On October 18, a prominent opponent of large-scale wind energy issued a press release to Vermont media that made some pretty serious charges against a lot of prominent people who don’t agree with him.
Mark Whitworth, president of Energize Vermont, depicted the “wind industry” as “one of the most corrupting influences in Vermont,” accused members of the legislature of taking orders from wind interests and claimed that “old-line environmental groups” had been “subverted” by the industry. Energize Vermont is one of two local groups opposed to large-scale wind; the other is Vermonters for a Clean Environment.
The occasion for this eruption is a set of proposed wind turbine sound rules developed by the state Public Utility Commission. As they stand, the rules would limit turbine noise to 42 decibels during the day and 39 at night; they would also establish minimum setbacks between turbines and nearby structures. The rules are currently under review by the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules, a clear majority of whom have serious reservations about the PUC’s work. They believe the decibel levels are too low, and they question the need for a setback requirement. (The committee may issue a final decision at a hearing set for Thursday at the Statehouse.)
Given lawmakers’ reservations, Whitworth and his allies are wary. They see the rules as acceptable, if not ideal, and don’t want any changes. And Whitworth’s accusations reflect that mind-set. He believes that large-scale wind is a social and environmental menace — which means that anyone who supports it must be corrupt or unenlightened.
Or part of a cabal. “I disagree with the course of action that REV, VPIRG, VNRC, VCV, CLF, Iberdrola, Vestas, Nordex and David Blittersdorf are promoting,” he wrote in an email after declining a phone interview. That’s a remarkable statement, lumping together those “old-line environmental groups” (Renewable Energy Vermont, Vermont Public Interest Research Group, Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont Conservation Voters and the Conservation Law Foundation) with a Vermont renewables developer and three international corporations.
They’re all on the same team, you see. Vermont’s environmental advocates — except for Whitworth and his allies — have abandoned their principles and chosen to put Vermont’s habitats and communities at risk. And why? The only explanation Whitworth can see is money; he speculated that the groups are doing the bidding of faceless, deep-pocketed donors.
“That characterization is baseless and silly,” says VNRC executive director Brian Shupe, who adds that he is “not aware of any wind developer that supports VNRC’s policy and advocacy work.” However, he would see nothing wrong with accepting such donations, “but there would be no strings attached, as is the case with all our members.”
VPIRG and VCV do not disclose information about donors, and the Internal Revenue Services does not require them to do so. This is also true of Energize Vermont and thousands of other nonprofit interest groups.
VPIRG executive director Paul Burns acknowledges accepting donations from wind interests, but he says there’s no quid pro quo. Quite the reverse: It was VPIRG’s pro-renewable stance that came first, not the donations. “We have supported renewables, conservation and efficiency throughout our 45-year history,” he says.
Which is a point lost on Whitworth, who asked, “Why are the old-line environmental groups promoting wind instead of environmental conservation?” As Burns notes, the groups say they promote both. And they see large-scale wind as a necessary part of Vermont’s response to climate change.
An October 12 LCAR hearing saw three Democrats take the lead in questioning the PUC rules: state Sens. Mark MacDonald (D-Orange) and Ginny Lyons (D-Chittenden) and Rep. Mike Yantachka (D-Charlotte). Or, as Whitworth wrote in his press release, they engaged “in a chaotic policy-making effort that exceeds the committee’s authority and expertise.”
The latter is a key point, because LCAR’s authority is narrow; it doesn’t consider the wisdom of a rule but only whether it’s within the bounds of legislative intent.
Lyons says that’s exactly what the committee is doing. “LCAR is asking all the questions it needs to, so we know the rule is consistent with legislative intent,” she says. “Asking pointed questions is part of the process.”
In his email exchange with me, Whitworth accused LCAR members of having been “coached by lobbyists” at their October 12 meeting. This appears to center on a hallway conversation between Burns and Lyons, which raised suspicions among anti-wind onlookers. In fact, both Burns and Lyons say they were discussing an unrelated press conference scheduled for later that day — not the wind rules.
Whitworth does little to help his cause by claiming a widespread conspiracy among politicians, developers and environmental groups alongside arguments about mountaintop disturbance, wildlife habitat and turbine sound.
The root cause of all this alleged chicanery, according to Whitworth, is the wind industry’s political generosity. “The industry has poured money into political campaigns,” says his press release, without providing any specifics — which can easily be found on the Secretary of State’s Office website.
A check of campaign finance reports for the 2015-16 cycle showed that Yantachka apparently received no wind money, MacDonald received $250 from the Vermont Renewable Energy Political Action Committee and Lyons got $250 from Blittersdorf. That’s all.
Did that $250 influence MacDonald? “Heavens no,” he says. “I support renewable energy. I have for years.”
To his credit, Whitworth answered my questions at length, and I appreciate his participation. He’ll probably be unhappy with this column; he believes that I’m biased in favor of wind. And yes, I have followed the issue for years, and I have found the arguments of the “old-line environmental groups” to be persuasive.
But my point here is not about the substance of the wind debate. It’s about irresponsible rhetoric and the damage it does to one’s credibility.
I will share one other quote provided by Whitworth in one of his emails that displays a profound bleakness of vision. It was written by novelist Jonathan Franzen and published in the New Yorker:
“The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal cancer we can choose to treat either with disfiguring aggression or with palliation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.”
So … we give up? We ignore any opportunity to evade the apocalypse and hold tightly to the untainted remnant as the darkness envelops us all? How inspiring.
The Scandal That Maybe Wasn’t
Congressman Peter Welch (D-Vt.) got swept up in a political flurry last week for his part in enacting a 2016 law that wasn’t the least bit controversial. At least it wasn’t until the Washington Post and CBS’ “60 Minutes” published a report asserting that the law is hamstringing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts to limit the illicit distribution of opioids.
According to whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi, a former DEA official, the law limited the agency’s authority to issue “immediate suspension orders” blocking questionable drug shipments.
The bill’s lead sponsor, Congressman Tom Marino (R-Pa.), had been President Donald Trump’s choice to head the DEA. In the story’s wake, Trump scuttled the nomination. The story also raised uncomfortable questions for Marino’s cosponsors — including Welch, who immediately called for fresh hearings on the law and said that, if necessary, he would support its amendment or repeal.
But now, there are questions about the Post/”60 Minutes” report itself.
One of its key pieces of evidence is a dramatic decline in the issuance of immediate suspension orders, from 65 in 2011 to six so far this year. But, according to DEA statistics, that decline actually took place before April 2016, when the bill became law. In 2014 there were only eight such orders, and the annual total has remained in single digits ever since. That’s a heck of a trick, having the effect precede the cause.
The DEA has a number of tools in its bag, including suspension orders, letters of admonition, civil fines, criminal penalties and memoranda of understanding. Recent years have seen a decline in the more confrontational methods and an increase in the more cooperative approaches.
Given the scope of the opioid crisis, it’s fair to ask why the DEA seems to have given the industry more wiggle room, but the statistics do not reveal an overt connection with the 2016 law.
Welch professes a desire to get to the bottom of the whole mess. “I have suggested that we have the whistleblower testify before the [House Energy and Commerce] Committee,” he says. “His accusations need to be aired. We need to satisfy ourselves that we’re not doing harm.”
Welch acknowledges that the Post/”60 Minutes” story explored some real, systemic problems in government, including the flood of money that engulfs the Capitol. Even Welch is not immune: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Vermont’s lone congressman has received $136,000 from pharmaceutical and health product companies over the past 12 years.
“Campaign finance, the revolving door [between public service and industry] — there’s a lot of cynicism,” Welch says. “The pharmaceutical industry does have great influence in Washington. I can see why this story was pursued, but whether they got it right remains to be seen.”
It also remains to be seen whether Welch got it right.
Media Note
Sad day at the shop today. One of Vermont’s best journalists — and one of the stalwarts of the Seven Days news team — is leaving the profession. Statehouse reporter Terri Hallenbeck will step away from the daily grind on November 3 and start a new job 10 days later as assistant director of donor relations at Middlebury College.
“After 31 years in journalism and 13 years on the same beat, it’s natural to seek new opportunities,” she says. “I’m ready for a change.”
Hallenbeck didn’t ask her colleagues if they’re ready for a change.
“I’ll never forget how many legislators thanked — and congratulated — me when we hired Terri three years ago,” says Paula Routly, Seven Days publisher and coeditor. “She was fair, they wanted me to know. We Seven Days editors soon had additional adjectives to describe Terri, including thorough, accurate, dogged, hardworking … Three decades after she started working as a journalist, she still really cares about the people she covers.”
As for me, I’ll remember Terri quietly prowling the corridors of the Statehouse, never making a fuss … but always getting the story.
This article appears in October 25 • 2017.
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It is entirely incorrect to lump fossil carbon fuels together with nuclear power, they are antithetical.
Even the so-called wind “turbines” require servicing by helicopters, and a serious effort to eliminate use of fossil carbon, as the coal, gas, and petroleum industries well know, would use not only minor improvements upon the remarkably wasteful but nevertheless very low waste current nuclear, but the molten salt reactor and fast neutron reactors that the USA pioneered and showed to be safe even three weeks before the infamous Chernobyl. The idea of misdirecting use of these into weapons is not only false, but pointless, because both Russia and China are now working upon them, and doing so with a view to exporting their technologies.
Part two – Blame the word counter
Then on the other end of the light spectrum is the well known Ultra-violet, another part that isn’t visible to our eyes but we know it was there when we have a severe sun burn like we spent the day in an oven at 350. Ultra-violet light is at a frequency that penetrates the clouds that block the visible light and degrades almost everything outside from our roofing materials to paint on our homes and cars to rubber and plastics, most of which we now have UV inhibitors in but are still eaten away slowly by UV.
Sound waves also have a spectrum, the parts we can hear/perceive and the parts that go well beyond our hearing and like light, are the most dangerous parts. The vibrations of sound waves interact with and alter the vibration of everything they hit and can do serious damage. Think about how microwaves cook meat by penetrating and altering the vibrational frequency of the molecules. The military has used sound wave weapons that will rupture a persons organs from a long distance and goes straight through walls. European countries have already documented all of this and set standards and limits that, of course, our big corporate wind people just want to ignore, because they are too inconvenient and get in the way of their profiteering. And this is all aside from the damage to the landscape, water quality, hunting and fishing grounds etc etc etc.
Part 1 – Blame the word counter
There is a very clear demonstration of a serious ignorance here on the part of people saying they stood right next to the towers and couldn’t hear anything, so it couldn’t possibly be causing harm. I’m sure some of that is willful & intentional ignorance, otherwise known as misinformation & propaganda but there is also just a lack of real understanding too.
These turbines produce infra-sound, sound that is beyond the range of our hearing and can’t be perceived by our ears but still penetrates and interacts with everything that those waves hit. Just like sunlight has a visible spectrum that our eyes perceive along with infra-red that our eyes can’t see but we can certainly feel on our skin as heat, even from the sun that is millions of miles away. Our wood burning stoves and radiators produce infra-red light as well. We can see it with infra-red cameras. You don’t see any light coming from the front of your wood burning stove but you certainly aren’t going to be happy holding your hand too close for too long are you?
In reply to Kathy’s comment above, I would ask her to lay out concretely her plan to get us from our current demand (met, at present, by heavy reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear power) to a society which can do without a similar amount of energy. I gather her vision entails shrinking our current consumer demand to a level she believes is consonant with the environment, and that she further opposes ALL large-scale energy development.
What needs currently supplied by electricity will we have to do without? What businesses can remain in a Vermont which no longer has access to large-scale energy supplies? How will Vermonters earn a living or even subsist in this climate? Will downsizing our demand require downsizing our population as well? If so, how will the people leaving the state impact the environment elsewhere?
It’s one thing to call for less industrialization, etc. It’s quite another to spell out what that lifestyle would actually look like, and provide some notion of how we are to get there from where we are.
Without answers to these obvious questions, we might as well turn to fairy dust and unicorns as our energy plans. Theyre equally realistic.
With all due respect, Susan C. Anderson, while I have vigorously and publicly supported both conservation and increased efficiency for decades now, neither is an adequate answer to the question posed.
In VERY round figures, Vermonters consume between around 600 and 1200 MW of electricity every hour of every day. Taking a VERY optimistic view of our potential for saving energy (which I do), we MIGHT be able (over time) to save roughly 1/2 of that. Many experts and all of the literature Ive seen put the figure closer to 20+%. But for the sake of this discussion, lets use my figure.
In addition, most expert thinking nowadays postulates that electricity will be called on to supply at least SOME of the transportation needs currently supplied by fossil fuels. If so, that would increase demand from current levels. But lets put that aside for now as well.
Even making these VERY generous assumptions, then, we would still have demand for enough electricity to supply somewhere in the ballpark of 300- 500 MW per hour. Without these un-conservative assumptions, the figures would be substantially higher.
So I join Roy’s comment above (I don’t know who Roy is) in asking: where should Vermont get that power, if utility-scale wind projects are to play no part? It remains a legitimate, nay an obvious question. I too have repeatedly asked Annette Smith and Mark Whitworth (and others) to answer it. The silence remains deafening.
The answer without wind is conservation and increasing efficiency,.
2 wrongs (wind/solar vs fossil fuels) don’t make a right!
Kathy –
“We need a new economy that lives smaller – but the money is in big global corporate technology. If the money (and neoenviros’ shoulders) were put to such, perhaps we wouldn’t be battling among ourselves and could all sleep at night, and bears wouldn’t be displaced from their habitat in Vermont’s national forest land today.
Meaning no insult or disrespect, but really, this isn’t a practical or productive comment. While you may believe that we need a new, smaller economy (and that may very well be true) we have the economy that we have and that isn’t likely to change and our energy needs will continue to grow. No perfect solution is in the offing for industrial energy generation so we have to deal in realities, not in “I wish it were so”. All large scale energy production has some downside but sometimes we have to look at the “lesser evil”. So I suppose the real issue here is whether or not we continue to support the fossil fuel industry as the drilling and fracking isn’t in our back yard or we go with the less than perfect solution of renewable industrial wind and solar that is in our backyard.
Barbara Alsop, 2,200 groups across the globe have formed in self-defense against the damage that these projects present to both human and non-human lives and ecosystems. That you haven’t personally encountered these damages does not mean they do not exist. They exist not all that far from your address, I expect. Would you give up your home to reclaim your health if it were damaged? Sleep soundly tonight but know that others cannot.
The collective WE demands growth, growth that is insatiable but not very creative. In VT that occurs in one county, demanding more housing, parking, and a widening circle of commuters creating more demands. Directing that growth to areas that are losing population, have ample housing stocks, and want local opportunities is one solution. Require new commercial building to include rooftop solar. It’s past time for solar parking lots. Favor mass transit over ECars that enable single occupants. We need a new economy that lives smaller – but the money is in big global corporate technology. If the money (and neoenviros’ shoulders) were put to such, perhaps we wouldn’t be battling among ourselves and could all sleep at night, and bears wouldn’t be displaced from their habitat in Vermont’s national forest land today.
It is all too easy and simplistic to proclaim your support for this industrial “answer” when you have not been harmed or threatened by it.
And Whitworth’s accusations reflect that mind-set. He believes that large-scale wind is a social and environmental menace which means that anyone who supports it must be corrupt or unenlightened.
This man is closed minded.
Wow, the vituperation here is quite heavy from the anti-wind crowd. I support wind power, think the mills are attractive, and don’t know what all the fuss is about. High power transmission lines have been running through this state for years with actual provable damage to wildlife and the biosphere, but I didn’t hear any of these NIMBY folks complaining then. While I would like to have my own private wind source where I live, I don’t think Champlain Housing Trust would approve the addition to their building.
I wait with ‘bated breath to hear a realistic solution to our energy needs that doesn’t involve more pipelines for fracked gas, and that adequately provides the needs of all sectors of the state. It certainly isn’t coming from this crowd. John Walters is paid to write these pieces and does a pretty good job. Like others who have held it, he has personal biases and lays them out for us all to see. I might suggest that the NIMBYs have their own biases and get to display them on this page. But it sure would be nice to hear a decent post-fossil fuel solution from these people after they finish trashing the only people who are actually working to provide renewable electricity generation