Write-in candidate for governor Annette Smith amped up her rhetoric on wind energy today during an appearance on WDEV-FM’s “The Mark Johnson Show,” comparing wind turbines to “a terrorist” landing in your community.
“Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m sorry, I thought wind was going to be part of the solution,” Smith told the radio host. “When you work on the wind issue, and you go into these communities — it’s like a terrorist has landed in your community.”
Here’s audio of the quote:
Smith: “Don’t shoot the messenger.“
Smith, who is waging a write-in campaign as an independent after narrowly losing a write-in campaign for the Progressive nomination, appeared on Johnson’s show to talk about her campaign and her choice to remain at the head of the nonprofit advocacy group Vermonters for a Clean Environment, among other topics.
Smith’s no stranger to strong words about wind development. In March, she told me developers are “making climate-change victims out of the people who live around the projects” — to which climate change activist Bill McKibben, a supporter of wind development, retorted that there are plenty of people and places around the world that better qualify as victims.
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That’s the issue: you START with the pre-conceived belief that the project is “ill-informed” because you hate development that you don’t want to see. Guess what? The majority of the state disagrees with you on wind, and our independent PSB system vetted the wind projects and found them to be in the public interest of the state. If you and your NIMBY-ist pals don’t like it, then you’re selfish and anti-democratic.
Annette’s only “your best shot” if you’re a selfish NIMBYist.
So when some ill-informed project gets shoved into your face or poisons your well, who ya gonna call? Annette’s your best shot. You know not of what you speak.
Gov’t would fight terrorists. Here in VT and most of the country the eco-fascists politicians are working with these subsidy sucking parasitic wind developers to destroy our environment and trample our rights in the name of green.
There’s a glut of generation in New England, an oversupply. We don’t need to be building intermittent, environmentally destructive, expensive wind power. Leaving the mountains and forests intact will do more for climate change than ugly, strobe lit wind towers. Hundreds of thousands of wind turbines installed around the world over the past 25 years have done nothing to lower emissions and they never will.
it’s great to see an honest, intelligent person like Annette running for governor and raising these issues. Until people are faced with an industrial wind project in their area they keep believing the wind industry propaganda. When they do a little research they realize that the wind industry is more about generating subsidies than clean, green electricity.
Use Less
I have friends who I respect on both sides of this question. What I don’t understand is how environmentalists applaud Act 250 on almost everything even when Act 250 blocks common sense development like local gravel pits (the closest gravel pit to Waitsfield is in Morrisville thanks to Act 250, what is environmentally sound about trucking gravel 40 miles?) yet these same environmentalists don’t think the Act 250 process is a good idea for wind projects. They’d rather some (pro-utility-owned-wind, at the moment) bureaucrats and utility-monopolies make all the decisions and forget about local input.
I’m sorry folks but you can’t have it both ways. I like Annette’s focus on restoring We the People via taking political power back from the feds/state and into the hands of people at the local level. If you are against local control you are against the self-determination culture that Vermont has always been rooted in, even before white people came here.
And worst of all, amid all the “replace Vt Yankee” and “fight climate change” talk, nobody mentions the fact that Vermont already has enough existing hydro-power that our ancestors built to completely replace the power we got from Vt Yankee, but ALL of that 567MW of hydro on Deerfield/CT Rivers is owned by foreign mega-corp TransCanada, and ALL of that power is exported to NH/MA.
TransCanada, the same company that’s doing the TarSands debacle in the NEK and other parts of the US exports all of our renewable energy…but to fight climate change we need to industrialize our ridge-lines by subsidizing another foreign monopoly, GazMetro? huh? I’m all for renewable energy but I smell a rat in the Democratic party-line on all of this and I’m glad people like Annette are stepping up to confront this.
The consequences for the increasing numbers of people are affected by infrasound and low frequency noise from a variety of sources including wind turbines are as Annette has described. I have spent the last 2 years investigating and working to ensure the multidisciplinary research is done, and have been contacted by those living within 10km of wind turbines, CSG compressors, coal mines, and gas fired power stations. The symptoms and pattern of their occurrence are identical in many respects.
Wind turbine syndrome symptoms are real, and have been admitted by one of the wind industry’s favourite acousticians, Professor Geoffrey Leventhall, who has also recently acknowledged Dr Pierpont’s important contribution to the field of environmental noise, by identifying the susceptible populations. These are the elderly, the very young, and those with a history of motion sickness, migraines, and inner ear pathology.
Over time, the effects of the chronic sleep deprivation and chronic physiological stress so well known to result in deteriorating mental and physical health will be the inevitable consequences. This was to be predicted from the work of Leventhall in his important 2003 Literature Review (see http://www.wind-watch.org/docu… ) particularly page 49 and section 10 and the concluding remarks, which show that for those who become sensitised or who are affected, they will continue to worsen until the exposure stops. For residents living near wind turbines, this means until they move or the turbines are shut down. There is no alternative, as the penetrating low frequency sound waves cannot be blocked, indeed good insulation makes the problems worse, as Rand and Ambrose describe in their acoustic survey at Falmouth (see http://www.wind-watch.org/docu…
For those reasons, the Waubra Foundation recommend a buffer distance of at least 10km until we know more about this serious and growing global public health problem, and we recommend that all existing wind developments must have the full sound spectrum measured inside and outside homes, in order to start to quantify what the exposures are. We also recommend permanent real time monitoring straight to the internet, together with the wind mast data, which means that compliance with existing (albeit inadequate) noise guidelines can be properly determined by independent acousticians, rather than relying solely on those acousticians who are employed by these noise polluters and who it would appear do not act in accordance with their professional codes of conduct to protect the health and safety of the public.
WIND TURBINE SYNDROME: http://www.windturbinesyndrome…
Wind Turbine Syndrome has been documented!
Wind Turbine Syndrome
A Report on a Natural Experiment
a book by Nina Pierpont
“Wind energy is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. It’s billed as
“clean, green, renewable.†In this engagingly written, peer-reviewed
report by a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine-trained M.D. and
Princeton (Population Biology) Ph.D., we discover wind energy’s dirty
little secret.
Many people living within 2 km (1.25 miles) of these spinning giants
get sick. So sick that they often abandon (as in, lock the door and
leave) their homes. Nobody wants to buy their acoustically toxic homes.
The “lucky ones†get quietly bought out by the wind developers—who
steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that Wind Turbine Syndrome exists.
(And yet the wind developers thoughtfully include a confidentiality
clause in the sales agreement, forbidding their victim from discussing
the matter further.)”
http://www.windturbinesyndrome…
Annette has been an avid, dedicated and working environmentalist for over 20 years, is the head of Vermonters For A Clean Environment and she knows her stuff. Her knowledge of the ins and outs of hydrology ~ stormwater run off, erosion, stream and river ecology, etc is substantial. Not helpful that you attempt to minimize her, and unsuccessfully I might say. I have read your posts on other issues before. You are quite the aggressor.
What the wind industry is doing to Northern New England is nothing short of eco-terrorism. Scalping, blasting away, leveling millions of cubic yards of mountains is destroying hundreds of miles of our sensitive upland environments. For what? Machines that are totally out of place and out of scale–turbines that are as tall as Boston skyscrapers, ruining Maine, NH, and Vermont’s “Quality of Place”. The best locations barely meet 30% capacity factor and most projects are in the low 20’s % range. Unpredictable, unreliable, non-dispatchable electricity generation that cannot compete in the market without extraordinarily generous Taxpayer subsidies. We are throwing away our unique regional heritage and natural resources for a folly.
Regarding noise, we are applying noise standards developed for other purposes to machines that have a unique sound signature. Again, we are allowing destruction of wildlife and human habitat without fully understanding the ramifications of audible repetitive noise and harmful low frequency sound waves intruding into the lives of humans and wildlife.
This is just a huge experiment. Unlike open farmland or desert on flat or gently rolling terrain, our New England projects are being placed on ridges surrounded by other ridges and sound traveling across bodies of water. In Lincoln Lakes, Maine, the various weather conditions create noise impacts that the CAD noise impact zone in First Wind’s application could never predict, though the locals knew how the sound would reverberate across the water and from ridge to ridge. In the case of the Vinalhaven, Maine turbines, one of the noise “hot spots” is more than a half a mile away on another hill.
There are so many things wrong with industrial wind power that it is a travesty that so many people and especially pandering politicians, have swallowed 20 years of wind industry propaganda and continue to support an environmentally devastating industry. All the hype about wind power has been refuted, yet we allow “green” zealots to keep this folly on a relentless path that we will come to deeply regret. Thank goodness there are people like Annette Smith who stand up for the truth and for protection of Vermont’s mountains!
Annette Smith should know about terrorism. She is a pathological NIMBY-terrorist. Nowhere else but Vermont would a houseperson with no technical or energy policy background be taken seriously.