>http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/03-4om/McKibben.html
>
>BILL McKIBBEN
>Serious Wind
>Environmentalists should be careful what they wish for.
>Orion Online - July-August 2003
>
>IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND how difficult it will be for our society to make
>the transition away from fossil fuel addiction, consider one small report
>that slipped out of the Department of Energy in early December of last
>year. It found that, despite melting poles and rising sea levels, the
>overall consumption of renewable energy in America fell twelve percent in
>2001. Granted, this was partly due to a drought that lowered the
>reservoirs behind hydro dams, but the drop was also due to the fact that
>more solar panels were coming off houses than were going up. Equipment
>from the "boom years" -- when Jimmy Carter was subsidizing renewable
>energy -- is wearing out, being retired faster than it can be replaced.
>Solar energy use, which never accounted for even close to one percent of
>our energy generation, is growing smaller still. And it's not because of
>George Bush, not really. It's because we environmentalists never forced
>the political world to take renewable energy seriously.
>
>But how seriously do we take it ourselves? If you want to understand how
>difficult it will be for our society to make the transition away from
>fossil fuel addiction, you might also want to visit a website:
>www.saveoursound.org. It's the home of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket
>Sound, and on it you will find an environmental cri de coeur that at first
>glance could be coming from any of a million citizen groups, watershed
>councils, river protectors, or wilderness watchdogs. Shady developers, the
>alliance warns, are planning a "massive power plant" that will line their
>pockets but endanger local fishermen, wreck property values, threaten
>wildlife, and "destroy the main reason people love Cape Cod: the
>ungoverned natural beauty, solitude, and wildness of its coasts."
>
>Before you sign up, though, you need to know that the villains in this
>case plan to build windmills: 130 of them, sited well out to sea, which
>would provide thousands of megawatts of power annually. This is precisely
>the kind of renewable energy that pretty much every Earth Day speech since
>1970 has demanded that we develop. Now that it's finally here, though --
>now that we're talking about particular windmills in particular places,
>not abstract and squeaky-clean "wind power" -- people aren't so sure.
>
>Opponents of the Cape Wind development protest that these windmills will
>be visible from shore -- and they're right. How visible is a matter of
>debate, but on a clear day you would see their blades turning on the
>horizon. They point out, again correctly, that the developers are private
>interests, rushing to develop a resource that, in fact, they do not own,
>and without waiting for the government to come up with a set of rules and
>processes for siting such installations. The critics also insist that
>there's a "better" site somewhere -- and again they're probably right.
>There's almost always a better site for anything. The whole business is
>messy, imperfect.
>
>But those criticisms, however valid, are small truths. The big truths are
>these: Each breath of wind that blows across Nantucket Sound contains 370
>parts per million of carbon dioxide, up from 275 parts per million before
>the Industrial Revolution, before we started burning coal and gas and oil.
>That CO2 traps the sun's heat -- about two watts per square meter of the
>planet's surface. Right now the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is
>higher than it's been for four hundred thousand years. If we keep burning
>coal and gas and oil, the scientific consensus is that by the latter part
>of the century the planet's temperature will have risen five degrees
>Fahrenheit, to a level higher than we've seen for fifty million years.
>
>And what does that mean for Cape Cod? Well, the middle-of-the-road
>prediction is that sea levels will rise a couple of feet this century. On
>a standard eastern beach sloping seaward at about one degree, a one-foot
>rise in sea level should bring the ocean in ninety feet. Go stand on the
>beach at Truro and make your own calculation.
>
>Big truths have to trump small ones. It becomes a caricature of
>environmentalism to object that windmills kill birds or fish -- in fact,
>new windmills kill very few birds compared with the original models. In
>fact, says Greenpeace, offshore windmill platforms in Europe have often
>turned into artificial reefs providing prime spawning ground for fish. But
>even if windmills did kill some birds, that's a small truth -- the big
>truth is that rising temperatures seem likely to trigger an extinction
>spasm comparable to the one that occurred when the last big asteroids
>struck the planet. Already polar bears are dying as their ice empire
>shrinks; already coral reefs are disappearing as rising sea temperatures
>bleach them, and by some accounts, they may be gone altogether before the
>century ends.
>
>The choice, in other words, is not between windmills and untouched nature.
>It's between windmills and the destruction of the planet's biology on a
>scale we can barely begin to imagine. Charles Komanoff, an independent
>energy consultant in New York, calculates that Cape Wind's windmills could
>produce as much as 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours annually. Or, looked at
>another way, if they aren't built, twenty thousand tons of carbon will be
>emitted each week as coal and oil and gas are burned to produce the same
>amount of energy. The windmills won't provide all the power for the Cape,
>but they might provide something like half, which is a lot.
>
>In the real world, the one where the molecular structure of CO2
>inconveniently traps solar radiation, you don't get to argue for
>perfection. You can say, as opponents of the Cape Wind project have said,
>that we'd do more to fight global warming by improving gas mileage in our
>cars. You can say that we should insulate our homes and build better
>refrigerators. You can say that we should plant more trees and have fewer
>kids. And you would be right, just as every Earth Day speech is "right."
>But I've given my share of Earth Day speeches, and seen the effect they
>had. Sooner or later you've got to do something. And if we're to have any
>chance of heading off catastrophic temperature increase, we have to do
>everything we can imagine. Hybrid cars and planting trees and a new
>president with the foresight of Jimmy Carter. And windmills, all the hell
>over the place. Right now renewable energy in America is at six percent
>and falling.
>
>Which is not to say it's going to be easy. The plans to build big turbines
>provoke mixed feelings in me too. I live in the mountains above Lake
>Champlain, where the wind blows strong along the ridgelines. I'll battle
>to keep windmills out of designated wilderness if that ever comes up, but
>right now I'm joining those who are battling to get them built on the
>ridgeline nearest our home. And battling to see them not as industrial
>eyesores, but as part of a new aesthetic. The wind made visible. The slow,
>steady turning that blows us into a future less hopeless than the future
>we're steaming toward now.
>
>
>[]
>BILL McKIBBEN's first book, The End of Nature, has now appeared in twenty
>foreign editions. His new book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered
>Age, has just been published by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and
>Company. He lives with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and daughter in
>Vermont. His Orion column, Small Change, appears three times a year.
>
>Photo courtesy of The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound
>
>
>
>
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> From the Editors
>
>Features available online:
>In Law We Trust
>by Mark Dowie
>With the privatization of natural resources sweeping the nation like a new
>dance, it's time to polish up a venerable legal weapon.
>The Squeeze
>by Barbara Hurd
>Caught between a rock and a hard place, a novice caver confronts her fear
>of life's dark places.
>Tracking Toxics
>by Bill Sherwonit
>The American military has left behind a trail of barrel dumps, illness,
>and death in the nation's last frontier, but a tiny group of Alaskans is
>righting the wrongs.
>
>Other features available in print version only:
>
>Getting Over Organic
>by Michael Pollan
>
>The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans
>by Rebecca Solnit
>
>Serious Wind
>by Bill McKibben
>
>Seeing As Believing
>Paintings by Judith Belzer
>
>Good Medicine
>Photographs by Lynn Johnson
>Text by Deb Soule
>
>Putting Birds Back
>by Susan Cerulean
>
>Self-Serve Biodiesel
>by Elizabeth Grossman
>
>A Woman's World
>by Barbara Seamen
>
>A Nation Divided
>by Rose Arrieta
>
>Reality Check
>by Robert Michael Pyle
>
>Everywhere But Here
>by Ana Maria Soagna
>
>
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