The Growing Backlash Against Green Sprawl

Remember, not too long ago, when environmentalists promoted "open space" and hated on "sprawl?" These days they're frantically destroying our open spaces with endless miles of wind and solar sprawl, most of which produces intermittent energy of marginal value to the grid.

But a backlash against green sprawl is growing at home and abroad.

NIMBYism has traditionally been a reliable tool for the Big Green Obstruction Machine. Greens have had success tapping in to the got-miner mentality to rally "neighbors" against drilling projects, pipelines, new power plants, transmission lines, etc. But perhaps now we're seeing a fraying of that symbiotic relationship, as the novelty of wind farms fades and people come to understand that it's a very wasteful, unsightly, space-intensive way to generate a very modest amount of unreliable but costly energy.

Heaven Help Us

I think NIMBYism has gone too far when the target of the naysaying moves beyond landfills and nuclear waste dumps, to focus on . . . monasteries. Yes, monasteries. The kind that have monks.

"To maintain their seclusion, the monks have their eyes on a 2,500-acre ranch about 50 miles away in a rugged area with creeks fed by looming mountains. The area has few roads, a few widely dispersed ranch homes, a few scattered oil and gas wells. The ranch is about 14 miles from the nearest public road, and the nearest town, 20 miles away, is Meeteetse, population about 350, that is most famous for the arrest of outlaw Butch Cassidy in 1894.

They plan to build a monastery mainly of stone with 30 separate hermitages for monks, a small dormitory for men in training to become monks, a commons area and a church spire rising the equivalent of 15 stories.

Ranch owner Dave Grabbert, whose family has held the property since 1938, has agreed to sell to the religious order, and he describes the two monks he has met as personable, intelligent and "just decent guys."

"I don't care if they're Hindus, Buddhists or what they are, but being decent people, that's really a plus in this day and age," Grabbert said. "Not everyone is."

Some of his neighbors object to the sale, citing concerns about traffic, wildlife, water -- and questioning whether the massive stone structure fits with the rural landscape.

"The plans look like someone took an old cathedral and just dropped it onto our beautiful landscape," Mary Elliott, who lives about 15 miles from the site, wrote to the Planning and Zoning Commission. She noted the religious order wouldn't be paying property taxes.

"As their contribution to this community will be prayer rather than property taxes the town will take a large loss on the currently paid property taxes," Elliott wrote. "As for prayer, I am sure we are all grateful for that but are capable of doing that ourselves."

Heaven help the country that has lost its mind.

Not to mention its soul.


P.S. An editorial writer at The Casper Star Tribune apparently had the same reaction to this story as I did, resulting in this well-deserved scolding.

A Chilling Report from The Great White North

I strongly believe not-in-my-backyard obstructionism has gotten out of hand -- in Nevada, they've even gone after ice cream trucks -- yet I also fear the coercive, totalitarian tendencies lurking just below the surface of the modern environmental movement. Which leaves me conflicted about this story out of Canada, where the Premier of Ontario recently announced that NIMBYism will no longer be permitted to stand in the way of "green energy" projects.

"The "not in my backyard" syndrome that has created roadblocks for new energy projects will no longer be tolerated by the Ontario government, Premier Dalton McGuinty warned Tuesday as he pitched his proposed Green Energy Act. McGuinty told the London Chamber of Commerce the legislation will include provisions to stop special interest groups or municipal governments from trying to block green energy projects for anything other than safety or environmental concerns.

"We're going to find a way through this new legislation to make it perfectly clear that NIMBYism will no longer prevail when it comes to putting up wind turbines, solar panels and bio-fuel plants," he told the business audience. "We need those jobs. We need clean electricity, and we need to assume our full responsibility in the face of climate change."

NIMBYism, when taken to extremes -- which it almost always is -- is making it increasingly difficult to build just about everything, from new power plants to new roads, to new schools and even new churches. You name it and NIMBYs will fight it. And I'm betting NIMBYism will become a major impediment to moving forward on all the "shovel-ready" construction projects funded by the federal "stimulus" bill.

But I'm even more wary of the "McGuinty mindset": That there's no room for dissent or democracy when it gets in the way of the green agenda. And I fully expect that this "our way or the highway" attitude will start to be heard in the United States as well -- including, perhaps, from President Obama -- if NIMBYism becomes an even greater impediment to the "green New Deal," or to "saving the planet," which is the banner under which eco-Stalinists march.

"Our new law will uphold rigorous safety and environmental standards, but once those standards have been met, we intend to assert the greater public interest in clean, green electricity and the jobs that come with it," McGuinty said. "Municipalities will no longer be able to reject wind turbines, solar panels or bio-fuel plants because they don't like them. We can't allow interests to oppose these simply because they don't like them . . .As a society, as an economy, either we're committed to clean, green jobs or we're not. I say we are, and we'll take the necessary steps to ensure we move in that direction."

What those "necessary steps" might be, the premier wouldn't say. But his statements seem more like those of a despot -- like something one might hear from leaders in Venezuela or Russia -- than someone in a Western democracy.

"That's Canada," you might say. "Can't happen here."

But just look what happened with hockey.

The Windmills of Their Minds

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is at its best this weekend, when highlighting the hypocrisy of liberal "blowhards" who are bullish on green energy -- as long as the ugly machinery doesn't end up in their backyards. I've included the entire piece below, but the final sentence is one for the refrigerator door:

"Environmentalists love the idea of milking Mother Nature for power, but they hate the hardware needed to make it work: huge windmills, acres of solar panels, high-voltage transmission lines to connect them to the places where people live. Of course, they still totally, absolutely, wholeheartedly support green energy -- as long as it gets built where someone else goes yachting."

Here's the rest of it:

Blowhards

The fabulous debate over wind power on Nantucket Sound.

For all the hype about the Bush Administration's oil-and-gas energy bias, one of its last official acts was to give the go-ahead to what could be America's first offshore wind farm -- thus enraging more than a few self-deputized environmentalists. Such are the ironies of the wilderness of mirrors known as the Cape Wind project.

For the last seven years and counting, the green entrepreneur Jim Gordon has been trying to build a fleet of wind turbines in federal waters near the upscale seascapes of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. The site seemed ideal, given the stiff ocean breezes and the eco-friendly politics in Massachusetts. The company says its 130 towers could meet 75% of the region's electricity needs and reduce carbon emissions by some 734,000 tons every year.

The sort of people who can afford to use "summer" as a verb are in favor of all that. Completely in favor, really. But they did want to raise one quibble. Unfortunately, the wind farm would create "visual pollution" in Nantucket Sound, particularly the parts within sight of their beachfront vacation homes.

Mr. Gordon went ahead anyway, and the opposition rose to gale force. Supposedly the wind farm will lead to everything from the disruption of seabird habitats to "desecrating ancient American Native burial sites," in the words of Glenn Wattley, the head of an antiwind outfit funded by the likes of Bunny Mellon. But what really upsets these well-to-do Don Quixotes is the thought of looking at windmills that would appear about as tall on the horizon as the thumbnail at the end of your outstretched arm.

Then there is the political saga, with the Kennedy family as the Hyannis Port Sopranos, supplying the muscle. While Ted Kennedy was castigating President Bush for destroying the environment, the Senator was working furiously behind the Congressional scenes to kill Cape Wind. He even had the inspiration of getting former GOP colleague Ted Stevens of Alaska to slip wording into a spending bill that would have handed a veto to then-Governor Mitt Romney, another aesthetically minded opponent. Robert Kennedy Jr., a Time magazine "hero of the planet," tried to get the Sound designated as a national marine sanctuary to bar development.

Incredibly enough, this political sabotage has so far failed. And last week the Interior Department issued its long-awaited regulatory study, mostly finding "negligible" environmental impact -- apart from a "moderate" impact on the scenery. If the Obama Administration signs off, construction could begin next year.

Mr. Kennedy blustered that the report was rushed out: amusing, considering it runs to 2,800 pages. Bill Delahunt, the windy Cape Democrat, also denounced the action as "a $2 billion project that depends on significant taxpayer subsidies while potentially doubling power costs for the region."

Good to see the Congressman now recognizes the limitations of green tech, such as its tendency to boost consumer electricity prices -- but his makeover as taxpayer champion is a bit belated.

Green energy has been on the subsidy take for years, including in 2005 when Mr. Delahunt was calling for "an Apollo project for alternative energy sources, for hybrid engines, for biodiesel, for wind and solar and everything else." The reality is that all such projects are only commercially viable because of political patronage.

Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf ran the numbers and found that the effective tax rate for wind is minus-163.8%. In other words, every dollar a wind firm spends is subsidized to the tune of 64 cents from the government. The Energy Information Administration estimates that wind receives $23.37 in government benefits per megawatt hour -- compared to, say, 44 cents for coal. Despite these taxpayer crutches, wind only provides a little under 1% of U.S. net electric generation.

We'd prefer an energy policy that allows markets to shape the sources that predominate -- which would almost certainly put Cape Wind out of business. But President Obama seems determined to unload even more subsidies on green developers as he seeks to boost renewables to 10% of the U.S. electricity mix by the end of his first term and 25% by 2025; their share today is about 9% (5.8% of which is hydropower).

We wouldn't be surprised to see the President's green future wrestled to the ground by the likes of Mr. Delahunt, the Kennedys and other anticarbon Democrats. Environmentalists love the idea of milking Mother Nature for power, but they hate the hardware needed to make it work: huge windmills, acres of solar panels, high-voltage transmission lines to connect them to the places where people live. Of course, they still totally, absolutely, wholeheartedly support green energy -- as long as it gets built where someone else goes yachting.