It would be great if we could harness the wind power from this debate among environmentalists over the proposal for 130, 440 foot high wind turbines 6 miles off the coast of Nantucket Sound. To view simulated pictures of the wind farm from Nantucket, go here.
The four-year-old battle started heating up last summer when Greenpeace USA staged a demonstration against well-known eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
who’s been an outspoken opponent of the proposal for a 130-turbine
wind-power project in Horseshoe Shoal, a shallow portion of Nantucket
Sound south of Cape Cod. Kennedy — a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council and a pioneer in the waterway-protection movement — was on a sailboat for an event with the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound,
which opposes the wind project. A Greenpeace vessel cruised up
alongside with a banner that read, “Bobby, you’re on the wrong boat” —
a stunt that was part of a larger Greenpeace campaign pressuring Kennedy to change his mind on the development. (Hear audio from the Greenpeace/Kennedy confrontation.)In mid-December, Kennedy, wanting to explain his position to critics and the public at large, published an impassioned op-ed in The New York Times
in which he argued that the wind farm would mar a precious seascape,
privatize a publicly owned commons, and damage the local economy.They [Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus] called on Kennedy to step down from his position at NRDC, and took
a swipe at his famous family by criticizing “the privileged patricians
of a generation for whom building mansions by the sea was
indistinguishable from advocating for the preservation of national
parks or big game hunting in the wilds of Africa.”
