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