A letter against the wind pirates

A powerful letter by Kaye Johnson appeared in the Malone (N.Y.) Telegram, August 30, 2005:

Why is it that we are supposed to believe everything the wind salesmen say and write, yet evidence about their constant misrepresentations of the myriad problems being created by their industry is 'propaganda'?

Noble's out-of-state lawyer recently used exactly that word in a letter to this paper. He also attempted to again ridicule a scientist who is a part of our community by, again, taking her comments out of context. No matter how many times he repeats his phony charges, they won't become true. But 'the big lie' can be an effective weapon against the truth. It may overwhelm the facts, especially when we all wish that wind turbines were a magic bullet to fix the nation's energy problems and our local economy at the same time. Then the developers can have their way with our money and our landscape and be long gone before we unravel their deception.

The developers are trying to frame the debate in such a way that it's their critics who have to prove beyond a resonable doubt that lining up hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines across our region is a bad idea. I say the shoe should be on the other foot. They should have to prove what's right about their plan before they so drastically change our environment, community, and economy.

I have heard their inflated claims about how many jobs they will create, but their industry's record shows almost no job creation in host communities. They claim their development of our ridgelines will help the environment, but the testimony from other sites contradicts that. The evidence coming in from other countries shows that littering the countryside with giant turbines has little net impact on greenhouse gases.

In town after state after country, the story is the same. We can expect that they will come in to our community, extract millions, and leave us to clean up their mess. That is why the developers are the ones who should have their 'propaganda' examined by impartial experts.

The developers are the ones who have been caught misrepresenting the results of research. Then they tried to discredit the very same research when their deception was exposed. The developers said they would answer all questions and make all their information available to anyone. Now they refuse to disclose their plans to those who don't sing their praises. And it's the developers who have a pattern of silencing their critics by buying them off.

... Noble, a wholly owned subsidiary of J.P. Morgan, is part of one of the world's largest financial organizations. They know they will have to spend a little money to get the millions and millions from our pockets in the form of higher utility bills and taxes.

So don't be fooled by the 'just plain folks' gimmicks. It will take more than giving our kids a pinwheel at the fair to compensate for the mess they'll have to clean up if these things are brought in. And don't think that a few well placed and highly publicized donations to worthy local causes make Noble's employees wonderful new members of our community. Their motivation in raping our countryside is not green power. It's greed power. And once they've had their way with us, they'll be gone with the wind.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms