RFK Jr., the EPA and Cape Wind

I've always wondered what the quid pro quo would be when Ted Kennedy began stumping for Barak Obama. Now the web is full of gossip that RFK Jr. might get the top position at the EPA. Who knows how serious the gossip is...but it would be a shame for the new administration to get off on the wrong foot this way.

Kennedy is a divisive figure much given to finger-pointing and name-calling, and if there's one thing for certain, it's that the American people want an end to that kind of politicking.

It also seems important that the guy has a conviction for heroin use. He pled guilty in a 1983 case.

And, of course, it would mean the end of Cape Wind. RFK has the strange idea that local communities should be able to call the shots when it comes to electric power production.

He seems to think that when those same nay-saying communities are short of power they should be able to get it from somewhere else, perhaps from some distant, much less politically connected community. Some on Cape Cod, for example, don't want to make their own electricity from wind, but when our local oil-fired plant has trouble, these same nay-sayers, including the Kennedys, have no trouble drawing power from a nuclear plant in Plymouth (a much poorer community just north of Cape Cod) or a coal plant in Fall River (a much much poorer community to the west of Cape Cod).

Here's my column on the effects of the Kennedy resistance to Cape Wind in today's Providence Journal.

WENDY WILLIAMS

MASHPEE

IT APPEARS THAT the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, with its SOS motto for “Save Our Sound,” is franchising itself.

There is now a Canadian Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County (Ontario), an SOS organization (SOS standing for Stop Offshore rather than Save Our Sound) in Toronto, and even an SOS (Save Our Scenery) in Wales. My favorite is another Canadian group using SOS for Save Our Skylines.

Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showed up in Toronto recently to complain, once again, about wind power in general and Cape Wind in particular. “There are appropriate places for everything,” Kennedy told some utility executives, according to The Toronto Star.

All the same absurd arguments have been brought up by these copycat organizations. Just like the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, these groups use the word “industrial” to describe wind turbines. They raise the specter of bird deaths and assert that the turbines are noisy, make people ill, destroy tourism and ruin property values. One of these spin-off SOS groups even claims, as did the Cape Cod anti-wind group, that wind turbines are scams that don’t really produce electric power.

This is why the Cape Wind case is so much more than just a local argument. When the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt offshore wind project was first proposed for Cape Cod in mid-2001, a small group of very well-financed people whipped up fear and anger in the resort community to keep their sailing grounds from being altered. Much of the money used to stop the development of wind power on Cape Cod came from deeply entrenched fossil-fuel interests. Indeed, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound’s head, Glenn G. Wattley, is a former coal-industry honcho.

Those buzzwords have now found their way into the lexicon of people who think their job on earth is to “just say no.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one such person, says local communities should be able to decide for themselves what kind of energy will power their homes, schools and businesses.

His idea is so 19th Century. When electric grids were first created, individuals and small communities who had the money built small, local central power sources and electric grids that served very small areas. The town of Hull, for example, where John F. Kennedy maternal grandfather, Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, had a summer home, built an electric grid long before most people had even heard of the electric-light bulb.

Unfortunately for RFK Jr., we live in the 21st Century, when a power source in one location may be called upon to provide power for a community 50 miles distant.

Bobby says this is unfair, but he forgets that the reverse is also true: If your local power plant goes down for any reason, a plant 50 miles away will keep your lights on while the problem is solved.

That’s the point of a region-wide electric grid. That’s also the point of what we call “community” and of what John Donne meant in 1624 when he wrote “No man is an island.”

Wendy Williams, an occasional contributor, is a Cape Cod-based science writer.