I love it when I’m right.  I admit that I don’t bat 1.000, but good hits are nice.  In today’s NY Times Roger Cohen (Britain Goes Nimby) writes that 82% of Brits favor wind power, yet in every community in England where turbines are proposed the citizens have fought them with the proverbial teeth and nails.

             Cohen’s disdain for environmental hypocrisy is not concealed:  “As they adopt nimbyism in droves, touchy-feely, green, politically correct types who only eat bacon from locally reared pampered pigs and would hug any hypothetical wind farm morph into rabid reactionaries. They bleat about 350-foot eyesores, turbine noise and animal suffering.”

             Could it be that there is some common DNA between Americans and the folks in Great Britain?

             I’ve written about this phenomenon in this forum several times before, noting that the only places reliable wind sources exist are mountain ridges and panoramic seashores.  It’s an environmentalist’s Catch 22.  Neither choice produces desirable results.

            If we can harness the renewable energy from the tides, the wind and the sun we can wean ourselves from the politically destabilizing and environmentally destructive effects of fossil fuels.  But doing so often places the ultimate decisions not in the hands of federal and state regulatory agencies but in the laps of county commissions and Boards of Adjustment who must decide how the local zoning ordinance should be applied.

             For a review of my past posts on this subject, please feel free to read Earth, Wind, Fire . . . and Google or Destroying the Environment to Save it.

             To read previous blog posts, continue to scroll down or click on a category of interest in the right hand column.  To be alerted by email when a new post is published, simply click the “sign me up!” button above.  If you learned something, please forward this link to others who also might benefit.