On Thursday, May 6, Rich Trzupek posted an article about the Cape Wind Farm. Since this seems to be moving ahead, I thought I would print some of the objections from the right and from the left. Mr. Trzupek posted the article at FrontPageMag.com, which is a website run by David Horowitz, a former 60's radical, now a conservative.
In the article, Mr. Trzupek cites Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s statement about the wind farm, "It's a boondoggle of the worst kind. It's going to cost the people of Massachusetts $4 billion over the next 20 years in extra costs." Mr. Kennedy is an environmental lawyer that you would expect to support 'green' energy. Mr. Trzupek agrees with the above statement.
The article further states:
"I recently asked an energy executive why his company was investing in wind-power so heavily, when we both know it doesn't make any economic sense to do so. His reply was that it's all about the government subsidies. Once those run out, they intend to forgo any further - very expensive - maintenance, run the things till they break down and then forget about them. Given the high cost of wind power, and the fact that you have to have an equivalent amount of fossil power ready to back up wind energy (since the wind doesn't blow all the time outside of the halls of Congress) it's reasonable to assume that this fellow isn't the only person in the energy industry thinking along such lines."
I think all of us would like to see cleaner, cheaper energy, but this is not the way to go. Please follow the link to the article referenced here to read how campaign money is influencing the government subsidies of the Cape Wind Farm. This is a true example of "follow the money." Unfortunately it is also a true example of how to take away money from the taxpayers and the consumers of electricity.
Of course it's follow the money. It is a part of the bigger picture of marine spatial planning (MSP) one of the newest ideas to hit the oceans lately, from our government. Driven by big business, the whole idea is to pretty much zone the ocean the way you zone land- it's a type of regulation that creates pay to play on the ocean. For example, they will section some areas off to shipping lanes, some to wind farms, some to oil rigs, some to marine protected reserves (which they use to try to justify the whole thing to any environmenally conscious public- all the while that environmentalist groups owned by big oil tend to be behind the whole thing).And fishing gets squeezed out, too and fishermen are expected to only fish in certain areas- as if fish didn't have tails to swim outside of man made "zones". Anyway, it's a big money making racket- wind, oil, etc get to pay to use the ocean bottom, and then they also get to make money off it. Marine spatial planning is a very, very scary thing that the public needs to be aware of, and this Cape Wind Farm is just the tip of the iceberg.