NYT: Debate Over Wind Power Creates Environmental Rift

June 6, 2006
Debate Over Wind Power Creates Environmental Rift
By FELICITY BARRINGER

OAKLAND, Md. — Dan Boone has no doubt that his crusade against wind energy is the right way to protect the Allegheny highlands he loves. Let other environmentalists call him deluded at best, traitorous at worst. He remains undeterred.

For four years or more, Mr. Boone has traveled across the mid-Atlantic to make every argument he can muster against local wind-power projects: they kill birds and bats; they are too noisy; they are inefficient, making no more than a symbolic contribution to energy needs.

Wind farms on the empty prairies of North Dakota? Fine. But not, Mr. Boone insists, in the mountainous terrain of southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland or West Virginia, areas where 15 new projects have been proposed. If all were built, 750 to 1,000 giant turbines would line the hilltops, most producing, on average, enough electricity to power 600 homes.

Wind projects are in the midst of a huge growth spurt in many parts of the country, driven by government incentives to promote alternatives to fossil fuels. But Mr. Boone, who wields a botanist's trowel and a debater's knife with equal ease, wants to slow them down with community activism, regulatory action and legal challenges.

His crusade harks back to the campaigns against nuclear power plants, toxic-waste dumps and dams on scenic rivers that were building blocks of the modern environmental movement. But the times, and the climate, are changing. With fears of global warming growing more acute, Mr. Boone and many other local activists are finding themselves increasingly out of step with the priorities of the broader movement.

National groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club used to uniting against specific projects are now united for renewable energy in general. And they are particularly high on wind power — with the caveat that a few, but only a few, special places should be turbine-free.

"The broader environmental movement knows we have this urgent need for renewable energy to avert global warming," said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace U.S.A. "But we're still dealing with groups that can't get their heads around global warming yet."

Indeed, the best winds, especially in the East, tend to blow in places that are also ideal for hiking, sailing, second homes and spirit-soothing views. These include the Green Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod and the ridges of northern Appalachia. Local opposition to unwanted development remains a potent force.

So when it comes to wind, the environmental movement is riven with dissonance and accusations of elitism. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s very public opposition to the 130-turbine Cape Wind energy facility proposed off Nantucket Sound has driven a wedge between activists. Dan Boone's circuit riding against wind projects, while not attracting the same celebrity notice, has exasperated many Sierra Club compatriots even more.

Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Boone says the areas he wants to protect are uniquely vulnerable. His family owns property near the proposed projects, just as Mr. Kennedy's does near the Cape Wind site.

But Mr. Boone says that wind supporters are the ones pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the public interest.

"I'm not sure that wind turbines in this region will significantly reduce the outcome of global climate change or actually have any role," Mr. Boone said. "The very limited benefit doesn't justify the risk of wiping out a lot of interior forest habitat."

National environmental leaders reject this argument.

"There's no free lunch," said Paul Hansen, executive director of the Izaak Walton League of America, a venerable sportsmen's group. " 'Not in my backyard' is not environmentalism."

The Alleghenies are a big backyard, with views that are both spectacular and problematic. Flowering shrubs like shadbush and preening flowers like trillium are framed by oaks, maples and longleaf pines. But intermittent industrial tree farming has repeatedly denuded some mountainsides. On both sides of the border near here in far western Maryland, second-home development is booming. The air has often been fouled by the Mount Storm coal-fired power plant.

If Ned Power, a wind-energy development company, puts up 100 or so turbines along 14 miles of ridgeline near Mount Storm, wind-energy supporters say, how much does that further spoil the landscape?

Kevin Rackstraw, a regional manager of Clipper Windpower whose proposed 40-turbine project in western Maryland has drawn Mr. Boone's fire, said opponents lacked perspective.

"Dan looks at all the impacts of a given wind project," Mr. Rackstraw said, "but doesn't say: 'If we didn't have wind, what would we have?' Coal. Think of the impact of acid rain and mountaintop removal."

The Ned Power project is just one target of Mr. Boone, 49, a former state wildlife biologist who now works as a consultant. In interviews, he said he first focused on the issue when working as a botanist on a study related to an early wind power project. The environmental-impact statements, he said, were grossly inadequate.

Now he drives from Highland County in western Virginia (where 38 turbines are proposed on Tamarack Ridge) to Bedford, Pa. (where early discussions of an unnamed project are under way) to talk to local groups or crystallize their objections for them. In Annapolis, Md., and Charleston, W.Va., he uses state utility regulators' licensing hearings to throw up roadblocks before wind projects. He is eager to argue with industry officials in any venue, questioning their facts, assumptions and motives.

"The rush is on now because a lot of the places they've targeted have no zoning, and it's easy to get in that kind of large-scale development," he said. "This part of the country has really good energy prices. Developers are keying in on that."

Mr. Boone's quiver of anti-wind arguments includes economic analyses, but his first line of attack is biological: he contends that they are a threat to bats and potentially to migratory birds and that they break up forest habitat.

Scores of raptors and other birds were killed by the first generation of wind turbines set up at Altamont Pass in Northern California. Since the Altamont Pass turbines were erected in the early 1980's, turbine design has been altered, and most subsequent studies have shown that birds tend to fly above the height of most turbines though some experts say more studies are needed.

But the turbines south of here in Thomas, W.Va., have been lethal to bats. More than 2,000 were killed in 2003 at the Mountaineer project, whose 44 turbines are owned by FPL Energy, a big power company that is the wind industry's dominant player.

Industry officials agree that the bat mortality measured at the Mountaineer site is unacceptable, and they are studying the benefits of deterrent devices and the best ways to modify turbine operations in bat-rich areas.

To Mr. Boone, wind energy will never make a big enough difference to justify its impact in the region. "You have to remember that these tax advantages are so huge," he said, "that these developers are keen to latch onto all the mythology — whether it's global warming or something else."

Asked if he thought global warming was a myth, he said: "No, I'm not calling it mythology." But industry officials, he contended, will "take things out of context."

Mike Tidwell, the director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network and one of Mr. Boone's adversaries, bristles at the attack. "Wind industry guys are the straightest-shooting people," Mr. Tidwell said. "Most got into it because they had an environmental ethic."

But Mr. Boone has plenty of allies, too. "He's the greatest naturalist I've even known," said Betsy Johnson, chairwoman of the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club. "Dan has been very helpful in educating us with what problems there can be with an energy source like wind."

The industry Mr. Boone regards so suspiciously is on a roll. The total share of energy that wind farms generated nationwide in 2004 was tiny — about one-third of 1 percent, according to the Energy Department. But by 2020, according to industry estimates, wind's share of the county's energy portfolio could grow ten- or twentyfold.

For the environmental movement, wind supporters say, the transition from the protection of place to the protection of planet is bound to be wrenching.

"Wilderness conversations are spiritual," said David Hamilton, the Sierra Club's national director of global warming and energy programs. "We've always been a place-based organization, protecting places," but "protecting our climate" is "just looking at it from a different angle and a different elevation."

Slate: The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

culturebox
Ask Mr. Science
The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
By Gregg Easterbrook
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006, at 6:05 AM ET

Relax: The Al Gore movie has no sex scene. Gore is the only presidential candidate who has made out on national television, so this was a legitimate worry. Otherwise, An Inconvenient Truth could use some action. Maybe a chase scene through the winding streets of Davos. Maybe Gore parachuting off a skyscraper as he shoots at American Petroleum Institute commandos aboard a helicopter. Instead, we get a 100-minute PowerPoint presentation interrupted by outtakes from campaign ads, plus shots of Gore apparently rendered despondent by the weight of his environmental knowledge.

As someone who has come to the view that greenhouse-effect science is now persuasive, I'm glad Gore made a movie that will help average voters understand the subject. An Inconvenient Truth is worthy in content, admirable in intent, and motivated by the sense of civic responsibility Hollywood on the whole has abandoned. About two-thirds is a quasi-documentary of Gore presenting to an audience the greenhouse slide show he's been giving for nearly 20 years. (I attended an early effort, in the late 1980s.) Mostly we see Gore talking and pointing at charts, interspersed with detours into the former vice president's political career: the Florida recount, Gore's stump-speech telling of his son's auto accident and his sister's tragic death from lung cancer. The political sequences have all the heft of a video press release: Time and again we are shown crowds looking adoringly at Gore, or cheering him on. And Katherine Harris may be a natural disaster, but what's she doing in a movie about climate change? If director Davis Guggenheim wanted to film a biography of Gore, he should simply have done so.

When Gore isn't being applauded, Guggenheim presents him as alone and melancholy: walking alone, musing alone, standing alone in a darkened barn. The scenes are meant to convey our inability to imagine the burden the former vice president bears. But they make the political part feel contrived, since Gore scarcely suffers solitude; he has a wonderful, loving family and participates in many public causes.

As a motion picture, An Inconvenient Truth has a lot to say, but contains little imaginative cinematography that might have made global warming engaging at the suburban cineplex. The picture the movie paints is always worst-case scenario. Considering the multiple times Gore has given his greenhouse slide show (he says "thousands"), it's jarring that the movie was not scrubbed for factual precision. For instance, this 2005 joint statement by the science academies of the Western nations, including the National Academy of Sciences, warns of sea-level rise of four to 35 inches in the 21^st century; this amount of possible sea-level rise is current consensus science.

Yet An Inconvenient Truth asserts that a sea-level rise of 20 feet is a realistic short-term prospect. Gore says the entire Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could melt rapidly; the film then jumps to animation of Manhattan flooded. Well, all that ice might melt really fast, and a UFO might land in London, too. The most recent major study of ice in the geologic past found that about 130,000 years ago the seas were "several meters above modern levels" and that polar temperatures sufficient to cause a several-meter sea-level rise may eventually result from artificial global warming. The latest major study of austral land ice detected a thawing rate that would add two to three inches to sea level during this century. Such findings are among the arguments that something serious is going on with Earth's climate. But the science-consensus forecast about sea-level rise is plenty bad enough. Why does An Inconvenient Truth use disaster-movie speculation?

An Inconvenient Truth spends too little time on what audiences might do about global warming, too much time trying to impress us with the Ask Mr. Science side of Gore's personality. Fewer details might have made the movie more effective, especially given that some details are off. For instance, Gore spends a while saying Earth's atmosphere is relatively thin, then somberly declares, "The problem we now face is that this thin layer of atmosphere is being thickened by huge quantities of carbon dioxide." Thickness is not the issue. Carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced by fossil-fuel combustion and forest fires, has molecular bonds that vibrate on the same wavelengths at which infrared energy radiates upward from Earth's surface; the vibration warms the CO₂, trapping heat. The main atmospheric gas, nitrogen, does not absorb energy on those wavelengths. It is the chemistry of carbon dioxide, not its density, that matters. (See this chemistry page maintained by the carbon dioxide study center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.) Anyway, you don't really need to know how greenhouse gases function. Why does Gore insist on giving a wrong explanation?

The movie takes a wacky side-trip into a conspiracy theory about Philip Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute and then became chief of staff of George W. Bush's Council on Environmental Quality—and then got a plush office at ExxonMobil. Gore asserts Cooney was "in charge of environmental policy in the White House," which is nonsense. The EPA administrators, Josh Bolten, Andrew Card, James Connaughton, Mitch Daniels, John Graham, Al Hubbard, and Karl Rove, have been Bush's go-to figures for environment policy; and Connaughton, to whom Cooney reported, is green as can be. Gore implies Cooney's secret mission was to sabotage such efforts as the federal Climate Change Science Program. If so, Cooney better keep his day job, since that program recently declared "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."

An Inconvenient Truth comes to the right conclusions about the seriousness of global warming; plus we ought to be grateful these days for anything earnest at the cineplex. But the film flirts with double standards. Laurie David, doyenne of Rodeo Drive environs, is one of the producers. As Eric Alterman noted in the Atlantic, David "reviles owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable, a private jet." For David to fly in a private jet from Los Angeles to Washington would burn about as much petroleum as driving a Hummer for a year; if she flew back in the private jet, that's two Hummer-years. Gore's movie takes shots at Republicans and the oil industry, but by the most amazing coincidence says nothing about the poor example set by conspicuous consumers among the Hollywood elite. Broadly, An Inconvenient Truth denounces consumerism, yet asks of its audience no specific sacrifice. "What I look for is signs we are really changing our way of life, and I don't see it," Gore intones with his signature sigh. As he says this, we see him at an airport checking in to board a jet, where he whips out his laptop. If "really changing our way of life" is imperative, what's Gore doing getting on a jetliner? Jets number among the most resource-intensive objects in the world.

This raises the troubling fault of An Inconvenient Truth: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases "is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical." Wouldn't deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century's headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore's airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn't seem to find unethical. The former vice president clicks up a viewgraph showing the human population has grown more during his lifetime than in all previous history combined. He looks at the viewgraph with aversion, as if embarrassed by humanity's proliferation. Population growth is a fantastic achievement—though one that engenders problems we must fix, including inequality and greenhouse gases. Gore wants to have it that the greener-than-thou crowd is saintly, while the producers of cars, power, food, fiber, roads, and roofs are appalling. That is, he posits a simplified good versus a simplified evil. Just like a movie!

Gregg Easterbrook is the author, most recently, of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2142319/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

NYTimes.com: C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS June 7, 2006
C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show
By SCOTT SHANE
The C.I.A. took no action in 1958 after learning the whereabouts of Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann.

Economist.com: turning against gay marriage

GAY MARRIAGE
Jun 7th 2006

Pope Benedict XVI, Australia's John Howard and Canada's Stephen Harper
have all grumbled in the past week about gay marriage. But America's
Senate has turned down an amendment to ban such unions

THE debate on gay marriage in America seems to crop up every election
year. On Wednesday June 7th the Senate turned down a constitutional
amendment that would have banned same-sex marriages. But the timing,
say sceptics, is suspicious. The debate came five months before
congressional elections in which Republicans, down in the polls, are
expected to take a kicking. A similar push on the amendment came before
George Bush's re-election in November 2004. By getting voters to worry
about threats to conservative values, Republican strategists possibly
helped send Mr Bush back to the White House.

Two years later, however, some things have changed. Mr Bush's approval
ratings and those of the Republicans are dismal. Resurrecting the
debate on gay marriage now risks looking like a cynical, even
desperate, move. Democrats have long seen the gay-marriage gambit as
one intended to galvanise the religious right. But the right seems less
motivated by the subject than before. Fiscal conservatives would rather
see Mr Bush veto a spending bill or two; others want Mr Bush to crack
down on illegal immigration. Instead, an amendment was resurrected
which had almost no hope of success.

Even some religious conservatives, to whom the amendment is desperately
important, are unhappy. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a
religious-conservative outfit, fired up his supporters last week by
saying that the "forces of hell" are trying to undermine marriage. But
a spokesman for another group, the Family Research Council, has said of
the marriage amendment that "It's unfortunate that it's coming up just
in election years." Laura Bush, the president's wife, has spoken
against the measure, as has Mary Cheney, the vice-president's daughter,
who is a lesbian.

Federalism, as it has been for other divisive issues in America, could
be a saving grace in this debate. Only one state, Massachusetts, has
opted to allow full gay marriage. Some others recognise civil unions or
domestic partnerships, which offer many of the benefits of marriage
without calling it such. Many conservative states have banned gay
marriage and other same-sex unions. But the federal marriage amendment
would put an end to this variation, imposing Mississippi values on
Massachusetts.

NOT ONLY IN AMERICA
Federalism has also been trumped in another country trying to come to
grips with the issue. Australia's federal government under its prime
minister, John Howard, had passed legislation limiting marriage to that
between a man and a woman. But the Australian Capital Territory (in
effect, Canberra, the capital) recently passed a law that stated: "a
civil union is different to a marriage but is to be treated for all
purposes under territory law in the same way as a marriage"" Seeing a
bid to allow gay marriage with a linguistic trick, Mr Howard said on
Tuesday June 6th that the government would nullify Canberra's move.
Four days earlier Stephen Harper, Canada's Conservative leader, said
that he would give MPs a free vote on whether to re-examine a law
giving gays the right to marry in that country.

Western countries are divided on the issue. South Africa, Canada,
Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands allow full gay marriage, and many
countries in Europe have recognised rights enshrined in civil
partnerships. The United Kingdom last year, for example, granted gay
couples extensive rights of inheritance, tax benefits and more. But
Pope Benedict XVI fears an assault on traditional marriage, not least
in Catholic countries like Spain and Belgium. Even in Italy the
government is looking at creating some sort of nationwide rights for
gay couples. On Tuesday the Pope said he worried that there is an
"eclipse of God" happening in places where gay marriage, artificial
insemination and the like replace traditional nuclear families and
procreation.

But giving gay couples the chance to inherit, to share workplace
benefits, receive hospital visits and enjoy other mundane but important
rights that heterosexual couples take for granted should not cause
great alarm in democracies. Even in America the popularity of gay
marriage and civil unions is now beginning to rise. Some may fight to
stop it being called marriage, but, despite this week's grumbling, the
trend seems to be in the direction of giving gay couples nearly
everything but that magic word.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7032820&fsrc=RSS

Bush, Blair Concede Missteps

Bush, Blair Concede Missteps: "Leaders acknowledge errors in managing the occupation of Iraq, but say war was justified."

Could Science Eliminate Religion?

Scott Adams: Could Science Eliminate Religion?

"As readers of my blog know, I believe that given the right conditions, anyone can be made to believe any damned thing. That’s why there are so many different religions. Persuasion has many names and forms. AdvertisingIndoctrinationPeer pressureHypnosisBrainwashing I wonder if a team of well-funded atheists could devise a legal and ethical method of reducing people’s religious faith. It would probably require testing lots of different methods until you found out what cocktail of messages worked best, but I think it would work.

This is important because the people with the most intense religious beliefs are threatening to destroy the United States. We wouldn’t have to eliminate the faith of our enemies; it would be enough if we weakened their belief that God rewards them for killing infidels. We’d just be rounding their edges, so to speak.

I’m sure that the direct approach would never work, as in “Your God isn’t real,” no matter how many times you repeated it. And I’m sure that no lological argument would make a difference. We would need to find the back door.

It would be easy to find volunteers for the research. I think lots of people would sign up to test their faith. You could tell people exactly what you plan on doing and still have them lining up.

The first thing I would test is context. If you expose highly religious people to the history of other religions, they will make the connection that prophets come and go all the time. And it would be obvious that (other) people are easily fooled. At first, the believer would think he was lucky that all those others got fooled and he didn’t, because his prophet is real. But this is just the start of the process.

Then I would expose the believer to some basics of psychology. The goal would be to show him how easily the average person can be made to believe the most ridiculous things in every possible context, from monsters under the bed to alien abductions. Unless you see lots of examples, you tend to assume that delusions are rare, when in fact they are the norm for all of us.

Then I would expose the believers to the literature of skeptics, to teach them how to critically evaluate claims in general. So far, none of this information would be directed at the subjects own religion. It is simply education.

Next would be a review of the history of Christianity from the viewpoint of historians, not religious people. When you show the heavy hand of human beings in the shaping of religion, it tends to erode your belief that God wrote a book and slipped it under your pillow.

When you’re done providing this information to your test subjects, you let it soak in for a few months and then ask them about their religious faith. I think their faith would be reduced. Using the scientific method, you keep repeating the process using different methods until you find out what set of knowledge most erodes faith.

Eventually you could create a book that is the sum of the best methods. Then all we need to do is air drop about a billion of them on the Middle East, close all of our embassies, pull out and wait a generation.

The book would immediately be banned by the authorities, but that would make them all the more popular with the young."

Washington, D.C. Is About to Get Punked

Washington, D.C. Is About to Get Punked: "Not by Ashton Kutcher, but by Yellow Arrow, an arts and technology project initiated by the New York based mixed-reality and entertainment company, Counts Media. The May issue of Spin magazine reports that in June, Yellow Arrow and it's M.A.A.P. (Massively Authored Artistic Publication) makers will be documenting the District's punk-rock scene by placing their signature yellow arrow stickers on various well known sites around the city. Which hardcore sites could you visit to find one of these stickers? The tour will likely include famed venues like the old 9:30 Club, Black Cat, Fort Reno, Sacred Heart Church, as well as the Wilson Center and several houses in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which many young punks called home. Each sticker contains a unique number which you can use in a text message sent from your cell phone to receive information on the location's history and significance as part of a virtual underground tour of the city. Yellow Arrow's website invites anyone interested in participating to sign up and recieve a tagname to join any of the current projects or start one of their own. All of the submissions are contained in an online gallery for others to view and discuss.

What other lesser known aspects of D.C. would you want to share through one of these interactive sticker tours? Maybe point out some hot spots in the city's Jazz roots around U Street? Or a history of the city's political scandals?

Sign up, go out and paint this town yellow."