Linowes that is available via the link below.

The costs are “the loss of the mountains,” said Dr. Dain Trafton of Phillips, Maine, speaking for the friends group to the Original Irregular newspaper. “Is it worthwhile introducing this huge industrial plant into these beautiful mountains when, in fact, very little power will be produced, very few emissions will be avoided, and very little economic benefit will come to the area?”

Good winds coincide with neither the heating nor air-conditioning season. Wind is a willy-nilly source of electricity, and as such is not very useful.