Destroy Vermont to save Vermont?
Burlington Free Press, www.burlingtonfreepress.com 1 March 2011
Good. Ronald Shems (new Natural Resources head) will help force the changes Gov. Shumlin, and advocates like Bill McKibben, have been pushing for Vermont. We don’t need a reliable, carbon-free source of electricity, we need “green” energy. Of course that will require removing a great deal of actual green, but so be it.
We have kept development off the ridgelines, so now we can bulldoze and blast them clear for turbines. We protected our floodplains, so now we can actually flood them for hydropower. Free-flowing streams are a waste of potential energy, we must dam them and show our resolve. In fact environmentalists have done a fine job of securing a corridor the length of the state along the Long Trail. They must stop whining about beauty and wildness and accept that turbines and power lines must be built in these areas. I’m sure all the poor towns along the way can be persuaded (if the idea of progress is not enough) in the form of our tax dollars paid to power corporations then passed on to them to allow industrial wind.
To paraphrase what the Army man said about the Vietnamese village, we must destroy Vermont in order to save it. So let’s get going.
LELAND KINSEY
Barton
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/03/01/destroy-vermont-to-save-vermont/