The Sietch has covered extensively the back and forth battle over Cape Wind in the last couple of years. In all that time the alliance to protect Nantucket sound, the opposition group against the project, have continuously surprised me with the kind of strange and often foolish things they come up with. First they said the project would kill all the birds, top environmentalists including the Audubon found that it wouldn’t, then they said that ships would run into the turbines, then we all realized that the ground around the turbines was too shallow for this to happen, then they said that the turbines would interfere with radar, but the government said it wont. In short they have never really been able to come up with a single decent reason for why Cape Wind shouldn’t be built.
They have now gone and amazed me again by hiring Glenn Wattley (scroll down for his bio), a coal industry insider(pdf), to be the new chief executive officer for the alliance. To me it makes perfect sense in so many ways. It is obvious that the coal industry might have a little to fear from wind power, it is also obvious that a lot of very rich people made their money from exploiting poor regions of the country (mountain top removal anyone) so why not hire a coal man to help protect the views of the rich people that made their money from exploiting the poor of coal country. See it all makes perfect sense.