God, this drives me craaazy.
So, Long Island. Known for beautiful, sweeping scenic vistas, right? Oh, no, sorry, that’s the Rocky Mountains. Long Island is a grimy industrial smear with some dirty beaches.
The Long Island Power Authority wants to build an offshore wind farm off the island. Great, huh? Close to an urban center for efficient transmission. No smog. No CO2. Barely visible at all on a clear day, totally invisible on a hazy one. What do you want, eggs in your beer?
But nooo. The locals are bitching. From Peter Applebome’s column in the NYT ($):
Jayne Johnes lives and breathes for her proximity to Gilgo Beach.
"This is heaven, this is my church," she said. "And now they want to put a power plant in the middle of it?"
Yes, Jayne. Yes. You use power. Every day, you enjoy more power than 95% of the planet’s residents — arguably more than your share. Right now that juice is probably coming from coal that got ripped violently out of a piece of scarred land and burnt in a plant that’s sickening local residents and spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.
That’s heaven, Jayne: the atmosphere. My heaven too.
You want to use power but you don’t want to deal with it. You don’t want to see it — oh, I mean barely see it, on a clear day. You think it should be in somebody else’s back yard.
Jayne, a message from all us out here getting warmer and worrying about our kids’ futures, to all you Long Islanders — salt of the earth folks, I’m sure — aghast that your familiar stretch of beach will have new features:
STFU.
