May 19, 2007

Climate, Class, and Claptrap

Garret Keizer has written a powerful "Notebook" piece for the June Harper's Magazine. Every sentence is gold. Buy the magazine and read it. Here is but one excerpt.

If I sound bitter it is partly because I have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new carbon-trading world order in the New England villages where I have lived, taught, and buried the dead for close to thirty years, and where any egress from one's house now risks collision with an eco-fluent carpetbagger. Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial "wind farm," ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance. So far only one of the towns affected has "volunteered" -- in much the same way and for most of the same reasons as our children volunteer for service in Iraq -- to be the site of what might be described as a vast environmentalist grotto of 400-foot-high spinning "crosses" before which the state's green progressives will be able to genuflect and receive absolution before zooming back to their prodigiously wired lives.

[Read more here.]

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont