Time to end the blustering
Build the wind farm, already.
The battle over the Nantucket Sound project has dragged on for eight confounded years, outlasting the presidency of George W. Bush, Manny’s Red Sox career, and my long-suffering Nissan Sentra.
At this rate, by the time those blades start spinning, the homes they’re supposed to be sending electricity to will have been submerged by rising seas.
Since 2001, the proposal to put 130 electricity-generating turbines in the waters off Cape Cod has inched its way through a giant bureaucratic morass.
The state is all in, at last. Final federal approval for the project could come in the next month or two.
Along the way, the wind farm has picked up serious support from environmental groups, including some that were initially skeptical.
Now Greenpeace, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, among others, give the wind farm thumbs up.
Despite this, there are a lot of people who oppose this project, some of them with awfully deep pockets, and they’ve launched challenges aplenty.
The twists and turns in the saga of the wind farm have become fixtures in our pages, as inevitable - and almost as frequent - as the lottery numbers.
Last week brought yet another in the long march of forward-backward steps: After the state gave developers Cape Wind Associates a blanket permit to help it avoid seeking umpteen separate go-aheads from local officials, two Cape Cod authorities and a group of wind farm opponents called The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound filed lawsuits with the SJC to nix the “superpermit.’’
This means yet more months of delay, even if the feds give the wind farm the final go-ahead.
It would be easy to deride wind farm opponents as fancypants NIMBYists who are more worried about the vistas from their waterfront estates than the future of the planet.
As surprising as it may be to regular readers of this column, I’m not going to do that. Because while many of the most vocal wind farm opponents might fit that description, others have genuine concerns that go beyond property values.
They believe Nantucket Sound is a national treasure that should forever remain as pristine as it is today. Or they don’t trust those who say the windmills will do no major harm to birds and fish.
But here’s the problem: We’ve been wrecking the planet for a couple hundred years now.
A federal report released on Tuesday paints a grim picture of what we’re doing to ourselves here in the Northeast.
If we don’t get a handle on carbon emissions, the end of this century will bring higher sea levels, and halved snow seasons. Large portions of New England will lose some of the precious things that make them New England.
They’ll become unsuitable for growing apples, blueberries, and cranberries. Milk production will plummet, lobsters will flee further north, and cod will be even more scarce than they are now.
We’ve done so much damage that we now have to choose between two options: continued reliance on toxic oil- and coal-fired power plants, or alternative sources of energy that bring real global benefits, but sometimes at considerable local cost.
The best we can hope for at this point is the lesser of two evils.
And that means wind farms - not just for Cape Cod, but in many other places, too, where they’re going to be equally unpopular with locals.
This project has had a full and fair hearing. It’s time to drop the lawsuits.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is Abraham@globe.com. 