The King of NIMBYism

In 2005, after Robert Kennedy Jr. published an op-ed in The New York Times opposing an offshore wind energy project in Nantucket Sound, environmentalists were plenty pissed. Since then, RFKJr has offered numerous arguments against Cape Wind, but none of them has stuck.

I thought he had reached a hypocritical apex a few years ago when he scolded Senator Dianne Feinsten for quashing solar development in California’s Mojave desert. But Kennedy scaled new heights with his op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. That piece seemed to cross some sort of rubicon even with Climate Progress (but not Joe Romm, who has never taken him to task), which ran this guest post last night, slamming Kennedy:

It is simply impossible to portray Kennedy’s latest salvo in the ongoing battle over Cape Wind as anything less than utter hypocrisy. Kennedy suggests that the project, which has undergone more than a decade of environmental and economic review, could be supplanted by “renewable” power from Canadian hydroelectricity ““ the same alternative that has been proposed to replace Vermont Yankee’s nuclear energy. And yet in 2004 as a senior attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, Kennedy penned a piece titled “Hydro is Breaking Our Hearts.” His article lamented that hydro development in Canada had “turned pristine rivers into power corridors, ancient lakes into holding tanks, and a sacred homeland into an industrial complex.”

Yet Canadian hydropower is precisely the solution he proposes to replace Cape Wind’s green electrons. Apparently his own Hyannisport sacred homeland is somehow “¦ more sacred?

Now I’m not someone who thinks it’s clear sailing for wind power. As this recent piece in Climate Central and this post by Mark Lynas demonstrate, there are serious issues and considerable blowback that still need to be addressed in numerous places. But Cape Wind is not one of them. It is perhaps the most vetted wind project on the planet. Opposition to it today boils down to plain old NIMBYism.

Last year, David Roberts of Grist, who often writes passionately about climate change, did an interview with Kennedy, but avoided asking him about his relentless anti-Cape Wind stand. Here was the final soft ball question and Kennedy’s answer, which included cartoonish rhetoric about “evil-doers,”  a term George Bush Jr. was fond of using, too.

Q. What are you spending your time on now?

A. I’m doing a lot of green-tech businesses. I’ve employed all the tools of advocacy during the past quarter-century; Martin Luther King said the tools of advocacy are agitation, legislation, litigation, and education. I would add to that innovation, which may turn out to be one of the most powerful tools of advocacy. We have an opportunity now, using new technologies, to displace the evildoers, the oil industry and the coal industry, and turn this country back into a democracy.

Kennedy neglected to add that he was also employing all the tools of NIMBYism to thwart a massive clean energy project that would do its part to help reduce greenhouse gases.