Well, good luck with this, Bill, because, as he actually points out in this very long, meandering piece, enviroweenies/climate cultists keep saying no to it. They’re often fine if it is Somewhere Else. Remember the fight over Cape Wind, where John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, among others, were dead set against it, because it was where they sail? I’ve written many, many blog posts on the E/CCs blocking “green” energy projects around the world.
I’m an environmentalist, which means I’ve got some practice in saying no. It’s what we do: John Muir saying no to the destruction of Yosemite helped kick off environmentalism; Rachel Carson said no to DDT; the Sierra Club said no to the damming of the Grand Canyon. We’re often quite good at it, and thank heaven; I’ll go to my grave satisfied by, if nothing else, having played some part in stopping Big Oil from building the Keystone XL pipeline 1,700 miles across the heart of the continent. Right now I’m deeply engaged with American colleagues in trying to stop our big banks from funding fossil fuel expansion, and rooting on friends in Africa as they battle the giant EACOP pipeline, and watching with admiration as European confreres fight plans to expand coal mines at the expense of forests and villages. In a world where giant corporations, and the governments they too often control, ceaselessly do dangerous and unnecessary things, saying no is a valuable survival skill for civilizations.
But we’re at a hinge moment now, when solving our biggest problems—environmental but also social—means we need to say yes to some things: solar panels and wind turbines and factories to make batteries and mines to extract lithium. And new affordable housing that will make cities denser and more efficient while cutting the ruinous price of housing. And—well, it’s a long list. And in every case there are both benefits and costs, all played out in particular places with particular histories. But what interests me is the search for some general principles that might make these disputes easier, at least for people of good will. I’m thinking of people like me: older white people, a class particularly used to working the system, and perhaps psychologically tilted toward keeping things the way they are.
I suggest we start in deep Blue areas, where the people who support this the most live. Bill goes on to tell the story of how an old mine in northern NY wanted to put up 10 wind turbines, and most of the locals were fine with this, but, the wacko-enviros were dead set against it, and
I wrote a piece for the New York Times saying just that (that they needed to be built, because some sacrifice needed to be made, as he describes in the previous paragraphs), and earned in the process the enmity of some of the region’s professional environmentalists (and they won the fight; there are no wind turbines). But it felt as if I’d been true to the place by saying no to one plan, and yes to another. The dump was just a stupid idea; the wind turbines, though they came with drawbacks, were a necessary one.
Well, good on Bill to back his beliefs
Right now we’re at a moment when we need to build in a way we haven’t for quite a while, maybe since the days of the New Deal and the Second World War. The consensus among scientists and engineers who study this stuff is that we need to replace about a billion machines in America alone—regular cars with EVs or e-bikes, furnaces with heat pumps. And to run them on clean power, we need to build out lots of solar panels and wind farms and battery arrays. The factories to churn these things out are going up fast, in response to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. But once this stuff has emerged from the factory, it needs to go in someone’s basement, someone’s kitchen, someone’s…backyard. Transmission lines have to cross fields; railroad tracks need to be built through rights of way. Some NIMBY passion will need to be replaced by some YIMBY enthusiasm—or at least some acquiescence.
Central Park would be a fantastic place to put up solar panels and wind turbines, eh? How about Cape Cod and the Hamptons? Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, near Biden’s beach house? The White House lawn? The bay outside San Francisco and the waters of Boston and Chicago? I’m sure you can think of some other great places.
Again, this is an extraordinarily long piece, which meanders. I think Bill would have been better served really just coming straight out with his point that E/CCs need to stop saying NIMBY and accept, even, as he writes, “grudgingly”, green energy and transmission lines in their areas.
And, because this was found at Real Clear Politics, the very next linked piece is
The inhumanity of the green agenda
The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world.‘Man is the measure of all things’, Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote over 2,500 years ago. Unfortunately, our elites today tend not to see it that way.
In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.
I’ll leave the rest to you.
Read: Bill McKibben Says People Need To Say Yes To Green Energy In Our Backyards »
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