Gone with the wind: Carbon millionaires arrested for fraud  

Credit:  November 15, 2009 | CFACT EU | cfact.eu ~~

Italian Wind Fraud Investigation Extends to the Netherlands, UK, Ireland, and Spain. Subsidies Questioned.

For some carbon millionaires, lining their pockets legally through taxpayer subsidies and hand outs is not enough. They choose to cheat even though they’re playing a game that’s already rigged.

The Financial Times reports that:

Oreste Vigorito, head of the IVPC energy company and president of Italy’s National Association of Wind Energy, was arrested on Tuesday in Naples. Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian business associate, was arrested in Alcamo, Sicily.

Two other men were arrested in Sicily and the Naples area, while 11 others were charged but not arrested.

FT reports that these saviors of our planet were building wind farms that were “built with public subsidies but had never functioned.”

Vigorito had ties to Brian Caffyn, founder of the controversial “Cape Wind” project planned for Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound, which has been criticized as a poor investment for taxpayers for the energy it will produce. Vigorito was not an investor in Cape Wind.

According to the Boston Herald:

“What we found was quite remarkable,” David Tuerck, the institute’s executive director, said at the time. “Cape Wind stands to receive subsidies worth $731 million, or 77 percent of the cost of installing the project and 48 percent of the revenues it would generate. The policy question that this amount of subsidy raises is whether the project’s benefit is worth the huge public subsidies that the developer gets.”

The Herald reports that Mr. Caffyn’s 2007 divorce records reveal that “he amassed an $82 million fortune building wind farms around the world.”

Wind power remains an interesting and potentially useful technology. However, if taxpayers are forced to pay for it they must receive a viable return on their investment. Conservationists should not be forced to endure wind farms spoiling undeveloped places of natural beauty. We should not allow wind farms to ruin the habitats of birds and other wildlife in ways we would never permit to established efficient methods of power generation.

It’s time politicians require the “green” business people who will reap fortunes from wind power to bear the financial costs and risks. It’s time government zoning and environmental regulators ban wind turbines where they threaten wildlife and spoil human enjoyment of natural beauty.

Wind yes, but only when economically viable and only with respect for the quality of life both human and wild.

This article was amended slightly in response to a request from the Cape Wind Project.