Grassroots Opposition to Clean Energy

Grassroots Opposition To Wind Energy Receives Scholarly Assessment

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 27, 2011March 17, 20110

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 …

About The Gail Wind Farm: Two Perspectives

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 6, 2011February 7, 20112

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 …

Afraid of the Wind

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 28, 2011March 3, 20111

Earlier this month, on a snowy afternoon, the newly renovated Garden Theater held the largest crowd I’ve ever seen indoors in the small Lake Michigan coastal town of Frankfort, with the exception of girls and boys basketball games. On tap that day was a polemical documentary film, “Windfall.” Two groups of citizen activists held the screening to build civic momentum in opposition to a good-sized utility-scale windfarm proposed for Benzie and Manistee counties. Afterwards the …

Wind Chill: Young and Old Greens At Odds Over Clean Energy Projects

by Keith SchneiderAugust 4, 2010September 9, 20100

Gabrielle Gurley, a writer for Commonwealth, the magazine of the think tank MassINC, has a rigorously balanced assessment in the most recent issue of the simmering dispute in American environmentalism about big clean energy projects. All across the country, including Massachusetts, where Gurley bases her reporting, grassroots environmentalists are fighting to block clean energy installations. In the battle between principle and pragmatism, the efforts by older green activists is producing a generational schism in the …

Blocking Wood Biomass, Blocking Coal in Michigan — Does it Make Sense?

by Keith SchneiderApril 9, 2010June 29, 20111

Eartha Jane Melzer, one of the reporters in Michigan whose work merits close attention, posted a piece a week ago on Michigan Messenger that described the legal work the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council are doing to block a big new coal-fired power plant in Bay City. Here is one of the important events associated with the transition to the clean energy economy. On one hand environmental organizations are pursuing legal suits …