Modeshift

Roopali Phadke was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from 2003 to 2005 when an intensifying civic struggle over a developer’s proposal to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Cape Cod caught her attention.

The battle line between supporters and opponents was readily apparent. But the soldiers filling out the ranks of the opposition leadership were especially confounding. They included Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the nation’s most influential liberal lawmakers, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the country’s most prominent environmentalists, and Bill Koch, a billionaire fossil fuel energy developer, prominent funder of freemarket conservative causes and candidates, and twin brother to David Koch, a billionaire oilman from Kansas who was busy financing a radical anti-government, anti-environmental movement that came to be known as the Tea Party.

“I saw during the permitting process how support and opposition to Cape Wind splintered normal alliances,” said Phadke, (see pix right) who is now an associate professor of environmental studies at Macalester College in Minneapolis. “I dug in deep on that project and it opened up for me how pervasive opposition to wind energy is around the country.”

Behind The Opposition Trend
A year ago, while serving as a communications consultant to a small northern Michigan utility, I smacked into the same trend, and it encompasses opposition to more than wind energy development. Traverse City Light and Power proposed to generate 30 percent of its power with renewable sources by 2020, and the utility’s board viewed a 10-megawatt, combined heat and power, state-of-the-art, clean-burning wood biomass gasification plant as a good start. It would employ 20 to 30 people, and cycle $4 million a year through the community that otherwise was being sent to Wyoming and Lansing for dirty, climate-changing, mercury-producing coal-fired power.

The proposal was a no-brainer to me. But my views certainly weren’t as widely shared as I anticipated. Last June, after a fierce grassroots pushback, the utility abandoned the project.

The experience, though, prompted me to report intensively on the civic fate of other clean and renewable energy projects around the country. I’ve collected my articles in a ModeShift special report that documents community battles impeding renewable and clean energy projects — wind, solar, geothermal, smart grid — in more than 30 states.

I’m convinced that the opposition movement, which is national, growing, connected online, and sharing data and organizing techniques, represents a significant barrier to the clean energy industry’s development in the U.S. But I’ve felt more isolated on this point in the journalism and academic community than I expected. That’s likely because national polls, including one reported last week by Dave Roberts of Grist, consistently show that Americans support the clean energy alternatives.

I’ve concluded, though, that when the theoretical becomes the actual, Americans are changing their minds about clean energy. Here in northwest Michigan’s Benzie and Manistee counties, where I’ve lived for almost 20 years, a Duke Energy proposal to build 112 utility-scale wind turbines has encountered serious turbulence from many people who I know personally and previously expressed strong support for clean alternatives.

A Social Scientist’s Findings
Last week, in a conversation with Roopali Phadke, a political scientist trained at Wellesley, Cornell, and U.C. Santa Cruz, I learned more about the causes of the resistance. Phadke has attracted National Science Foundation grants for a project that “seeks to better understand how communities can navigate controversy and engage in the process of wind energy development.”

In a new paper that’s going to press in Antipode, a journal of geography, Phadke documents 130 wind opposition groups in 30 states. The numbers, she says, are increasing. “It’s a significant movement,” Phadke told me.”The wind developers didn’t see this coming — the number of groups, how networked they are, and what a challenge it is to their industry.” In her paper, which draws its narrative from opposition to a Duke Energy windfarm proposed for federal land in Nevada, Phadke concludes that the movement reflects “the emerging social resistance to re-sculpting of energy geographies.”

“Local opposition to wind development in the New American West is representative of broader shifts in the economic and aesthetic value of once historically “productive” rural landscapes,” she writes.

Phadke added: “As a conspicuous technology capable of both sustaining and thwarting the realization of an imagined rural ideal, utility-scale wind energy development across American landscapes calls forth similar social reconciliation as was faced with the expansion of railroads, steamships, and factories in early modern America.”

The American wind energy industry, which has attacked Republican opposition to state and federal incentives, is not yet acknowledging the influence of its grassroots opponents. In October I called the American Wind Energy Association,  and reached Denise Bode, the Washington-based trade group’s chief executive officer. I asked Bode what AWEA was doing to respond to the civic efforts to block wind projects. “What are you talking about?” she said before hustling off the phone.

No doubt, in her private conversations with AWEA’s board and staff, there is considerable concern. The American Wind Energy Association reported earlier this year that wind energy generating capacity increased by just 5.1 gigawatts in 2010 in the U.S. That’s half of the generating capacity increase in 2009, and less than a third of the 16.5-GW increase in wind generating capacity built last year in China. (see pix above from northern Gansu Province).

The Washington-based trade association faulted political uncertainty about federal and state incentives, roiled financial markets, and diminished interest by the nation’s utilities to commit to wind. The association didn’t mention the increasing grassroots resistance to wind power in rural areas.

“The focus of the industry, the government, and national environmental organizations has been on technology, jobs, and making the economics right,”  said Professor Phadke. “But they’ve glossed over the civic work that needs to be done. This is a revolution in energy production. There is an assumption that everyone has been on board. They aren’t.”

– Keith Schneider

JIUQUAN, China-Business for wind and solar energy components has been so brisk in Gansu Province-a bone-bleaching sweep of gusty desert and sun-washed mountains in China’s northern region-that the New Energy Equipment Manufacturing Industry base, which employs 20,000 people, is a 24/7 operation.

Just two years old, the expansive industrial manufacturing zone-located outside this ancient Silk Road city of 1 million-turns out turbines, blades, towers, controllers, software, and dozens of other components for a provincial wind industry already capable of generating more than 5,000 megawatts per year.

Chen Xiao Yan, a 25-year-old assistant in the New Energy Industry office, said Sinovel, Goldwind, Dongfang, Sinomatech, and 21 other clean energy manufacturers have established plants at the base. Two of those developers also produce equipment for Gansu’s expanding solar photovoltaic industry, which at the end of this year will have 120 megawatts of electrical generating capacity.

Within three years, 10 additional manufacturers will build plants in the base, increasing the workforce to 50,000 employees, Chen said in an interview with Circle of Blue.

“It’s what we do here,” she said with a shrug. “We produce energy.”

Northern Gansu is doing that and considerably more. As part of Circle of Blue’s new Choke Point: China project, I spent much of a week in Gansu reporting on alternative energy and water use. This region of dust and industrial innovation-about as far west from Beijing as Montana is from New York-has very quickly become a vital outpost in China’s rocket ride to the top of the global water-sipping clean energy heap. Prompted by a national decision in 2005 to diversify the nation’s energy production portfolio, and to do so with the goal of reducing water consumption and climate-changing carbon emissions, Gansu and its desert neighbors are pursuing clean energy development with a ferocity unrivaled now in the world.

Along with northern Gansu, there are six other wind energy zones and eight other solar power zones being built in China-most of them in the desert regions of northern and western China. China also has a burst of seawater-cooled nuclear power plants under construction along its eastern coast.

China’s National Energy Administration projects that, over the next decade, generating capacity from wind, solar, and nuclear power will more than quadruple, from 53 gigawatts in 2010 to 230 gigawatts in 2020. The other big non-carbon electrical producer is hydropower, which is expected by the government to grow to 400 GW of capacity by 2020, up from 213.4 GW last year.

Wind energy now accounts for 42 GW, or 16 percent of China’s non-fossil fuel generating capacity. China’s energy agencies projected last year that wind generating capacity will rise to 150 GW by 2020, though many wind industry executives predict the number will reach more than 200 GW. (See sidebar)

Solar generating capacity is expected to jump from less than one GW in 2010 to 20 GW by 2020. Nuclear power is projected to increase from 11 GW to 60 GW in the next decade. (For reference, one gigawatt, or GW, is equal to 1,000 megawatts, or the generating capacity of a big nuclear- or coal-fired power plant.)

Yet China’s demand for electricity is rising so quickly that the massive investment in new generating technologies will not make nearly as large a dent in production-or in freshwater conservation-as many people might expect. Simply put: wind, solar, and nuclear power will climb to around 13 percent of the 1,900 GW of generating capacity expected by 2020, according to government data. That’s up from the nearly six percent of the 962 GW of generating capacity today.

The new wind, solar, and seawater-cooled nuclear plants will replace roughly 100 big coal-fired generating stations, which equates to a savings of 3.5 billion cubic meters (nearly one trillion gallons) of water annually, according to academic and government estimates. The clean energy stations also will eliminate around 750 million metric tons of climate-changing emissions annually. (That’s Ren Tao-a 42-year-old engineer and general manager of SDIC’s 10-MW solar photovoltaic demonstration plant in Dunhuang, in pix above.)

But China’s annual national water use-591 billion cubic meters in 2010-is anticipated to grow by 40 billion cubic meters by the end of the decade. And the increase in water use , a good portion of which is  spurred by new coal production, is occurring in a nation that is steadily getting drier.

Put another way, the $US 738 billion that government authorities promised last year to spend on non-fossil fuel power generation over the next decade will jump start China’s clean energy economic transition. The enormous solar and wind-related manufacturing plants across China already employ tens of thousands of people. They are irrefutable evidence of the capacity of clean energy to spur job growth. They also are a signal to the United States and other nations that China is prepared to dominate wind, solar, nuclear, and other cleaner sources of power that global energy economists predict will eventually generate trillions of dollars in revenue each year.

But clean energy development will not solve one of the most significant threats to China’s modernization – the confrontation between rising energy demand and declining reserves of fresh water. Over the next decade, and likely well beyond that, the water savings from solar, wind, and seawater-cooled nuclear power will not be nearly enough to loosen the noose that water scarcity is steadily tightening around China’s coal production and combustion sector, and its national economy. (See sidebar)

“There may be an ultimate day of reckoning approaching,” said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow and China specialist at the Peterson Institute in Washington D.C. “But there are a lot of intermediate steps China is prepared to take and already is taking to hold it off as long as possible.”

See the rest of the article here.

– Keith Schneider

Circle of Blue, the Traverse City-based global news and science organization, where I serve as senior editor, last week opened a compelling new series on the commanding threat to China’s modernization posed by water scarcity. Choke Point: China is the product of more than a month of reporting by four teams of writers and photographers that spent most of December 2010 in China. The first article prompted a nice flurry of good responses including a message from the American Embassy in Beijing, which is reprinting the series in its weekly commerce newsletter, and from the British Embassy, where diplomats are said to be eager to see the next article. That’s me in pix above with Xiangkun Ren, who oversees the coal-to-liquids program for Shenhua Group, the largest coal company in the world.

By any measure, conventional and otherwise, China’s tireless advance to international economic prominence has been nothing less than astonishing.

Over the last decade alone, 70 million new jobs emerged from an economy that this year, according to the World Bank and other authorities, generated the world’s largest markets for cars, steel, cement, glass, housing, energy, power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, highways, high-speed rail systems, airports, and other basic supplies and civic equipment to support a modern economy.

Yet underlying China’s new standing in the world, like a tectonic fault line, is an increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress. Simply put, according to Chinese authorities and government reports, China’s demand for energy, particularly for coal, is outpacing its freshwater supply.

Students of Chinese history and geography, of course, understand that tight supplies of fresh water are nothing new in a nation where 80 percent of the rainfall and snowmelt occurs in the south, while just 20 percent of the moisture occurs in the mostly desert regions of the north and west. What’s new is that China’s surging economic growth is prompting the expanding industrial sector, which consumes 70 percent of the nation’s energy, to call on the government to tap new energy supplies, particularly the enormous reserves of coal in the dry north.

The problem, say scholars and government officials, is that there is not enough water to mine, process, and consume those reserves, and still develop the modern cities and manufacturing centers that China envisions for the region. “Water shortage is the most important challenge to China right now, the biggest problem for future growth,” said Wang Yahua, deputy director of the Center for China Study at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  “It’s a puzzle that the country has to solve.”

See the rest of the first piece here. Next up tomorrow morning is a report on China’s clean energy development, an impressive display of technology and national goal-setting, but not nearly as big a water saver as you might think.

– Keith Schneider

About a year ago, while consulting with Traverse City Light and Power on the utility’s plan to generate 30 percent of its energy from renewable resources, I recognized the surprising and damaging trend developing within grassroots environmental groups to sow fear and block clean and renewable energy projects.

That trend is growing bigger. Opponents to a big Duke Energy proposal to build the 112-turbine Gail Windpower installation in Benzie and Manistee counties here, many of whom view themselves as grassroots environmentalists, deployed a polemical film and junk science to scare people.

Late last month, my friend and former colleague at the New York Times, Felicity Barringer, reported that opponents to wireless smart meters, used to improve energy efficiency, are fighting a plan to install the devices, accusing them of causing cancer. Electromagnetic radiation from the meters, say critics, can injure living tissue, though multiple studies have failed to conclusively link such radiation to human disease. Sitting in front of the television years on end, for example, can certainly produce pyschic and bodily harm. But it won’t be from the electromagnetic radiation produced by the appliance.

That won’t mollify opponents, of course, who advance the “be safe rather than sorry” view of risk management, regardless of what the science says, especially if they ideologically oppose new technology. I’ve interviewed activists charged up about the purported risks of electromagnetic radiation. A few talked to me from their cellphones.

You recall, if you read this blog, that fraud science was also used in the struggle over a wood biomass gasification plant in Traverse City. Instead of embracing a utility proposal to build a state-of-the-art energy plant, a clean renewable proposal that would provide 10 mw of electricity and replace an equal measure of dirty coal-fired power, the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council fought the plan. The Traverse City-based group, using a couple of hectoring regional residents and some out-of-state activists touting rubbish science, built a fear-based campaign that accused the utility of proposing an industrial monster. The high-tech plant, about as big as a bakery, was said by opponents to be a grave risk to public health, would slaughter the forests, and disturb the peace. The region’s two major news publications and broadcast media embraced the activist message and the plan died in June.

At the time I noted that the bitter language and hyperbolic authoritarian tone of the Traverse City greens, some of whom I’d worked with for years, sounded a lot to me like the language of the local Tea Party. Felicity reports the same phenomenon is occurring in northern California, where greens are trumping up charges of health consequences over the use of smart devices that Tea Party activists view as a threat to privacy.

You wonder how the United States can progress when so many people share the same nervous view of the future?

– Keith Schneider

Residents of this beautiful and beleaguered state weren’t the only Americans electrified last night by Chrysler’s Superbowl ad starring Eminem and Detroit.

My father-in-law and I watched the commercial at his home in Brethren, where he raises beef and pork on a 40-acre farm. He’s Manistee County born and raised. He also can fix anything that needs fixing and spent a good bit of his work life as a prison guard. I’m a New York-born and raised writer who emigrated to this part of Michigan more than 20 years ago. We both were stirred by the Chrysler ad’s frankness, as well as its hopeful swagger and the wonderful lacework of iconic Detroit locations, rap, and gospel. Chrysler is selling 200s and more.

While hearts and intellects were fired by the opening and closing lines — “What does this city know about luxury? Huh?” and Eminem’s closing “This is what we do!” — they weren’t the most important. That honor goes to the line three quarters of the way through. “We’re from America.”

In every way imaginable, Detroiters and Michiganders understand that we are America. This state invented the 20th century, manufactured its drive through economy, sold a way of life of cul-de-sacs and convenience, highways and prosperity that persisted for half a century. The high wages that Michigan’s auto workers earned in hundreds of unionized factories also made the state number one in second home ownership, boat ownership, and near the top in median incomes, new business starts, and other measures of economic stability. Detroit at its peak was so vibrant that it produced Motown Records, which recorded the soundtrack of America for a generation.

“We’re from America” now means something much different. Just as Detroit and Michigan and the thriving auto industry defined American wealth and opportunity in the 20th century, the deteriorated city and state describe the diminished condition of the nation in the 21st. This state, the only one to lose population in the first decade of the century, and its largest city, which is less than half the size it was in the mid-1950s, is a vivid warning to America. Industrial obsolescence, ignorance of the weight and speed of history, an undying fealty to the foolishness of American exceptionalism, political polemics, allegiance to quarterly numbers, racism, and too many other damaging trends to name here, wrecked Detroit and injured Michigan. Much of the rest of the country is following the same path to economic and cultural decline.

Americans understand that instinctively. Most are perfectly capable of describing the central characteristics of our national emergency — jobless millions, diminishing wages for tens of millions more, the fecklessness of our poisoned politics.

But this is where the Chrysler ad is spot on. Americans are beginning to truly understand the depth of the crisis enveloping the country, and not just in economic terms. It’s going to take time, at least a decade and maybe a generation, to reboot how we approach the new market opportunities of the 21st century. It will test the American strength of character and our innate optimism. It’s going to take a good honest look at our depleted condition and then see beyond to a new era of opportunity.

Chrysler embraced Detroit’s hollowed buildings and saw poetry in decay, heard beauty in gospel voices, to sell luxury cars. What those of us who live here saw and heard, though, was a gripping video prayer for our state, our families, and ourselves. “We’re from America.” We have what it takes to get through this.

– Keith Schneider

Duke Energy, which last month merged with Progress Energy to become the nation’s largest electric utility, proposes to build a 112-turbine, $360 million wind farm in four rural townships in Benzie and Manistee counties. The company, in its public statements, says it hopes to begin construction in the spring of 2012. Duke also says it has reached binding leasing agreements with landowners who own 10,000 to 11,000 acres of the 16,000 acres in Duke’s wind development zone.

The proposal has stirred strong emotions here, prompting two townships to issue wind construction moratoriums, and leading two citizen opposition groups to form. Support or opposition to the Duke proposal transcends politics, income levels, residency, age, or any other conventional means to measure public opinion.

My own view is that the project, carefully and intelligently sited, is a good thing for the region. That’s an easy call for me to make given that I just spent three years as communications director for the Apollo Alliance, a proponent of “clean energy, good jobs,” and the U.S. Climate Action Network, which is convinced about the science of climate change. It’s clear to me that wind, solar, nuclear and other non-fossil fueled  energy sources represent a sound response to the warming earth. I also am convinced that the new public and private revenue that the project generates is a plus for families, job growth, and local governments.

But my experience seeking to site new renewable energy projects in this region, and the entirely unscientific poll I’ve conducted with friends and neighbors in Benzie and Manistee counties, indicates to me that Duke will be lucky to build one new turbine.

Resistance is High
With the exception of landowners who seek to gain $20,000 or more a year in lease payments for every wind turbine sited on their ground, the resistance to the towers is powerful. They are seen as too big, too loud, too intrusive, and too much of a threat to property values and this region’s small town way of life. Moreover the people I know, including myself, who view the wind power project as an important step to leverage the new energy markets of the 21st century, harvesting new public and private income and cleaner energy, are not likely to jump into the policy and advocacy ring.

My involvement, for instance, is likely to solely focus on reporting new developments. The narrative of Duke’s proposal, whether they succeed or not, is a story about this region and this country.

Last week, following my “Afraid of the Wind” post, I received several messages from two smart friends who have differing views of the Gail Windpower Project.

Two Lawyers, Two Views
Jim Olson, a friend who was raised in Traverse City, now lives up the road in Honor, and is routinely recognized by his peers as one of the country’s best environmental lawyers, supports wind energy, but is reserving judgment on the Gail wind project.

“I support wind energy in our region, including the places where the wind is, the coastal areas,” he writes. “This does not mean I support Duke Energy’s project as proposed.  To date, I do not and will not until I see more of whether and how Duke Energy will work with local landowners, communities, and those from whom they are leasing the location to exploit the wind.  In addition, I see wind as a commons, in which all should share in some way. So I’m still thinking through what this looks like with the large, centralized corporate, big wind turbine model.

“As I said in my emails and elsewhere, I prefer a lower more appropriate wind turbine/ or wind generation in our region, including community wind projects and I believe Congress and our state legislature must provide an equivalent or even playing field through tax incentives for all of us, not just Duke or big energy.

“The dilemma for some about this project is the lack of subsidies and legal structure for alternative wind energy projects, such as community, lower scale, and residential,” Jim wrote. ” To be sure there are some tax breaks for residential and others businesses, but little structure for community smaller call electrical utility wind energy operations.”

“Under current tax, financial, and legal conditions it is next to impossible for these alternatives to make much headway,” Jim continued.  “Hence, the country, and communities like Arcadia/Frankfort are faced with either “yes” or “no” in participating in the nation’s commitment, an absolutely necessary one, to renewable wind energy – energy independence, non-fossil fuels, mitigation of climate change effects that undoubtedly will occur and worsen if nothing is done.

“So we need to support wind turbines,” Jim added. ” This is because of climate change and because there are significant tax subsidies that make them real; but the local area accepting the effects from large scale operations, like Duke’s, must receive open-minded measures that minimize impacts, address land use, and level the playing field, sort of speak, in the social justice sense, due to lack of options and alternatives.

“The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the cross-effects of competing subsidies for wind turbine versus unconventional fossil fuel development in the west.  Clearly, these subsidies, along with any for so-called “clean coal” have to go or be reduced, which is a political impossibility it seems, for now anyway. Otherwise, Duke simply takes subsidies for all, including wind, and uses those major economic cash inflows to keep burning coal and other fossil fuels.”

Arcadia’s Friend
Tom Carr, a friend who owns a lovely home in Arcadia Township, and a lawyer whose family has summered along the northern coast of Lake Michigan here for generations, sent a thoughtful essay encompassing his opposition. “The likelihood is that the vast majority of Arcadia residents and visitors would support harnessing wind energy if it could be done economically and without significant “collateral damage” to the local environment.”

Tom wrote: “I am a 3rd generation property owner in Northwestern Lower Michigan, my grandfather having begun coming to the area in 1920 or so.  My views are those of my own family, my brother, my sister, our 9 adult children and their families.  Of that group, 6 own property on the lakefront or overlooking Arcadia.  I believe my thoughts mirror those of the vast majority of property owners in and visitors to Arcadia Township.

“The reality is that “large scale operations” of any kind don’t belong in these areas, whether wind farms or hog farms.

“While our nation may need to have a commitment to renewable energy, that doesn’t necessarily mean that as a nation we have to have an “absolutely necessary” commitment to renewable wind energy (or, necessarily, any commitment to wind energy), versus to solar energy, nuclear energy, or other alternatives to carbon based energy sources, or that any such commitment is so important as to diminish to the status of petty irritants the collateral damage than may occur to areas in which renewable energy projects are located.

“It may be possible to identify relatively remote areas of Arcadia, Blaine, Pleasanton and Joyfield Townships where placement of 112, 495-foot-high industrial wind turbines is feasible.  However, there is no place for such installations in the “valley” of Arcadia or on the surrounding ridge lines.

“Perhaps the turbines can be located in remote areas of the Townships, so as to significantly alleviate or eliminate altogether the aesthetic, health, tourism and support services and blade flicker issues.  Even if that is the case, though, as conditions precedent to commencing construction, Duke should be required to compensate adjoining property owners for diminution in their property values and provide surety for the cost of removal and restoration.

“I am part of an extended family that has enjoyed the area for more than 90 years, has major emotional and financial commitments to it, wants to see the beauty, serenity, and way of life continue unabated. I feel no more obligation to put any of what I  –  and, for example, my siblings and the 9 families in the next generation of the Carr clan  –  value in Arcadia at risk to support “our nation’s commitment . . . to renewable wind energy” than I believe that residents of the Grand Traverse region would if the project were to be sited on Old Mission Peninsula or any of us would were it to be sited on the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

“To the contrary, I will work others to see that the project does not impinge upon our valley or the surrounding ridge lines, and will happily support like-minded people in the other affected townships.”

– Keith Schneider

The Michigan Land Use Institute this week posted a strong report, and a rich archive of supporting material, that raises important questions about the credibility of assertions that “infrasound” generated by utility-scale wind turbines produces dangerous health consequences. The article, by MLUI managing editor Jim Dulzo, a former colleague and a journalist who knows his way around complex issues, notes that opponents of big wind farms, including the 112-turbine, $360 million project proposed for Benzie and Manistee counties here in northwest Michigan, have embraced the unproven thesis to stop wind development in their regions.

Dulzo writes, “Two local groups opposed to the project, Citizens for Responsible Wind Development and the Arcadia Wind Study Group, base their push for mile-plus setbacks on a self-published book by New York pediatrician Nina Pierpont. She claims her “natural experiment” shows that wind turbine infrasound causes serious health problems, and that mile-plus setbacks are necessary. Wind opponents nationwide now routinely use her claim to push for big, project-killing setbacks.

“Dr. Pierpont’s theory, however, has little research other than her own to back it up, even though she has been promoting it aggressively since at least 2005. In the past 13 months, her infrasound-based “wind turbine syndrome” theory has drawn strong criticism from two panels of acoustic scientists and medical doctors who formally investigated it. And a 40-year infrasound research veteran is urging policy makers to ignore unfounded worries about low-frequency sound and, instead, concentrate on protecting people from sounds they can actually hear.”

The annals of environmental dispute in America, of course, are rich in the narrative of hyperbole, fear, and irony. Years ago one of the most prominent environmental leaders in the United States urged me to curtail my reporting on new evidence showing that dioxin, a byproduct of chemical combustion, was much less dangerous to people than previously thought. He argued that trace levels of the compound could cause high levels of human cancers and other maladies, and that such reporting would stir government to loosen regulatory standards. He made his case while lighting a tobacco pipe and inhaling deeply.

Mixing fear with scientific bombast, though, has now become the toxic tactical brew of choice for opponents of renewable and clean energy development here in northern Michigan. Early last year, during my three-month stint as a communications consultant, Traverse City Light and Power’s proposal to build a clean, high-tech, 10mw wood biomass gasification plant was defeated by an opposition campaign based on fear and ginned up science. Essentially, said opponents, the plant would use so much wood as to “slaughter” the forests.  And its particulate emissions, though controlled by state-of-the-art equipment, would generate innumerable respiratory illnesses, said critics.

Neither assertion was true. The Grand Traverse region, mind you, is so rich in wood fuel that a good number of those same opponents burn wood to heat their homes in stoves and furnaces with no pollution or particulate control at all. Nevertheless, the TCLP biomass plant was seen by opponents as tantamount to constructing a nerve gas factory in the center of town.

Jeff Smith, the respected editor of Traverse Magazine, wrote a careful evaluation of the disappointing episode in the November 2010 issue that describes his own dismay with the tactics and the outcome. “Maybe you are thinking the business community did this because they feared higher power rates from a naively ambitious but costly green energy plan,” Smith writes. “Not so. The people driving the ballot initiatives and the people whose opposition killed the 30 by 20 goal view themselves as environmentalists, and what raised their ire was that TCLP wanted to build, or at least seriously evaluate building, a wood gasification power plant—wood being a renewable energy source.”

Citizens concerned about industrial development have every right to express themselves and to debate the merits and risks of big projects. The four Benzie and Manistee townships that are the targets of Duke Power’s big wind proposal unfold across a landscape of forests, orchards, clean streams, and Great Lakes vistas (see pix above) unrivaled in Michigan and the Midwest. The wind towers Duke wants to spread across 12,000 to 16,000 acres would establish a new and visually dominant industrial corridor along U.S. 31 at the southern entrance to Benzie County, and northern entrance to Manistee.

A good number of people — some summer folks, others retirees and long-time residents — very clearly see a phalanx of wind towers as the geography of abomination, a threat to property values, and a wicked insult to the little towns and the woods and fields that surround them. Others view the new electrical generating zone as an income producer, a statement of modernization and change, a curtain-raiser for a new era of clean power for the region, state, and nation. What the wind turbines clearly won’t do, as Jim Dulzo’s article reports, is produce infrasound that jeopardizes human health.

– Keith Schneider