Huffington Magazine Issue 39 | Page 43

SINKING IN BUREAUCRACY mate change and the comparative social advantages of clean power. A year of operation of a comparable coal power plant, Cape Wind’s developers say, could produce as much as 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide — the leading planetwarming gas — and tens of thousands of tons of other airborne chemicals and pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides and asthma-inducing particulate matter. Natural gas-powered plants are much cleaner, but they still have abundant emissions. A year of operation of an offshore wind farm like this produces no such pollution. Of course, even accepting these benefits, opponents have fought tenaciously to keep it out of Nantucket Sound. As the project has inched its way through an obstacle course of state and federal agency approvals — 17 in all, by Rodgers’ count — critics have challenged each approval with relish in court. In fact, the project has been in an indeterminate state for so long that it has been the subject of at least two books, hundreds of editorials and a pair of documentary films, including last summer’s Cape Spin — described by The New York Times as HUFFINGTON 03.10.13 a “tragicomic” look at one of the nation’s most protracted energy infrastructure battles. “It was the first offshore wind farm proposed in the U.S., and the nation lacked a clear regulatory path established for how such a project would get approved,” Josh Levin, one of the film’s producers, told the Times last June. “Whether you are a green person or not, whether you are a renewable energy person or not, whether you’re a pro-business person or not, there is a cost to the United States having no effective energy policy.” BOGGED DOWN When the Cape Wind project received its final nod from the Interior Department in the spring of 2010 — already a decade after the project was first proposed — the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal chuckled. Having long decried the nominally higher costs of wind power relative to fossil fuels, the generally conservative newspaper had never been a friend to the Nantucket wind farm. But it had even deeper disdain for the protracted regulatory and judicial review that had kept the project in limbo for so long. “Contemplate this depressing change in America’s can-do spirit,” the editorial suggested. “The 6.6 million-ton Hoover