by Charles Komanoff

December 3, 2002

Dear colleague -

A wind energy project proposed for Nantucket Sound has run into

heated opposition. This is not surprising in itself; what is

surprising is that the opposition has draped itself in the flag of

"environmentalism." I believe that this misappropriation of our

cause is harming the progress of renewable energy and may prove

damaging to the larger environmental movement as well.

I am appealing to U.S. environmentalists to make clear that they

strongly support the Cape Wind project as a key element of

developing large-scale wind power throughout the United

States.

To be sure, there may be important issues to be negotiated for the

project, ranging from the precise siting of the wind turbines to

regulatory standards for development on the outer continental

shelf. But I think it would be tragic if these issues became a

pretext for stopping or significantly shrinking the project.

Wind power is the only non-polluting means of generating energy

that is commercially available on a large scale and can satisfy the

so-called "market" criteria that govern U.S. energy supply and

demand now and for the foreseeable future. Wind turbines such as

those proposed for Nantucket Sound are thus the only currently

viable means of providing commercial quantities of energy without

destroying whole ecosystems or massively polluting our air, water

and land. The Cape Wind developers anticipate producing roughly

1.5 billion kilowatt-hours a year from 420 megawatts of capacity;

each unit of output will substitute 1-for-1 for the fossil-fuel mining

and burning that constitutes the bulk of present energy systems

both locally in New England and throughout the world.

In light of the destructiveness of all fossil-fuel extraction and

power generation -- which is well understood by every

environmentalist -- it seems clear that the Cape Wind farm will be

extremely beneficial to the environment on an overall net basis. No

less an authority than Dr. George Woodwell -- founder and

director of the Woods Hole Research Center, president emeritus of

the Ecological Society of America and former board chair of the

World Wildlife Fund -- has stated that he does not expect the

project to pose a dire threat to the region's rich bird life, and

certainly not in comparison to the damage now being wreaked by

the fossil fuels that the project will displace. The same holds for

marine mammals and other wildlife.

Yet the home page of the Web site of the Alliance to Protect

Nantucket Sound, which opposes the project, recently carried the

following quote from a senior attorney for the Natural Resources

Defense Council: "[The Cape Wind project will] injure a ...

valuable tourist industry [and] destroy a resource which is ... a part

of the commons ... our nation's history ... and the maritime and

the nautical tradition of Massachusetts." However, Nantucket

Sound, to which the NRDC attorney presumably referred, will be

largely untouched by the project. The Sound covers at least 300

square miles, whereas only 28 square miles -- less than one-tenth

of the Sound's overall expanse -- will be disturbed, according to

the alliance.

And within that disturbed area, each turbine will lie at the

center of a considerable open area, roughly one hundred acres

of sea. (This assumes that the 170 turbines are distributed evenly in

the 28 square miles; clustering them would reduce the total impact

by allowing even more of the Sound to remain undisturbed.)

Considering both the small share of the Sound that the wind farm

will occupy and the large elbow room for each turbine, the NRDC

attorney's alarm strikes me as disproportionate, to say the least.

More importantly, consider the tremendous prospective benefits of

the Cape Wind project. If the turbines perform as anticipated, they

will displace the energy equivalent of more than two million

barrels of oil a year. That equates to one fully loaded Exxon Valdez

every seven months. In just 80 days of operation the wind farm

will create sufficient energy to displace the entire cargo of the

shattered oil tanker Prestige -- oil that is now befouling 250 miles

of the Spanish coast and killing Atlantic bird and sea life on a vast

scale. And there is the effluent as well: every week the Cape Wind

project does not operate will result in existing power plants putting

another 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere,

with all the catastrophic consequences that we understand too well.

It is no exaggeration to say that humanity's and the Earth's

prospects depend on a move to renewable energy. Fortunately, real

progress has been made, particularly in wind power. The world

wind industry appears to have finally attained critical mass. More

than a dozen manufacturers now sell utility-scale wind turbines to

developers in at least 20 countries, and installed global capacity

has tripled in just five years, from 1995 to 2000.

But deployment of wind turbines has been slower in the U.S., and

progress remains dependent upon strong public support so that tax

breaks can offset subsidies to fossil fuels and wind farms can be

sited in suitably windy areas. If the first-ever large-scale wind

power project proposed for the eastern United States is stopped -

and stopped in the name of "environmentalism" -- this debacle

will significantly slow the development of wind power, just when

we need it to accelerate.

To be sure, 170 wind towers will set a clear human imprint on

Cape Cod's seascape. We can all agree that wild nature is precious

and that its continued presence is essential to human happiness.

Dave Brower's plea for wilderness, "that a wide, spacious,

untrammeled freedom shall remain in the midst of the American

earth," drew me into the environmental movement over 30 years

ago and continues to motivate my work and shape my life.

But the majesty of the Cape and Sound will survive the Cape Wind

project. The maximum visual height of the turbines will be slightly

more than one degree from the very nearest point on Cape Cod,

Point Gammon; significantly less elsewhere on the Cape; and a

little less than half-a-degree from Martha's Vineyard and a

quarter-degree from Nantucket. In other words, from the very nearest

point on land, the tallest tower could be covered twice over with the

width of your fingertip held at arm's length, and would be even

less conspicuous from any other shore point. Moreover, Nantucket

Sound hasn't been a pristine place for centuries. It is already a

very heavily humanized stretch of water, though no less beautiful for

that. Indeed, it is this fact -- that a humanized world need not be

an ugly one -- that shows us, perhaps, the way forward.

We should appeal to the people of Cape Cod and the Cape Islands

to try to cultivate a broader feeling with regard to the Cape Wind

project -- to regard the wind turbines not as incursions on their

view but as a visible measure of their taking responsibility for

living on this planet. Indeed, I would urge them to go further still,

and not merely tolerate the windmills, but learn to like them, to see

them as beautiful emblems of humankind's new commitment to live

harmoniously in the natural world.

I offer a numerical comparison to help them do so. With the Cape

Wind farm in place, Nantucket Sound's energy density -- the

amount of energy being extracted per unit area -- will rise to the

current level for the U.S. as a whole. Briefly: the lower 48 states

cover 10,000 times as much area as the Sound, and they contain

power plants generating 2,500 times as much electricity as Cape

Wind is projected to produce; while this suggests that the project

will give Nantucket Sound a four-fold higher electricity density

than the rest of the country, we must also remember that total U.S.

energy use -- by cars, planes, factories, etc. -- is roughly triple

that of electricity alone. This leaves the Sound, with the windmills,

with a slightly (one-third) higher energy density than the U.S. as a

whole.

Is that not a lovely result? The communities around Nantucket

Sound will be assuming their share, plus a little extra, of the

burden for the energy we Americans use. The citizens of Cape Cod

and the Cape Islands will then have moral authority to demand an

energy policy based on wind and sunlight. They will have "walked

the walk." If they wish -- and I hope they will -- they will have

the credentials to become renewable-energy ambassadors to the

nation and the world. And they will have done their bit with

comparatively little sacrifice: they will have no infernally polluting

fossil or nuclear sources, just some tall, elegant blades that spin

quietly and miraculously draw energy from the air.

Let us be clear that it won't suffice to propose other sites for the

turbines, or to posit energy-efficiency measures that might save

energy equaling their output. The Cape Wind project is nearly

ready to go, whereas there is no assurance that these alternatives

would actually materialize (and hard experience tells us that they

probably will not). More fundamentally, we need these other steps,

multiplied many-fold, in addition to the Cape Wind farm, if we as

a people are to actually make the transition from fossil fuels.

If all this isn't enough reason to support the Cape Wind project,

consider this: In recent years we environmentalists increasingly

have been disparaged as "bait-and-switch" artists who talk one

way and, when crunch comes, act another. The spectacle of

environmentalists exhibiting the most glaring kind of NIMBYism

in this highly visible controversy will tend to discredit not just the

cause of renewable energy but the entire environmental movement.

John Muir famously said, "When we try to pick out anything by

itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." And

so it is with energy production on today's terrible scale, and also

with its antidotes.

Through dependence on fossil fuels, humankind has come to a

point where an "unspoiled" Nantucket Sound is inescapably linked

to spoiled climate, water, air and lungs elsewhere, and to global

violence and terror. Conversely, Nantucket Sound with its clean,

quiet, graceful windmills would show the way out of this

dependence and to the recovery and continuance of our world.

If by accepting a modest, largely aesthetic change in the landscape

we can heal the Earth to this great extent, how in conscience can

we not do so?

Charles Komanoff

If you agree with this statement, or at least its bottom line, please

express your support for the Cape Wind project as an individual

and, if applicable, on behalf of your organization. Please write to

the following. Please circulate this statement as well.

Doug Yearley / President and CEO / Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound /

396 Main St., Suite #2 / Hyannis, MA 02601 / Email: info@saveoursound.org /

[The Alliance represents opponents of the Cape Wind project.]

John Adams / Executive Director / The Natural Resources Defense Council /

40 West 20th Street / New York, NY 10011 / www.nrdc.org / [An NRDC senior

attorney has been quoted prominently on the Alliance's Web site

opposing the Cape Wind project.]

John Knox / Executive Director / Earth Island Institute / 300 Broadway, Suite 28 /

San Francisco, CA 94133 / www.earthisland.org / [At this writing EII was listed as

an opponent of the project on the Alliance's Web site, based on the opposition

of the International Marine Mammal Project, an EII project.]