Cape Wind - The Book

The Dangers of LNG

Take a look at a story about LNG and Boston from the Boston Globe. Check it out here.

More Action from Osterville

This editorial from Friday's Providence Journal:

The federal Minerals Management Service will delay its final report in what political skullduggery has caused to be among the most delayed energy projects in U.S. history — the plan by Cape Wind Associates to put a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. (Building a coal or oil plant is a cinch in comparison!)

Now, at what seems to be the behest of U.S. Rep. William Delahunt and his boss, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrats who are fighting the Nantucket Sound wind farm with the financial support of some rich summer people centered in two Osterville clubs, Rep. James Oberstar (D.-Minn.) has succeeded in putting off the Federal Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), which had been scheduled to be released this month by the MMS. That statement is expected to support the wind farm.

This is another win for the Kennedys, who have summer houses on Nantucket Sound, and Bill Koch, a fossil-fuel billionaire and a hardball political player and paymaster, and the leader of the anti-wind-farm group the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

That the vast majority of Massachusetts residents support Cape Wind seems not to matter at all; nor does the fact that our reliance on fossil fuel helped get us into this recession.

As chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mr. Oberstar sent a letter to Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen “requesting” an extraordinary review of the Coast Guard’s ruling that Cape Wind does not present any navigation hazards. The good admiral knows whence his agency’s money cometh, and complied with the “request” for a delay.

Foes hope to delay the matter so long that the principals of Cape Wind Associates just give up after they have spent many millions on the project. As it is, the opponents’ strategy of running up Cape Wind’s legal and lobbyist bills has succeeded in dropping the enterprise into a much tougher financing environment.

All this is after the project has been studied and tortured for more than seven years and the peril of America’s dependence on fossil fuel made manifest. Cape Wind was first proposed just before 9/11.

Mr. Oberstar’s move is yet another nail in the coffin of respect for the federal regulatory process, whose most recent triumph is the failure to note Bernard Madoff’s many exciting activities.

It is unclear what Mr. Oberstar’s motives are, though it may be pertinent that he is on the board of the Kennedy Center, along with Senator Kennedy and Rep. Patrick Kennedy. It’s tough to fight a dynasty that has such, well, dynamism — especially when it’s aided by people in the oil and coal industry, who, among other things, don’t particularly want competition from clean energy.

Energy-poor New Englanders can only hope that, perhaps with the help of the Obama administration, this proposal will finally get the green light this winter. Or maybe, at the urging of (soon-to-be) Sen. Caroline Kennedy, we’ll get another seven years of much-needed “study.”

Bingaman and Domenici Write Another Letter

In a repeat of the events of the summer of 2006, which closed the book, Senators Bingaman and Domenici have once again written a letter in support of Cape Wind.
The senators head the senate side of the Congressional energy committee, and when the project was held up by Don Young, the senators sent a letter of protest.
Today they sent a another letter of protest, this time asking Minerals Management Service to release the completed EIS for Cape Wind, which the agency has been sitting on for quite a while now.
As explained in an earlier post, there is no legal or procedural reason why MMS must wait for the completed Coast Guard work. At this morning's Coast Guard meeting to discuss the effect of wind turbines on marine radar, Coast Guard spokesmen explained quite clearly that their terms and conditions of service can always be amended, so that if, on the off chance that some navigational problems vis-a-vis Cape Wind do turn up, the Coast Guard can take action.
Interestingly, the end of that meeting nearly turned into a riot when Coast Guard officials declined to enter into debate with Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound supports. Fists were raised in the air.
"This is outrageous," was one comment of a longtime Cape Wind opponent.
It will be interesting to see if the Minerals Management Service decides to release the long-awaited study, or if it continues to withhold the document from the public.

Gemmel Movie of Cape Wind Book

It looks like Robbie Gemmel has finally found the money to make the movie of the book, as he contracted to do nearly two years ago.
It will be fun to see what he comes up with.

Cape Wind & Good Government

When Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in the summer of 2005, it was clear from the wording of the legislation that Washington lawmakers intended for Cape Wind to move forward as quickly as possible.
Yet the Minerals Management Service has had a final Environmental Impact Statement ready to go for quite a while now.
Why is the agency refusing to release the document to the public?
This is not a Cape Wind issue. This is a Good Government issue.
Tax money has been spent on this process and the public has a right to see the document.

Another Kennedy? Not for Illinois?

Absolutely incredible. No other family would ever be so bold.
While Ted Kennedy is pushing for Caroline to be handed a senate seat in New York, the clan is also pushing for another clan member -- Chris Kennedy -- to be handed the Obama seat in Illinois.
Does anything embarrass these people?
Read the story here.

Good Government, the Alliance & Cape Wind

The Minerals Management Service should release the final Environmental Impact Statement immediately. There is no valid legal or valid procedural reason why the agency should hold up its release. The Coast Guard work on radar safety is a completely separate procedural pathway and is not legally required to be included in the final EIS for Cape Wind.

More Alliance Meddling

from today's Providence Journal

WENDY WILLIAMS

MASHPEE

SINCE 2002, the bottomless pockets of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound have been dedicated to creating a Houdini-like illusion of environmental problems associated with the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt Cape Wind project and, by proxy, with all offshore wind farms.

People associated with the tax-exempt organization have sponsored the forging of signatures on anti-wind farm petitions, disseminated a false press release implying scurrilous behavior by Cape Wind chief executive Jim Gordon, clogged state and federal courts with frivolous law suits and manipulated politics at a very high level, ultimately (however unintentionally) revealing strange-bedfellow relationships in Washington, such as between now-disgraced Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The tax-exempt Alliance has spent millions on lobbyists and more millions on lawyers, holding democracy hostage while manipulating the regulatory process year after year . . . after year.

Now comes a seemingly small-potatoes player in this epic drama. Mark Weissman -- a retired editor and businessman who has no real credentials in marine biology but who sat from 1993 until several months ago on a volunteer board, the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Advisory Commission -- didn't like the wind farm.

From 2003 to 2007, the Alliance paid Weissman at least $48,000 for services that ranged from working on a booklet about boating in Nantucket Sound for the Alliance-sponsored Nantucket Soundkeepers (a division of RFK Jr.'s Riverkeepers organization, with which the latter became associated to perform community service after he was convicted of heroin possession) to helping to write and edit Alliance comments decrying Cape Wind.

While receiving Alliance money, Weissman made a variety of public appearances. In these appearances, he credentialed himself by stating his affiliation with the aforementioned fisheries panel and then asserted that Cape Wind would cause severe environmental problems. During these appearances, ! he did n ot explain that his views were his own rather than those of the commission. Nor did he reveal that he had a private business arrangement with the anti-wind-farm organization. Any reasonable listener would have concluded that his statements represented the views of a state agency.

In print, he adopted a similar strategy. For example, in a 2005 column in a Cape Cod newspaper, The Mashpee Enterprise, Weissman criticized the project's Environmental Impact Statement because project developers paid for the study, something that the law requires them to do. But in that very same column, while Weissman listed his commission participation as a credential, he did not tell readers that he himself was a paid consultant for the Alliance.

Surely, when complaining about a legally required financial connection between Cape Wind developers and the company that was hired to do the environmental impact statement, his own financial arrangement couldn't have been far from mind.

The Massachusetts Ethics Commission has found that Weissman had "acted in a manner which would cause a reasonable person . . . to conclude that the Alliance can improperly influence the performance of his official duties."

He was fined $2,500.

The commission wrote that Weissman should have disclosed that he had a "private business relationship" with the Alliance in a letter to the governor.

That may be correct, on legal grounds. But basic respect for democracy and for the integrity of our government requires much more. Whether he was legally required to do so or not, each time Weissman mentioned his state credentials at a public meeting or in print, he should have explained first that he was not speaking for a state agency, and that he was a paid consultant for the Alliance.

Indeed, the honorable thing for him to have done would have been to stay out of the discussion altogether, or to have given up his state position if he wished to receive money from the advocacy group.

At first glance, that the Ethics Commission reprimanded and! fined W eissman would seem to bode well for democracy.

But an important question remains unanswered.

Why did it take so long? Weissman had been speaking against the project since 2002, and had been a paid consultant since 2003. To those in the know -- including other members of his fisheries board -- his financial relationship with the Alliance was common knowledge. Yet for years, state officials did nothing.

Why? Was it a disinclination to offend powerful people?

Their quiet complicity does more to undermine the integrity of democracy than anything Weissman got away with.

The amount of money he took and the choices he made would seem to be pretty small potatoes. After all, Cape Wind foes have by now spent at least $20 million trying to stop this project. To reporters, Weissman himself was quite flippant about the ethics violation, saying that all he got was a "slap on the wrist."

Scott Lehigh On C. Kennedy --

"But a US Senate seat is one of the most important posts in the federal government. It is not a barony to be awarded as a political perk to the lightly experienced scion of a famous family."
Read the rest at the Boston Globe.

Tribal Instincts

A new insightful article from the AP on the Kennedys:

"The Kennedys are tribal; there has been a Kennedy important in American politics now for more than a half-century," said Boston College political science professor Marc Landy. "So, the idea you could prolong that for another generation — if not more — is more than important. It speaks to their tribal instincts."

Read the rest here.