Sierra Club Head Equivocates on Wind

It is perplexing and disturbing that, Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club (the organization whose mission is ostensibly to protect the planet), ends his Aug 1 interview with Mike Seccombe of The Vineyard Gazette by echoing the hollow Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) refrain against Cape Wind.

It aligns Carl Pope and the Sierra Club by extension with one of the principal hypocrisies — tools of inertia — that has delayed the first US offshore wind farm (and all the others behind it) for several years now and which has cost citizens of Massachusetts and the United States untolled billions in preserving the commitment to fossil fuels.

“You need strength to deal with vested interests like that.” Another example Mr. Pope points to is the Cape Wind development.

“You will see people come out and say ‘Yes, I’m in favor of wind, but not where I am.’ And I have a lot of questions for people here about Cape Wind, which the Sierra Club supported after studying it for a long time.

“Now, I don’t know myself if Cape Wind is in the best place in this region for wind turbines. There might have been a better place.

“If so, I would be fine with the people of this region saying ‘Here’s our wind site and it’s big and we’re going to make it really easy to build there.’

“As long as people take responsibility for what they need. It’s not a question of moving the burden to someone else,” Mr. Pope said.

One would think Carl Pope would have caught the interleaving paradoxes (and even the psychological transference) of that Charlie-Parker-like improvisational run across the chords; he — more than most others — should be expected to have committed the necessary time to understand the long work, preparation and technical as well as business merit of Jim Gordon’s plan to locate Cape Wind on the Horseshoe Shoal. Even though Mr Pope says the Sierra Club has studied the situation, it is painfully evident in his words that he has neither grasped the details nor the likelihood that Horseshoe Shoal will be exploited along with all the other shallow-water venues around the Cape & Islands for wind power, eventually.

You can see how the shallow water of the Horseshoe Shoal represents an ideal location for the Cape Wind turbines: not too close but not too far from the electricity grid, out of the flight paths and clearly away from principal maritime navigational channels. These facts have been ignored by opponents who continue to cite flight-path and maritime navigational issues (which only exist for private sailors) as reasons to delay and kill the project.

Clean, renewable wind power: this is not a trifle.

The list of NIMBY-ists has heretofore consisted of the members of the Oyster Harbors Club and the news editors, retired news icons, and state and national elected officials of the Cape & Islands who either sail in the Nantucket Sound themselves or vainly cater to the embedded interests of Osterville and environs.

Heading the list are people who are national institutions in their own right: Bunny Mellon (she, not Jackie O, redecorated Camelot), Bill Koch (America’s Cup winner of yore, “art” collector, legacy of Koch Industries and Fossil All-Star as principal of the Oxbow Group, a heavy player in Old energy), Ted Kennedy (who carried their water in Congress), Mitt Romney (to whom the Governor’s veto on Cape Wind — proposed in the secret language entered in conference committee to the failed Young-Stevens-Kennedy amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 — would have handed Cape Wind’s demise) and other non-entities & baggage-handlers.

Aesthetic objections to the placement of Cape Wind deserve recognition. Moreover, it is understandable that individuals who learned to sail their Wianno Senior sloops in the Nantucket Sound — no matter how privileged — would have visceral reactions against a large industrial project placed on the special & historic waters of their formative adolescent passage. It is even touching to consider this, as we have heard both Kennedys — Bobby & Teddy — sputtering incoherently on the radio and on the Senate floor in their mad rejection of the thought of Jim Gordon’s personal assault on their emotional plane.

Yet the merits of the Cape Wind project are so well-grounded in energy and utility terms, and so serious in their meaning for the future of our country and these coming generations, that the strong feeling of a few is simply and justifiably blown away. The merits of Cape Wind, in its proposed Horseshoe Shoal location, are overwhelming.

Add to merit the fact that many people — particularly those technology natives under a certain age — like the look & feel of wind turbines. Aesthetic opponents, we may find, are elderly conservatives who either repel from change of any kind or have never seen these glorious white things in the flesh. It was my neighbor on Music Street — an old 17th-Century Martha’s Vineyard name — who reminded me that there was conservative opposition in the 1950s & 1960s to the introduction in West Tisbury and Chilmark of the unsightly telephone poles.

And so, it is surprising to see Mr Pope willingly adding his own and the Sierra Club’s names to this traitors’ list of NIMBY-ists. And this may come to reflect that he doesn’t talk enough to the 18- to 28-year olds who are not captured in the polls and who are about to give Obama the coming historic landslide.

Mr Pope, what is the Sierra Club’s position on Cape Wind and on clean, renewable wind power in general?

Your words betray an alignment with entrenched fossil fuel interests, and your uncertainty may stifle our nation’s swift progress toward national security. You sound just like the soulless Mitt (the -Crit) Romney, that hollow being, hair perfectly sculpted as he sonorously decries the benefits of wind- and other renewable forms of power, while hurling menacing sliders up and under the chin of Jim Gordon.

How is it so? There is no opening here for pensive hedging. Have you considered the damage this does to your credibility & your position? You — and others — can’t have it both ways because time is of the essence.