July 12, 2012
Letters, Massachusetts

Governor misinformed on wind energy

The Berkshire Eagle | www.berkshireeagle.com 12 July 2012

Governor Deval Patrick continues to believe in the efficacy of industrial wind turbines (Eagle, July 7,) despite a rapidly growing body of evidence that wind turbines not only do not provide the energy attributed to them, and that there are no external costs to them, particularly to their closest neighbors. Now that more communities have installed them, there has been a corresponding growth of in noise-related physical ailments.

The steady increase in opposition to industrial wind turbine installation is interpreted by the governor as the result of misinformation. Actually, the governor is, you should forgive me, whistling in the wind. What has actually occurred is growing documentation of the environmental and physical hazards associated with the government-subsidized wind turbine industry. Were there no government subsidies for industrial wind turbines, the whole problem would go away because there would be no incentive to build them.

The governor attempted to rebut the claims of close neighbors of wind turbines by appointing an “expert” panel to study the issue. The best thing about this panel was its impressive array of academic affiliations. What was missing, though, was any attempt, however feeble, to actually study the problem. Instead they produced a cursory review of the literature they thought proved their point. This is not science. It is, instead, governmental chicanery at its most obvious.

What the governor should – must – do now is to appoint a real academic panel to use reliable means of academic inquiry to pursue the growing number of health complaints from those forced to live close to industrial wind turbines. Surely even this governor can’t be opposed to real science.

Perhaps after such a study, the governor might apologize to those of us he accuses of “suffering from a certain amount of misinformation.” We believe that it is he who suffers from a serious case of it.

LAURILY K. EPSTEIN

Monterey


URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/07/12/governor-misinformed-on-wind-energy/