GREENIE VERSUS GREENIE -- OR IS IT "SPY VS. SPY"?

Windfarms are great -- for other people. So any excuse will do to stop them when the REAL people (Greenies and Lefties) might have to put up with having them around ruining the view

A report released yesterday by opponents of the proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound claims that nearly 80 percent of the 130 turbines would be in water deep enough to be vulnerable to a strike by a tanker. The result, the group says, could be a spill severely affecting the Nantucket Sound ecosystem. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound commissioned an oil-spill assessment in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the Cape Wind Energy Project that was released last November. The oil-spill assessment was conducted by Lighthouse Technical Consultants and The McGowan Group.

The public and other interested parties, such as the Alliance, have until Thursday to submit a response to the DEIS. The Army Corps is then required to investigate all claims and determine if further research is needed before issuing the final Environmental Impact Statement. Alliance assistant executive director Audra Parker said the group expects an approximately 800-page report will be submitted Thursday to the Army Corps that will include their questions on air quality impacts, aesthetics, economics, wildlife and other issues.

The portion of the report released yesterday dealt with oil spill impacts and said that the Corps failed to assess the worst-case scenario in terms of oil spills, as required by law. The report said that the most probable scenario involved the MV Great Gull, which carries up to 1.3 million gallons of fuel oil and petroleum products to Nantucket, striking one or more of the turbines. They estimate that such a collision would rupture two cargo tanks on the vessel, spilling 380,000 gallons of fuel into the sound.

The report estimated that a spill of that magnitude would cover 425 square miles of the sound's surface water and coat 217 miles of coastline. Impacts would be worst on Horseshoe Shoal, site of the wind farm, but would also hit Nantucket Sound communities, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and portions of the Atlantic Ocean and Elizabeth Islands.

Army Corps spokesman Lawrence Rosenberg disputed the claim that the turbines are vulnerable to being hit by any deep-draft vessel such as a tanker. "It's quite impossible for a large-keeled vessel to get close enough to strike one of the towers," he said yesterday. Rosenberg said shoals around most towers protect them. With depths of three to six feet, Rosenberg said a large ship would go aground before reaching any of the turbines.....

Rosenberg said that towers in deeper water are not easily accessible. "Some of the depths go to 20 feet, but you would have to be one hell of a navigator to get to them," he said. "These are not new issues. They have been looked at," said Cape Wind spokesperson Mark Rodgers. "I don't believe there is a recorded instance of oil barges going through that channel having lost control and driving into the shoals."

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AN EXPENSIVE SYMBOL


HOW IMPORTANT to the world's future is the Kyoto global-warming pact that went into effect Wednesday? It can't be that important when Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told the Washington Post, "The greatest value is symbolic." Symbolic is the word. Kyoto won't reduce emissions in America because this country never ratified Kyoto. What's more, negotiators at Kyoto in 1997 had to know the United States never would ratify the pact. Before Vice President Al Gore left to attend the Kyoto summit, the Senate voted 95-0 in favor of a resolution that warned that the Senate would not support a global- warming pact that exempted developing nations such as China and India. Kyoto won't make a difference in those developing nations because they don't have to reduce emissions, or even agree to curb how much their pollution grows. While 141 countries ratified the pact, Kyoto's emission caps only apply to some 35 countries.

Kyoto won't result in big greenhouse gas reductions in Europe. The Kyoto pact required Europe to reduce its emissions to 8 percent below its 1990 levels by 2012 and the United States by 7 percent below 1990 levels. That makes it seem as if Europe has a tougher mandate, except the baseline year chosen, 1990, was rigged to help Europe. The year 1990 preceded the shutdown of coal-spewing smokestacks in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. By 1997, many European countries already had met their Kyoto target. When the race started, some European nations were already at the finish line.

Claussen noted on the phone Thursday that some European countries are now exceeding their goals and will have to work to meet them. Allow me to interject that they'll be struggling despite their humongous head start.

President Clinton clearly understood Kyoto was poison. He never asked the Senate to ratify it. More important, Clinton never pushed for meaningful legislation to reduce emissions. When Clinton left office, emissions were on the rise -- they had reached a whopping 14 percent above 1990 levels. As Claussen noted, Team Clinton was "no different in substance than the current administration."

Claussen explained that she believes Kyoto is important because it establishes a global "statement of will" to reduce greenhouse gases. But Kyoto is "symbolic," she added, because it doesn't begin to address by how much emissions would need to be reduced to stop global warming. Greenhouse-gas emissions would need to be as low as 50 percent of 1990 levels to address human-induced global warming, albeit in 50 to 75 years. Other enviros have argued that much steeper reductions are needed -- one science biggie said "40 successful Kyotos" are needed.

The Bush administration estimates Kyoto would cost the United States 5 million jobs and $400 billion annually. Even if that figure is inflated, I don't know many Americans who want to lose their job for a symbol, or a first step. And it doesn't help that the global-warming debate has been distorted by politics. I am a global-warming agnostic. I think that warming may well be human- induced, but I am skeptical of the doomsday scenarios, and I don't trust people who use the issue as a club against America itself (and George W. Bush). I don't trust the zealots (like Gore) to pick the best remedies, after they misrepresent the science. ....

The Kyoto crowd has to get real, however. Be honest with the American people about how much change is involved. Admit that the science is not clear, and even scientists who recognize global warming as human-induced vary widely in what they see as the remedy. While Europe blames President Bush for the demise of Kyoto, I blame Kyoto negotiators for passing a document that wasn't a pact to spread the pain universally, but a pitchfork aimed at the U.S. economy. They call themselves sophisticates, but they negotiated like Madame Defarge.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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