Cape Wind Voices

John K. Bullard

Former Mayor of New Bedford
Cape Cod Resident

The more we examine climate science the more alarming is the information. And yet for some reason we are not alarmed. CO2 levels are increasing beyond the worst case scenarios of the IPCC. And the impacts are becoming clearer. Sea level is rising at an accelerating rate. Permafrost is melting, releasing methane into the atmosphere, which accelerates the process. The North Pole will be ice free in the summer with a few years, reducing the albedo effect and again causing acceleration. Scientists are trying to keep up with the accelerating glacial melt in Greenland. Humans face a planetary emergency where flooding, drought, sea level rise, ocean acidification, increasing severe weather, wildfires and the spread of disease are clearly predictable and we react like it is just another day. The forced migration of millions of people and political destabilization of significant parts of the world seems to trouble us not at all.

Sheik Yamani said in 1974, “We didn’t leave the stone age because we ran out of stones.” Well, we need to leave the carbon age and we need to leave it soon. And not just because carbon is changing the planet in a way we may not, as a species, be able to tolerate. Coal, oil, gas have fueled steroid like growth. Dramatic, easy, and very unhealthy. And not because there aren’t alternatives. Our addiction
to oil (to use George W. Bush’s term), not only pollutes the planet.
It requires that we pay unfriendly governments money we don’t have for fuel we shouldn’t need. We are borrowing money from the Chinese to give to countries that don’t like us to make the planet more dangerous. There is just nothing right with this model.

Clean, renewable energy is there for the harvesting, and in plentiful, never ending supply. Developing the technologies and infrastructure to capture and distribute this energy can be the source of jobs for the next generation. One objective – generate all our electricity from renewable resources by 2020 – improves the climate, creates good jobs (would you want your child to work in a coal plant or a wind
farm?) and makes us energy independent. No more wars for oil. No more black lung disease. No more global warming. What, exactly is wrong with this strategy.

So we have a choice between a strategy that has nothing right with it and a strategy that has noting wrong with it. Why are we making the wrong choice? Whose interests are being served?

Cape Wind is a small but significant piece of the answer. It is a scandal that it has taken us 7 years we don’t have to get to this point. We need Cape Wind and we need it now. But we need much more than Cape Wind. Cape Wind is showing the way and is paying the cost of going first. Now that there is a path, we must pick up speed. The draft Massachusetts Ocean Plan designates two places for significantly
scaled wind turbines. How quickly can we get those on line?
Massachusetts should lead the way on wind energy, not follow distantly states like Texas. What are we waiting for?

Clean air, good jobs, energy independence. Don’t we want to be first in line? Don’t we in Massachusetts want to show others how we get there? Isn’t that ability to lead what has always made us great? Or was that just our parents’ and grandparents’ generation? And speaking
of different generations, do you feel like someone is looking at you?
That would be the future generations. They are watching us, and counting on us.