Environmental Talk

ET favorite Chris Baskind and his website Lighter Footstep alerted us to this Daily Show piece on renewable wind energy and the terrible toll it could take on Nantucket residents.

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The Cape Wind website presents the case for the project here.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New York Times editorial against the project can be found here.

Grist takes a look at both sides of the project in a balanced piece available here.

Instead of a long, tedious treatise addressing both sides of the argument, I’ll cut to the chase with a little snappy and snarky commentary….

The current project is estimated to be able to supply about 75% of the electricity demands of Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

Suffice to say, if the project had been built before Kennedys Jr. and Sr. had started talking, it may well have supplied 100% of the energy for the entire state of Massachusetts.

In his Times article, Kennedy first criticizes the cost of building the project off-shore and then later suggests that it should be built even further off-shore similar to proposed projects in Scotland and Germany.

Kennedy’s claim that local fisherman would get their nets caught in project cables seems to come up empty when, as reported in the Grist article, “the cables carrying the electricity back to shore would be embedded six feet under the seabed.”

Unless the fishermen are trolling for the worms from Dune, there would appear to be little impact on the local sea folk.

About the only real problem that could arise from Kennedy’s arguments is a global shortage of red herrings.

global warming, climate change, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Edward Kennedy, hypocrisy, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Wind, hot air, renewable energy, wind power,