God bless the students at Sterling College who are protesting GMP’s industrial wind project and the blasting of Lowell Mountain. Yesterday they risked arrest to save a mountain ecosystem that they have come to love and respect. Apparently, Sterling not only offers courses in environmental science, but ethics as well.
Many environmental colleges and students today have no connection to the forest, fields, and streams that they
are trying to protect, unless it is on a boardwalk.
Like the Governor, they believe that everything that says “green” is good. Whether it works or not.
The Governor, at his recent “ribbon-cutting ceremony” was stumbling on his own words when he tried to justify his support of the wind industry by saying, “We have to do this for our kids”. And his co-speaker, Paul Gaynor, UPC/First Wind, replied, “Vermonters will [now] burn less fossil fuels” to make their electricity.
Is he sure our kids want us to blast the peaks off four mountain tops for (hopefully) half of one percent of Vermont’s electrical needs?
In order to get his projected twenty percent of the states needs, the Governor will need to blast more than one hundred mountains.
Mr. Gaynor should know better, too. Vermont doesn’t use fossil fuels to generate power – less than 1%. And actually, the power from wind is so intermittent we will now need fossil fuel plants to balance the load when the wind stops. (Of course Mr. Gaynor knows this – he was stumbling on his words as well.)
Unfortunately, for Vermont and for our children, we will have lost our mountains and what they do best for us —
absorbing pollution and lettting visitors pay to come and look at them.
Projects Planned in Vermont: www.aweo.org/windprojects.php
Greg Bryant
Sheffield, Vermont
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/10/26/sterling-students-protest-for-vermonts-green-mountains/