Hypocrisy Almost Killed America's Biggest Wind Farm

Wednesday's announcement that the U.S. Federal Government had finally, after nearly 10 years, approved the nation's first offshore wind farm marked the end of a long, strange journey for what should have been a straightforward move to initiate the clean-energy revolution favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans.

The forces arrayed against the project, known as Cape Wind, included the usual suspects — noted TeaBagger Scott Brown has some vague, hand-wavey objections to it that appear to derive more from political expedience than his professed love of the rights of Native Americans, which he claims the windfarm will infringe — and one that has always struck me as more than a little bit peculiar: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Indeed, in a 2005 editorial in the New York Times, RFK Jr., normally an outspoken environmentalist, declared his support for wind power but decried this particular offshore wind farm. The fact that he made a case against the 440-foot tall turbines without ever mentioning that one of his objections might be that they would mar the Kennedy compound’s ocean view is more than a little bit disingenuous.

As someone who has long suspected that when push comes to shove, Americans aren't going to make the sacrifices required to preserve a livable climate, I always found the opposition to the Cape Wind project of an otherwise staunch advocate of environmental protection to be particularly disheartening.

The situation is perhaps best summed up by a 2006 letter from activists who disagreed with Kennedy, which read, "We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency. Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon, is the least that we can do."

I encourage you to leave similar examples of schisms within the environmental movement or instances of hypocrisy in the comments – I'm collecting them for a future post.

Photo credit: Martin Pettitt