First, to give credit where it’s due, the photo of work at the Sheffield wind power project site in last Wednesday’s post was taken by Steve Butcher from a plane flown by Peter Boynton. Both live in the Mad River Valley and oppose plans for a wind power project along Northfield Ridge. The photo was not intended to, could not have, and did not reveal any improper activity going on at the site.

Next, the sentence in Friday’s post that read, “electricity consumption nationwide is equivalent to about 450 GW annually,” should have replaced “annually” with “on average,” or “equivalent to the output of 450 GW running continuously.”

For the record, the guy in the photo on the right side of Friday’s post was John Donne

Finally, some clarifications on the earlier posts, starting wtih clearing up some confusion toward the bottom of Friday’s post, Latish in the evening, after dinner out, the News Guy got some new information thanks to the cooperative folks at ISO New England.

Perhaps because it was late, perhaps because the dinner included a drink (OK, two drinks, if you insist) the information was at first misinterpreted as a dissent of sorts from the findings of a U.S. Government agency that Vermont’s capacity to create electricity from wind was quite small.

Those who read that post after about 9 AM when the misinterpretation was corrected can skip this paragraph. For earlier readers, there is no discrepancy. Both ISO New England (the area’s Regional Transmission Organization, based in Holyoke, Massachusetts) and the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) conclude that Vermont’s wind power potential is less than a gigawatt.

This can get confusing, and blame for some of the confusion rests right here, because electricity capacity is sometimes expressed in megawatts or gigawatts and sometimes in megawatt hours or gigawatt hours. (See above clarification about the difference between “annually” and “on average.”).

The comment on last Friday’s post (scroll down) by Hilton Dier is factually accurate. Friday’s post concluded, based on U.S.Energy Department assessments, that Vermont’s wind power potential was tiny in relation to the nation’s energy consumption, too tiny to make a dent in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

That’s true.

Dier points out that if Vermont fully exploited its wind potential (a most unlikely prospect), it could effectively provide all its power from wind.

That’s probably true, too.

How can they both be true? Because Vermont, according to the Energy Department, uses but two tenths of one percent of all the electricity consumed in the country.

That’s not enough to save much, if any, fossil fuel burning, especially without some disincentive for burning those fossil fuels (see below).

Now, this alone does not prove that wind power should not be developed. There are all kinds of reasons for supporting more wind power in Vermont. Some people approve any addition to the power supply by any means. They may be right.

(Or not. A case can be made that New England, where the population is stable and per-person electricity consumption is declining,  needs no more power generating plants at all, at least for a while. But that’s a separate discussion.)

But the point of these last few posts, which should have been obvious to the functionally literate, is that if your case for supporting wind power in Vermont was that it might help reduce fossil fuel use and thereby ease global warming, you ain’t got much of a case.

The wind power that could potentially produced on land (the offshore potential is greater) by the entire east coast (which effectively includes Vermont, its lack of actual coastline notwithstanding) is not likely prevent the burning of a single ton of coal, barrel of oil, or cubic foot of natural gas.

At least not if NREL’s assessment is correct.

Especially considering that without that carbon tax or cap and trade regimen, adding new generating power to the system will probably mean only that Americans will use more power, not that they will substitute the clean for the dirty. The coal will still be in the ground waiting to be mined, sold, and burned. Absent some disincentive to mine, sell, and burn it, that’s what is likely to happen.

The key question here is not whether putting wind towers on Vermont ridge lines would do any good at all. Obviously, it would produce some electricity without polluting the air.

The key question is whether creating this tiny (in the national context) amount of power is worth the damage to the ridge lines.

Especially since, as Lyndon State science professor Ben Luce said, the near future could see a much more meaningful expansion of renewable energy from wind towers off-shore and on the Great Plains and from solar energy.

If that happens, Vermont will have degraded some of its pristine mountain streams, intruded on valuable wildlife habitat, and scarred its high elevation ridges for…well, effectively for nothing.

Granted, some people – seemingly intelligent, knowledgeable, well-meaning people at that – remain bullish about New England wind, raising the possibility that there could be a flaw in NREL’s analysis. This is not likely – the federal scientists have access to the best data all over the country – but let’s play with the idea briefly.

Seth Kaplan, a vice president for policy and climate advocacy at the Conservation Law Foundation, is a real optimist about New England wind power’s potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His line of reasoning, which appears informed and responsible, is too complicated and not sufficiently central to today’s discussion to require a detailed account here. But he’s confident that eventually wind can produce enough power to create a tipping point, reducing coal production by a greater percentage of power use than the wind produces.

“If 2.5 percent (of all power produced) came from (wind), emissions would drop by 2.5 percent,” he said. But if wind could produce 14 percent of the power, “you’d get a 17 percent CO2 reduction. At 24 percent, a 30 percent reduction.”

Needless to say, those estimates are debatable. But what is important for now is Kaplan’s acknowledgement that they only rise to the level of debatable if Vermont and the rest of the northeast can produce a great deal of wind power, apparently more than the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds feasible. Could NREL be wrong?

Yes. Before assessing the wind power potential of each state, NREL excludes all the land where,it assumes industrial wind towers could not be built—city centers, lakes, parks. In Vermont the study excludes more than three quarters of the state’s 2,569.6 square kilometers, including, it seems, the Green Mountain National Forest.

But wind towers have not been banned on the GMNF, whose officials are considering whether to allow them in the Searsburg area.  Ponder this possibility, then: the same peaks and ridge lines that George Aiken saved from a federal highway proposal in the 1930s could be covered by 450-foot-high wind towers in the coming decade.

Not, probably, what most Vermonters want. Not, probably, a plus for the state’s tourism economy. But if wind towers are acceptable to the Forest Service, and if people are serious about producing enough wind power to make a difference in global warming, not out of the question.

Ben Luce, who has studied the wind maps, doubts that very much of the GMNF is prime wind power terrain.  In much of the area, he said, building the necessary roads would be prohibitively expensive. Besides, he said, even covering much of the National Forest with wind towers would still produce “a tiny fraction” of the region’s or the nation’s electricity, not enough to reduce greenhouse gases.

Especially considering that Vermont now gets much of its power from Hydro-Quebec and (for a while) Vermont Yankee, neither of which emit GHGs. (Or not much. A more scientifically literate reporter than this one informs that HQ’s flooding and reservoirs emit some carbon dioxide.

The mainstream environmental groups who support more wind power now would probably draw the line at covering the National Forest with wind towers. But here’s the contradiction that confronts them: unless Vermont wind power is developed everywhere it can be produced, it’s not likely to have any impact on greenhouse gas production.

With some justification, the enviros have complained that the earlier posts on this subject did not mention their commitment to “careful siting, scale, and design of wind facilities,” as they make clear in the joint statement they released last week. Jamie Fiedel of the Vermont Natural Resources Council pointed out that his organization had “spent years” on “limiting the impact on bear habitat” from the Searsburg wind project.

No doubt they did and no doubt they are sincere in their desire to limit the harmful impacts of wind projects. But the more they limit, the less productive the wind developments, so their two goals – create more power; protect the ridge lines – seem to be in conflict.

Besides, no matter how much damage is limited, it is indisputable that from an environmental perspective, the best thing to do with these ridges is…nothing. Any development will result in some degree of environmental and ecological degradation. Here we have environmentalists favoring environmental degradation largely because they think it will assuage the greater environmental crisis of global warming.

They seem to be wrong.

And in a bit of political irony, the environmentalists, politically left of center, argue for a policy which grants extraordinary discretion over land use policy to developers. Without comprehensive energy or land use planning, it is developers, whose mission is to make money, not produce power or protect nature, who will decide where the wind towers go.

With, to be sure, approval from the Public Service Board and the Agency of Natural Resources. So far, this has not been a problem.

To be fair, climate change is not the green groups only goal here. In an email, Paul Burns of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) said he and his colleagues were also motivated by “the retirement of Vermont Yankee,” and the “belief…that we Vermonters bear some responsibility for generating the power we use every day.”

It’s understandable that environmentalists, who have been fighting to shut down Vermont Yankee, feel responsible for making sure something is available to replace the power the nuclear plant now provides. But it seems there is plenty of power in the area. CLF’s pro-wind Seth Kaplan noted that “New England is capacity rich,” right now.

The part about Vermont’s responsibility to produce its own power is understandable, but also subjective and a bit abstract. It also seems to be a thin reed on which to base the environmentalist pro-wind policies.

So here, admittedly as conjecture more than evidence-backed analysis, are two alternative explanations.

First, the environmentalists and some of  the wind developers are associates, even friends. Some of those developers (see last Monday’s post) even sit on the green groups boards and contribute generously.

No, the greenies are not being bought off. But they and the wind developers are in the same tribe. They frequent the same Montpelier restaurants and coffee shops. They share the same liberal politics. To the environmental leaders, the wind developers are “one of us.” They must mean well (and no doubt do; but as George Bernard Shaw noted, “all men mean well”).

The second explanation has to do with that liberalism they share. These environmentalists are liberals, and Vermont liberals at that. Liberals, perhaps especially in Vermont, believe in being personally responsible. They recycle. They try to limit their carbon imprint.

Good things to do. But in the case of recycling, it really only does any good if enough people do it. In Vermont, they do, thanks to the efforts of environmentalists.

But the environmentalists would do it anyway, whether or not it did much good. It would make them feel better.

Maybe that’s  why they want to cover the ridges with wind towers.

….Serves to advance an honest mind,” is how John Donne finished that line back in 1633.

Donne was writing what he called a song, and it was fun. This exercise in how an honest mind should judge the efficacy of wind- generated electricity would be less enjoyable even if the guy putting it together had a tenth of Donne’s talent, which, for the record, he does not. What follows is a slog through fact and data (while trying to avoid conjecture and bias), a whole lot less entertaining than wit and rhyme.

There are several arguments on behalf of developing wind power in Vermont. It would create some jobs. In the spirit of Vermont self-reliance, the energy would be home-grown, even though no one knows where the juice powering his or her appliances really originates.

But the climate change case is the sine qua non of the pro-wind forces, the reason wind power development seems to have (those the polls should be treated with some skepticism) the support of most Vermonters. So there is one central question: will erecting hundreds of wind towers on Vermont’s high ridges mean Vermonters and other Americans will burn less coal, oil, and natural gas, and therefore stop making the world hotter, or at least stop making it hotter as quickly?

Because this is no more a suspense novel than a poem, the answer will come right now: NO.

Or at least the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence says that it will not.

Or at the very best (or worst, depending on one’s sentiments) it will do so infinitesimally.

Obviously, creating any power without producing climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHG) contains the potential for reducing the creation of power from sources that do produce those gases.

For instance, according to First Wind, the company now clearing land for a wind power project in Sheffield, that project will provide 115,000 megawatt hours of power per year. Considering that a typical ton of coal produces 2,000 MWh of power (or so says the National Mining Association) might not those figures mean that exploiting Sheffield’s wind could avoid burning 57,500 tons of carbon-filled coal?

If it did, big deal. More than a billion tons of coal was burned in the U.S. in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available, and lower than the previous year thanks to the recession). This is rounding error territory.

Besides, the Sheffield project would not have any such impact. The 115,000 MWh figure comes from the developer, and is meaningless out of context, as are claims, so often parroted by local news organizations, that a proposed project will provide power to X thousand Vermont homes.

Better to stick to the official, carefully-researched, and presumably un-biased projections of the U.S. Government (which supports more wind power, so any bias would be pro-wind).

According to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL, part of the U.S. Department of Energy) if all Vermont ridge lines with “suitable wind resource for wind development” (average annual wind speeds of 6.5 meters per second or greater) were in fact developed, they would produce  2,948.7 megawatts, or, to keep it simple, the equivalent of 2.9 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity (a gigawatt is a billion watts). If all the suitable sites throughout the Northeast were exploited, the total would be 52 GW. (This is for inland areas only; offshore wind power potential is greater).

That sounds like a lot of power, but these are estimates of “gross capacity…not adjusted for losses.” That’s official jargon meaning the estimate assumes the wind would be blowing at about 6.5 m/s all the time. It doesn’t. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all.

The hard-line anti-wind activists are wrong when they say this means wind power would be worthless and unreliable. No method of generating electricity works at full capacity all day, every day, all year long. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants have to shut down for maintenance, repair, and inspection (few of them as often as Vermont Yankee).

It does mean that the actual – as opposed to theoretical – production capacity of wind projects has to be adjusted downward,  70 percent downward according to NREL.

So the Northeast really contributes some 15.6 GW and Vermont less than nine tenths of one GW. And remember: that’s assuming maximum production on all sites, which is unlikely ever to happen.

Electricity consumption nationwide is equivalent to about 450 GW annually.

So Northeast wind would add up to roughly 3.7 percent of the nation’s energy use. Could producing that wind power reduce fossil fuel emissions by 3.7 percent?

No. First of all, not all power is produced by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear, biomass, and other non-polluting (or at least non-greenhouse gas-emitting) sources provide roughly a third of all electrical power. In the Northeast, where Vermont wind power would be used, that power would be more likely to replace (if it replaced anything) electricity made from natural gas – a carbon emission, but with roughly half the carbon of coal, further diminishing whatever savings in GHG might ensue. In addition, most greenhouse gases are not produced by electricity generation. Estimates range from 34 percent (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to 41 percent (the Energy Department). Either way, the potential GHG savings from infusing a few GWs of eastern wind power into the system appear to be tiny.

Or maybe non-existent. Here we are in the realm of conjecture because no data exist. But it is undoubtedly possible – and perhaps likely – that the result of adding a few more GWs into the system would be that…a few more GWs would be used. Instead of replacing power now generated by fossil fuels, they would supplement them. People – or at least Americans – seem to have an effectively infinite capacity for using electricity, especially these days when so many appliances keep eating the stuff up even when they are turned off. Yes, energy efficiency efforts have been somewhat successful. That doesn’t mean people won’t use more power if the system creates more power.

This might not be the case if the whole country produced a great deal of wind power, say a couple of hundred GWs instead of Vermont’s paltry less-than-one. At some point, the overload could lead to real replacement of fossil fuels by renewables.

Now we come to an important part of the political debate in Vermont. Because (though some of the pro-wind zealots seem to deny this) almost nobody is opposed to developing more wind power where: (a) there is lots of it; and (b) its ecological impact would be acceptable. The “almost” is needed in that previous sentence because there are a few folks –die-hard supporters of nuclear power and/or global warming deniers – who dismiss wind power outright.

But that does not describe most opponents of putting wind towers on Vermont’s ridges. It certainly does not describe Ben Luce, the Lyndon State College science professor who called attention to the NREL analysis when he spoke at the press conference Wednesday held by Vermont wind power opponents.

Describing himself as “a long-time advocate of utility-scale wind development,” Luce said wind power can “make a meaningful contribution to US clean energy generation,” but that Vermont ridges “are not actually major league renewable energy resources,” and that the wind projects will cause “enormous and adverse impacts to Vermont’s fragile wilderness.”

(As noted in an earlier post on this subject, these areas, remote and wild though they may be, are not really “wilderness.”)

Wind power production, Luce said, should take place where there is a lot of wind, and where the ecological impact would be less severe and perhaps more acceptable.

It’s not much of a mystery to see where that would be. Take a look at that map above. In the Great Plains, from Minnesota to Texas, the wind speeds are often more than eight or even nine meters per second. Most of the land is flat. Flat does not mean unimportant. It often does mean that development is less threatening to the land’s ecological integrity.

(Here Luce and his allies can be accused of NIMBYism, supporting change elsewhere but “not in my back yard.” But that’s a separate discussion. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with NIMBYism; it’s the American Way).

But wait a minute. Is there no evidence in official or quasi-official sources pointing the other way, suggesting that Vermont wind power could have a real impact on greenhouse gas emissions?

In official sources, no.

The Energy Department’s Energy Information Agency does predict that “generation from wind power increases from 1.3 percent…to 4.1 percent in 2035.” More than a tripling, but still a tiny percentage of the total. And that’s nationwide. Almost all of that increase is likely to come from…believe it or not, where almost all the “suitable wind resources for wind development” are located – out on the great Plains. Vermont simply does not have enough wind resources to make a difference.

ISO New England, the area’s Regional Transmission Organization, has projected that in New England alone, 12,000 megawatts of wind power could be generated by 2030, 7,500 MW inland, another 4,500 off-shore. That’s comparable to the NREL assessment, and while ISO New England said that development would represent “a major shift” in the region’s resources, it still isn’t much power, hardly enough to reduce GHG emissions.

But Seth Kaplan, the Boston-based wind power expert for the Conservation Law Foundation, said the ISO New England projections reveal the possibility of even more wind power in the Northeast, perhaps enough to allow substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Come back Monday for an examination of whether he and ISO have a good case, and also of whether, if they do, most Vermonters would be happy about it.

That post and this one concern the same subject, and while they can be read in either order, the better option would be to scroll down and read Monday’s first.

The Sheffield wind project

So you want to build a whole bunch of wind towers on a Vermont mountaintop to generate electricity?

Not so fast. First you have to comply with a whole bunch of state and federal laws designed to make sure that – among other things – the  roads you build up to and along those ridges, plus the huge platforms on which your towers will sit, don’t pollute the water. All that excavation can cause erosion. Cutting trees along stream banks means less shade, hence warmer water. The law says the water can’t be made more than one degree warmer or otherwise “degraded.”

So what to do?

One obvious technique – the one preferred by most environmentalists – is first to test the streams. Take their temperature. Check for pollutants. Measure acidity and turbidity (suspended sediments in the water). That provides a baseline, a foundation for judging , as the project proceeds, whether the excavation and construction is doing unacceptable damage to the mountain waterways.

“How else to determine degradation?” asked Stephanie Kaplan, the Calais lawyer representing opponents of the wind project now under construction in Sheffield. “The logical thing is to test before and then during and after” to measure the impact, she said.

That’s not the way it’s being done. Instead, First Wind, the developer of the Sheffield project, has committed to perform the work using “Best Management Practices (BMPs). Under this theory, if BMPs are followed, then, ipso facto, the streams are not being polluted.

Huh?

Well, it may sound absurd, but it seems to be legal. The Agency of Natural Resources endorsed the policy. So did Environmental Court Judge Meredith Wright. Though her decision is under appeal, the bulldozers, dynamiters, and chain saws are working on the Sheffield project.

Kaplan is convinced she has a chance to get the State Supreme Court to overturn the Environmental Court decision. She acknowledges that in some cases the statute (10 V.S.A. § 1264) allows for using BMPs. But it also says a project “can not raise the temperature more than one degree Fahrenheit, can not degrade the water, can not change the ph. Water quality  standards have standards. If they are to mean anything there has to be way to determine whether these things are occurring.”

Kaplan and her allies in the outnumbered and (so far) outgunned anti-wind forces in Vermont are both mystified and infuriated by the judge’s decision, by the ANR’s efforts on behalf of wind power, and perhaps most of all by the acquiescence of the state’s mainstream environmental organizations. In the past, those organizations often opposed using BMPs as a substitute for actual stream monitoring. Their silence in this case only reinforced the suspicions of the anti-wind forces that the fix was in against them, that Vermont’s establishment – government officials, politicians, the media, and even most environmentalists were stubbornly locked into their support for more wind power, regardless of the consequences.

“They all love wind, no matter what,” Kaplan said.

(Though apparently not all with the same ardor. The Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) and League of Conservation Voters are the most gung ho for wind development. The Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) is more ambivalent.  Its water resources expert, Jon Groveman, also disagrees with Judge Wright’s decision on the BMPs. The Conservation Law Foundation is generally pro-wind but has not taken a position on most of the specific proposed projects in the state)

“I’m a little baffled, myself,” said Annette Smith, the head of Vermonters for a Clean Environment (VCE),  the only green group opposing wind power in Vermont (the other, Energize Vermont, is really a VCE spinoff). Smith said she had spent a lot of time discussing the wind issue with officials of the other environmental groups, and suspects that one reason they are all so pro-wind is that a few of them have some financial connections with wind power companies.

(The subject of Monday’s post [scroll down] which erroneously said that the Conservation Law Foundation did not disclose the names of its contributors. It does list the over-$500 donors on its web site, as can be seen here.

Wind power has obviously created a schism in the green community, one which reached its apex (so far) last week when the mainstreamers rejected an advertisement Kaplan wanted to buy in the program for an environmental conference Saturday on behalf of “citizens working to protect their communities, mountains, wildlife and streams from the environmental destruction caused by industrial wind turbines.”

The language and tone did not “match our community position,” said one environmentalist, in urging that the ad not be published.

Touchy, touchy. But there is ample ill will and possible misunderstanding on both sides of this green civil war. These wind projects are not the first ones in which officials have used Best Management Practices to determine compliance. In fact, similar standards are used in enforcing environmental (and other) regulations all around the country.

Furthermore, these ridges are not wilderness. They have been logged, often more than once. Vermont has never made a decision to protect its privately owned ridge lines from development, however remote and beautiful they may be. Which is another way of saying that the state has made a decision not to protect them, but to allow development on them.

“We haven’t said no to high elevation development in Vermont,” said Chris Kilian of CLF. “In fact, we said yes to ski areas. We have restaurants on the top of our mountains. Vermont made a major strategic decision to open up summits to development.”

Kilian said he is not entirely happy about all this situation, and thinks perhaps high elevation projects should “be analyzed in a different way.”

Another thing Vermont has not done, said Elizabeth Courtney of the VNRC, is implement a statewide energy plan. With one, officials might be able to determine how much additional power generation the state needed and how it should be supplied. Without one, she said, “the developer gets to choose where the project goes, not the people.”

Assuming, of course, that the developer can get approval from the Public Service Board and the Agency of Natural Resources. But that doesn’t seem to be difficult. Even though it isn’t clear that more generating capacity is needed, even if the wind projects rip up the mountains, official Vermont, backed by most of the state’s environmental lobbyists, appears determined to approve wind power.

Because even though they might be a bit hyper-sensitive, Stephanie Kaplan, Annette Smith and their small band of allies are right: the fix is in for wind power in Vermont. Not because anyone (except the wind developers and some landowners) are making money or have been corrupted by donations. But because being pro-wind has simply become the established wisdom. It’s rather like being pro-choice on abortion in some circles. Everybody one knows, all the “right people” are pro-wind.

And it’s easy to see why. The anti-wind forces have been allied with the coal and oil industries or with nuclear power, specifically the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant which Vermont environmentalists have been battling for years.

Or – worse – the anti-wind camp is part of the climate change denial school, the minority (but a very well-financed minority) which defies the scientific consensus that the world is warming because people are burning too much oil and coal. At least after the turbines have been built and installed, wind power produces almost no greenhouse gasses.

Anyone wanting to understand why Vermont environmentalists are so devoted to wind power need only read from the opening paragraph of the recent joint statement they released, where they expressed their “deep concern that society has not moved fast or aggressively enough to address the most urgent environmental crisis in human history: climate change.”

On that, they are as correct as they are sincere. And they are sincere in their conviction that exploiting Vermont’s wind power potential can ease this crisis, can produce enough power to allow the state, the region, the country to burn less coal and oil, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. production and easing the impact of global warming.

If they’re right about that, they could have a good case that it’s worth blowing up a few mountains.

But suppose they’re wrong about that. Come back Friday.

Vermont’s environmental community, notably the Vermont Natural Resources Council and VPIRG (Vermont Public Interest Research Group), supported a recently-passed bill providing certain advantages to producers of “sustainable” or “renewable” energy produced by sun, wind, water or biomass (largely a polite way of saying manure).

The green groups endorsed the legislation though they didn’t like the provision including power produced by the massive Hydro-Quebec dams in Canada in the same approved classification as power produced from local renewable energy sources.

Obviously, power from Hydro-Quebec is sustainable and renewable. Those rivers up there will keep flowing. And the power they produce does not create an ounce of greenhouse gas, the avoidance of which is the crucial argument for renewable energy in the first place.

But, explained VPIRG Executive Director Paul Burns, to his organization and other environmental groups. “mega-hydro projects were not considered green energy” in the same way as the power produced by wind, sun, or smaller hydro plants. Burns agreed that the Hydro-Quebec power is “renewable in a sense,” But he insisted that the environmental damage caused by building the massive power-generating dams has to be included in the equation.

“You quickly get into a… public policy definition,” he said. “In defining what is a renewable energy project and then defining which projects receive financial benefits. We think there’s a greater rationale to providing those benefits to smaller projects.”

That seems a perfectly consistent and reasonable policy position. If anything, Burns understated his case; those dams caused social as well as environmental damage, disrupting the traditional culture of some 5,000 native Cree. In that context, it makes sense to provide public benefits (in the form of guaranteed higher prices) to smaller wind, solar, and other renewable projects.

As it happens, the more public support those small projects get, the better it is (at least potentially) for, among others: Matthew Rubin, David Blittersdorf, Leigh Seddon, Mark Sinclair, and perhaps Greg Strong.

These people are in or associated with the renewable energy business. The first four are or recently were on VPIRg’s Board of Trustees. Strong, the president of Spring Hill Solutions, LLC, “a clean energy and carbon reduction consulting firm,” is on the Vermont Natural Resource Council’s board.

Neither VPIRG nor the Conservation Law Foundation, another important Vermont environmental group, make public the names of their contributors. VNRC does, in its annual report, reveal the names of all contributors of more than $100. One of them was Greg Strong and his wife, but they were not in the list of the biggest contributors.. Eight of VNRC’s contributors asked to remain anonymous, mostly, according to Executive Director Elizabeth Courtney, because “they don’t want to be solicited.” The one business contributor which asked to remain anonymous was not, she said, a renewable energy firm.

“It is absolutely true that people who have been or are in the renewable energy business have served on VPIRG’s board,” Burns said, agreeing that it was “not an unfair question to ask” whether their financial interests influence VPIRG’s policy positions.

Not surprisingly, he said it did not.

“We have conflict of interest policies,” he said. “Whenever an issue comes up for consideration by the board in which a board member has a financial interest. that board member would recuse him or her self from that vote.”

Merely suggesting that  the leaders of Vermont environmental organizations are in it for the money seems preposterous. Many of them are attorneys who could easily double their incomes by moving to a law firm. One of them, VNRC’s Jon Groveman, said he stays where he is because “it feeds the soul.”  It is easy to make too much of these connections.

As did John McClaughry on the Vermont Tiger web site last month when he cited Dartmouth Professor Robert Hargraves saying that the Conservation Law Foundation, like most Vermont green groups a supporter of wind power and an opponent of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant “has a for-profit consulting subsidiary called Conservation Law Ventures….(which) is providing strategic advice to a company…that is working to build a 720 Megawatt natural gas fired electric plant in New England.”

Except that the subsidiary is really called CLF Ventures, it’s a non-profit, and its association with that gas company ended eight years ago. At any rate, Hargraves said that he was not implying that CLF officials were influenced by the income their subsidiary might have earned from a potential competitor to Vermont Yankee, Instead, he said, he wanted to suggest that “the fossil fuel industry is supporting opposition to nuclear power.”

A plausible if unproven suspicion. But it isn’t likely that coal, oil, and gas companies are secretly supporting wind development. Wind developers are supporting wind development, but they have allies. Some of those allies are environmentalists, who support wind power because it can reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gasses emitted by fossil fuels.

But maybe also for other reasons – political psychological, and – yes – financial.

CLF Ventures, for instance, has a web site on which it lists its clients. But not all former clients, one of which was First Wind, the company developing a wind power facility in Sheffield in the Northeast Kingdom.

Jo Anne Shatkin, the CEO of CLF Ventures, who in an earlier conversation did not reveal the First Wind connection, said when asked, “we were working for First Wind,” in facilitating community meetings in Brimfield, Massachusetts, abut a proposed wind energy development there. “We told the community. We served as a neutral facilitator. Our goal was to facilitate a process where people could understand the issue. We facilitated the meetings that First Wind sponsored.”

And paid for. Shatkin would not say how much.

First Wind also contributed more than $10,000 to the Nature Conservancy chapter in Maine, where the company is putting up wind power facilities.

Chris Kilian, the head of CLF’s Vermont operations, said he had not known that First Wind had been a CLF Ventures client. Kilian said CLF had “very vigorous internal controls” to make sure its subsidiary’s contracts don’t “influence our policy positions.” But he acknowledged that the connection could raise questions.

So while  there is no evidence that Vermont environmentalists are being “bought” by contracts or contributions, there are institutional connections between wind power developers and what might be called the environmentalist establishment. Some of those institutional connections are financial. However honorable the green group officials may be, like the leaders of  all other non-profits, they have to keep raising money if they are to perform their mission. It’s close to impossible to conclude that consciously or not so consciously, their awareness of where this money comes from has no influence on them.

This doesn’t mean their support of wind power has been bought. There are legitimate reasons to support wind power. But it does complicate the situation.

This fact does not solve – but it may help to begin to solve – a political-environmental puzzle in Vermont: why has wind power faced almost no opposition? Or, more precisely, why has it faced nothing but very localized and politically inept opposition?

After all, the wind projects have to go where the wind blows, which in Vermont means remote, high-elevation ridges on land where the ecological balance is delicate. The towers and the roads needed to build and maintain them pose obvious threats to unspoiled, swift-flowing mountain streams and to habitat for bears and maybe even (if they are anywhere) catamounts. If ever there were a recipe for opposition from environmentalists, this would seem to be it.

Yet just last week all the “mainstream” green groups in the state reiterated their support for wind power. That leaves only the not-so-mainstream Vermonters for a Clean Environment to oppose the wind projects in Sheffield, nearby Lowell, and other ridges.

Asked why she thought her group was alone in opposing wind development, Annette Smith of VCE said, “follow the money.”

Come back Wednesday when this site will follow the money – but also more than the money – to try to solve that political-environmental puzzle.

Meanwhile:

Correction of self: For the second time in a couple of months (clearly there is a synapse out of kilter here) the News Guy said “Hartland” last Friday when he meant “Hartford.” Accchhhhhh!

Correction of other: In Sunday’s Burlington Free Press appeared the headline, “Environmentals look ahead with optimism.”  There is no such thing as an “environmental,” much less two or more of them. The word is an adjective. It can not look ahead with anything. Yes, making the headline fit can be a challenge, but that’s no excuse.

Considering that they are…well, you know…Democrats, Vermont’s leading Democrats are acting awfully grown-up.

It isn’t just that they’re not being petulant, a surprise in itself, petulance being what the computer nerds would call a Democrat’s default position.

Instead all five candidates for governor have been exuding graciousness and good humor in this post-primary period, none of them more than Peter Shumlin,  the certified leader (by 197 votes) if not yet the final winner of the primary.

But he would be the final winner had runner-up Doug Racine not demanded a recount.  It would be no surprise, then, were Shumlin a might miffed at Racine.

If he is, he’s not showing it; to the contrary, he said the recount was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, Racine keeps acknowledging that Shumlin is likely to end up as the nominee after the recount, and the other three have joined the top two on the campaign trail.

Under the circumstances, this is just what the Democrats should do if Shumlin (or Racine) is to have a chance to beat Republican Brian Dubie. But Democrats do not always do what they should do.

Republicans usually do, and Dubie is. He’s being aggressive and energetic, yesterday announcing a 26.2-hour campaign marathon scheduled to start  early Tuesday and go nonstop into the following morn.

“Vermonters work hard for their money, and they deserve a Governor who will work hard for them,” said Dubie, firmly if not originally, in a campaign press release.

For two reasons, this is just what Dubie ought to be doing. First, he’s taking advantage of the Democrats delay. Second, he’s trying to do what Gov. Jim Douglas did in his last two elections – create the appearance of inevitability, make it the conventional wisdom that “Dubie can’t lose.”

Harder to do against either Shumlin or Racine than against Douglas opponents Gaye Symington and Scudder Parker, two of the more inept statewide candidates (and not just in this state) of recent years. But that doesn’t mean Dubie shouldn’t try. For him, the effort is like chicken soup; even if it doesn’t help, it couldn’t hurt.

Perhaps more amazing than Democrats acting like grown-ups, so are the Progressive Party leaders. Party Chair Martha Abbott abandoned her own candidacy for governor to support…well, to oppose Dubie, though she was apparently not quite grown up enough to endorse anyone, or even, in her statement on the party’s web site (and in the Burlington Free Press) to mention the word “Democrat.”

Still, it was a more politically productive maneuver than an actual Abbott campaign for governor would have been. Nor is Abbott the only Prog venturing into adulthood these days. Anthony Pollina, who ran for governor as a Progressive in 2000 and as a sort-of Progressive (technically an independent) two years ago, ran in the Democratic primary for a state senate seat in Washington County. He won.

Are these signs of a future rapprochement or even merger between the Dems and the Progs?

Not yet. It would be interesting to see, however, if a Governor Shumlin or Governor Racine would appoint Abbott or another Prog to a senior administration position. If that happens, rapprochement/merger discussions might follow.

And now for something that is not as completely different as it first seems. This little outdoor vignette will circle back onto policy and politics.

As has been noted before on this site, the News Guy likes to go fishing, and did so the other day on the Black River (the one in the Northeast Kingdom, not the one that runs through Springfield).

The Black is a beautiful River. There’s plenty of access. Most of it is easy to wade. It is, in short, almost the perfect river for state and local tourism officials to market to anglers in nearby states, and as far away as New York City and New Jersey. Come to the placid, pastoral, easy-going Northeast Kingdom, bring your money, and enjoy a great trout stream.

Just one little problem: the Black is not a great trout stream. Not any more. It was “once considered one of Vermont’s great brown trout streams,” according to Vermont Trout Streams, a guide edited by Lawton Weber and published by Northern Cartographic (2002). “Sadly,” the  guide continues,  “that can no longer be considered the case,” thanks largely to a ”combination of intensive logging and farming practices over the last 30 years.”

Another way to put it is that the fishery degraded because of not enough government regulation.

The Black, alas, is not alone. Most Vermont rivers contain fewer wild trout and other species than they did a few decades ago, and in most cases the main reason is that logging and farming polluted the water, silted over the spawning beds, or denuded the streambanks of the shade that kept rivers cool enough for trout.

There is an economic as well as an ecological price to be paid here. Mediocre trout streams draw far fewer visitors than good ones. That means fewer customers for hotels, restaurants, shops and gas stations. Some of those visitors might have decided to move into the state, bringing money with them, possibly hiring workers.

But in some cases, only if they could live near a great trout stream.

To be sure, maybe it was all worth it. Perhaps the lax regulation allowed farmers and loggers to produce more wealth than the state has given up by not being able to attract as many tourists toting rod and reel. That’s probably impossible to figure out. What is known is that logging and farming are an increasingly small percentage of the state’s economy while tourism and outdoor recreation are growing.

Either way, the point here is that regulation has its economic benefits as well as its costs, and de-regulating can entail an economic loss. For instance, if all those wind towers are erected near the Long Trail on Lowell Mountain, will some hikers from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut decide they’d rather backpack in Maine or the Adirondacks? Wherever they go, some of those folks spend lots of money.

Again, it’s hard to know. But maybe it should be thought about, especially as the candidates propose easing or at least streamlining the regulatory process. Dubie has taken the lead here, calling for less regulation. All three candidates say they’d like to speed up the permitting process for developers, and all say their proposed changes can be put into effect without hurting the environment.

Maybe they can, but it could well depend on just what they want to deregulate. And how they propose to deregulate it.

(Oh, like most Vermont rivers, the Black is not a terrible trout stream. The tally that day for four hours of fishing was one decent-sized rainbow, one smallish but feisty brookie, a few missed strikes. Fine when the river is a 20 minute drive from home, but not good enough to attract folks from away).

The News Guy will not take a Labor Day holiday, but will – appropriately — discuss some of the candidate tax claims and counter-claims, especially as they relate to who might get much and who might get little.

Can they do that?

Or, to be strictly grammatical,  the doer in this case being a single entity, if composed of several individuals, can it do that?

The “it” is the Executive Branch of the government of the state of Vermont, commonly known as the Douglas Administration. And the thing that it did was fire a state worker after the Legislature specifically told it not to fire that state worker, an instruction that Gov. Jim Douglas seemed to accept.

As with the grammar, the above description is imprecise. The Administration did not officially “fire” Jens Hawkins-Hilke, the scientist who provided expert advice to local planners involved in the Community Wildlife Program.

It just eliminated his position.

It did so even though the budget bill passed in late May stipulates with no apparent ambiguity that “(i)t is the intent of the general assembly that the fiscal year 2011 budget… funds two (2) limited service Fish and Wildlife Scientist II positions… The Scientist II positions shall continue to implement the landowner Incentive Program and Community Wildlife Program. “

A separate “Statement of Legislative Intent” filed by Appropriations Committee chairs Martha Heath (House) and Susan Bartlett (Senate) asserts that “the policy goal” of the provision is “to have continuity…for the wildlife related local municipal and regional planning…assistance these positions provide including wildlife crossing of roads in developed areas to improve planning for sustaining critical habitat for wildlife preservation.”

Douglas signed the bill on June 3. The next day, Jonathan Wood, the Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources eliminated one (1) of those “two (2) Fish and Wildlife Science II positions, Hawkins-Hilke’s, the one that “implement(s) the…Community Wildlife Program.”

Could he do that?

Obviously he could because he did, though Hawkins-Hilke and the state employees union have filed a grievance. Until the grievance procedure runs its course, then, it’s premature to conclude that the termination (reduction in force, or RIF, in government jargon) was completely on the up and up.

But it isn’t too early to conclude whether the Executive Branch has the power to terminate a position even after it agrees (as at least implied by the Governor’s signature on the bill) not to terminate that position.

Apparently it does.

“The Legislature can put in language that says ‘you shall’ or ‘you shall not,’” said David Coriell, Douglas’s spokesman. “But when they say what the intent of the Legislature is, that’s a little fuzzier. Intent is not a mandate.”

Coriell, of course, works for the Executive Branch, and could be expected to interpret law and constitution in its favor. But Steve Klein, the head of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Office, a lawyer as well as a numbers whiz, agreed that in general “I don’t think legislative intent has the force of law,” and Paul Gilles, the Montpelier lawyer who is recognized as one of the state’s leading constitutional lawyers, said statutes are often “not implemented the way (legislators say) they’re supposed to be,” but courts are reluctant to intervene in jurisdictional disputes between the other two branches.

At any rate, the Legislature does not plan to take this case to court.

“We’re just urging the governor to follow the full intent of the law,” said Tom Cheney of Speaker Shap Smith’s office.

When one side in a legal dispute decides not to go to court, it’s usually because it doubts it can win.

So Hawkins-Hilke’s termination, while perhaps less than noble, arguably even dishonorable, appears to be within the Administration’s constitutional discretion.

Whether it violates the state’s contract with the Vermont State Employees Association is yet to be determined, and Hawkins-Hilke, not surprisingly, asserts that it does, and is therefore illegal.

“According to the union contract, (the RIF) has to be on economic grounds and has to be in compliance with the law,” he said. “The budget bill is law. It was signed June 3, and on June 4 administration continued with the RIF. So it is not in compliance with statute. Nor is it an economically driven cut.”

Yes, it is, insists ANR Secretary Wood, even though it saved only $16,000, the state’s half of Hawkins-Hilke’s pay. The other half came from the federal government.

“I would love the people who are saying that to live a little bit in my shoes,” Wood said. “The agency has had to reduce almost 100 positions…in the last couple of years. Unless you’re in state government it’s a little annoying to cavalierly talk about amounts of money as though they’re insignificant. This has been the largest reduction of state government in history. Every dollar is important.”

But Hawkins-Hilke and others suspect that the Administration wants to weaken environmental planning as much as it wants to save money. After all, it increased spending on some of its preferred functions, such as economic development.

And one email released by Administration Secretary Neale F. Lunderville’s office indicated that at least one Administration official, Human Resources Commissioner Caroline Earle, was “very concerned about this move in the light of the legislative language.”

Other officials, though, were confident that Wood had the authority to terminate the position.

Hawkins-Hilke pointed out that he is not the only environmental planner whose job has been eliminated.

“The only planner in Forest, Parks, and Recreation was RIFFED last year,” he said. The head planner for the Agency of Natural Resources was RIFFED  last year. The Basin Planning Program (part of the Water Quality Division) has taken a substantial hit.”

Dana Farley, president of the Vermont Planners Association, had a similar assessment.

“The planning community’s a little bit perplexed by it all,” she said. “Resources for planning have been cut for many years. We aren’t getting the kind of technical and funding support we used to. The loss of this position really tipped over the cart.”

Wood insisted that ANR would continue to help localities plan for wildlife conservation, though he acknowledged that the service “may not be quite as robust without having an individual dedicated to it.”

Evidence as to whether the position was terminated solely to save money might be found in the emails the VSEA is seeking from the Department under a Freedom of Information Act filing. According to Hawkins-Hilke, Lunderville’s office has complied with the request, and the Agency of Commerce and Community Development replied that it has “no communications whatsoever” on the matter, an assertion Hawkins-Hilke does not doubt.

But ANR is balking, arguing that though the VSEA does not want copies of the emails, only the opportunity to look at them, it must pay for the staff time required for the search.

This, too, could simply be because the hard-pressed agency needs to find all the money it can. On the other hand, just as a decision not to go to court usually indicates a weak case, a reluctance to turn over documents often means that the reluctant party does not want the documents in question to see the light of day.

Talk about a slam-dunk no-brainer.

Here’s a gift, worth millions in plain money, and more in measures money can’t match.

It’s for everyone. First for residents of the Northeast Kingdom, but also for all Vermonters, every American, even anyone in the world.

Not to mention the world itself.

Who could turn it down?

Maybe we could.

“We,” here, is technically the United States of America, or to be precise the Fish and Wildlife Service of its Interior Department, which now has 62 days to accept the gift of  more than 400 acres of land, including 1.4 miles of shoreline along Lake Memphremagog and 228 acres of wetlands.

Or it will turn into a pumpkin.

No, worse. Or it will be sold to whoever will pay the most for it, likely to be someone who will build immense and nearly identical McMansions.

Such are the terms of the will of Michael Dunn, who died on September 1, 2007, and who bequeathed his more than 800 acres on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border to governments, hoping to preserve the land’s “open state” and recreational potential.

But only if those governments agreed to accept the donations within three years of Dunn’s death. Otherwise, the land is to be sold to provide the maximum benefit to another passion of Dunn’s life – the Modern Museum of Art in New York. That doesn’t give Fish and Wildlife much time.

(The federal government of Canada actually rejected the offer, but Quebec Province accepted, so the Canadian portion is saved. For whatever reason, Dunn did not offer a similar option to the state on this side of the border).

It isn’t that Fish and Wildlife is against accepting the gift. At an afternoon tour of the site yesterday afternoon, and later at a public hearing in Newport, Agency officials left little doubt that they wanted to preserve the land and that “we are aware of the deadline,” in the words of Janet Kennedy, the Massachusetts-based regional supervisor of the Service’s Wildlife Refuge System.

So what’s the problem?

Actually, there are two problems, and though right now it looks as though the deadline will be met, both problems illustrate how difficult it often is to get anything done these days in America, and perhaps especially in Vermont.

The first problem is that there is actually some opposition to accepting Dunn’s bequest. Not from the town of Derby, which considers saving the land “a real asset,” Selectboard member Karen Jenne told the hearing. Not from the State Legislature, which overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging the feds to take the deal. And not from the owners of neighboring lakeside cottages, several of whom came to the hearing to urge acceptance.

But Sherb Lang is against it, and so is Hunters, Anglers, Trappers of Vermont (HAT), of which Lang is the president. Lang raised no specific objections to federal ownership of the Dunn land. In fact, he called it “a wonderful piece of property.” But he and his associates are angry at the State Fish and Wildlife Department over other issues, and they remain furious about the 12-year-old sale of what were once called the Champion Lands to the state and federal governments.

This is, in short, a policy position founded on resentment, not an unusual phenomenon in rural Vermont.

The other, more influential, dissenter at the hearing was Duncan Kilmartin, the Republican State Representative from Newport. Kilmartin contended that the plan under consideration by state and federal officials didn’t really honor Dunn’s will, which specified that the land should remain available for “hikes and campers.”

Instead, Kilmartin said, the draft Environmental Assessment (the official subject of the public hearing) gives priority to conserving resources and wildlife habitat rather than human uses such as hiking and camping.

It’s unlikely that Kimartin has a better grasp of what Dunn wanted than does Michael Hickcox, the long-time family friend of Dunn’s who flew to Europe to bring Dunn’s remains home and who flew to Vermont from his San Francisco home for last evening’s hearing.

The proposed plan for the land is “in terms of spirit, exactly what (Dunn) would want,” Hickox said.

Besides, the draft EA does specify that under federal ownership the land will be open to hunting, fishing, and camping. But the proposed new owner is the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose basic mission concerns…fish and wildlife and their habitats. The Service can’t very well take ownership of land primarily for another purpose. Still, people fish, hunt, and camp on its lands all over the country.

The other problem has to do with bureaucratic sclerosis, some of it created by environmental law, which, in this case at least, might end up making it harder to protect the environment.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 creates a complex and elaborate system of processes that have to be followed before a federal agency can acquire property, even for free.

As Janet Kennedy explained it last night, the first step was a “preliminary project proposal,” which started the NEPA process, leading to the draft EA examining whether the proposal “would significantly affect the environment” and proposing alternatives (in this case just two: take it or leave it).

What is happening now is the legally required comment period, after which a final EA will be issued and the regional supervisor will or will not issue a Fonsi, which is not a character in an old sitcom but a Finding of No Significant Impact, after which the Acting Fish and Wildlife Director in Washington may grant “permission to expand the boundary” of the existing Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, which will include the Dunn land, non-contiguous though it may be.

Got all that?

There is also the possibility that the whole process didn’t start soon enough. The trustees of the Dunn estate seemed to have had trouble navigating the political shoals in Washington until they turned to the Vermont Land Trust for help.

“You would think that giving away this land would take a ten-minute meeting and a handshake,” said Mark Frederick of the Community Financial Services Group, which is handling the Dunn trust. “But some said it wasn’t their jurisdiction, others said the property was too small for them, or they didn’t have the funding.”

When the VLT came into the picture, Frederick said, so did Vermont’s Congressional delegation, and then the process began to move.

In time? Jonathan Wood, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Secretary who conducted last night’s hearing with a booming voice and a soft touch, said he thought so. The state’s Fish and Game Department (part of Wood’s agency) will probably end up managing the new addition to the federal system, but it won’t cost much. The basic management plan is to leave it alone, and anyway the feds will pay for most of what has to be done.

See? A no-brainer slam-dunk.

Unless it isn’t.

USA Today came to Vermont last week to write about the Vermont Yankee squabble, and in Friday’s paper the reporter quoted Yankee spokesman Larry Smith describing the nuclear power plant’s opponents as “hippies from the ’60s who want to be against something, and it’s nuclear power.”

Not a very smart thing to say, at least not in the judgment of one Larry Smith, who said Tuesday, “not the smartest thing I ever said.”

Not what he meant, either, said Smith, who didn’t deny saying it. But he was referring, he said, only to some of those who oppose relicensing the plant for another 20 year run, “many of the same people who attended those (anti-nuclear) hearings” 40 years ago.

“The people who moved up here in the 60s, sort of counter-culture folks,” he said. “But it was not a general characterization. I would never characterize all our opponents that way.”

Good enough. But here’s the interesting thing. If he had meant it as a serious description of those against the relicensing (and we take him at his word that he did not), he would have had a point.

Not literally, of course. If the latest polls are accurate, most Vermonters don’t want the plant licensed to run past March of 2012, and surely most Vermonters do not fit the definition of “hippie”: “a person who opposes and rejects many of the conventional standards and customs of society” (American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition).

But broadening the definition a little (well, OK; a lot), the description fits. At least the leaders of the anti-Yankee forces tend to be political liberals, environmentalists who are suspicious of all large corporations, who might go out of their way to eat locally grown, organic food, who listen to public radio.

To a corporate executive at a nuclear power plant, these people would be not only wrong on the issue, but also…not my kind of people. Conversely, on the other side of the debate, those executives would be not only wrong on the issue, but…not our kind of people.

At some point this political tribalism becomes as significant, if not more so, than the differences over the issues, real though they are. On both sides, beating those other guys (not our kind of people) becomes the real goal.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Vermont. Take the dispute over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The oil industry does not support drilling as fervently as do conservative commentators and operatives (the industry isn’t sure there’s that much oil there). The conservative commentariate has no economic vested interest. They just want to “stick it to the hippies,” or, more accurately, defeat environmentalists, who are not their kind of people (and who in turn delight in the conservative discomfort about continuing to lose this battle).

Something similar is going on in Vermont with regard to “permit reform,” which apparently isn’t going to happen again this year. But it’s a perennial. It will be back, promoted by the business community (especially the building contractors) and supported by most Republicans.

Their argument is that the hoops through which developers must jump before they are allowed to begin construction projects suppress economic growth in the state. Were it easier, quicker, and cheaper to get permits, they say, there would be more construction projects, hence more jobs and faster economic growth.

The argument is not provably false. But it is almost surely not true, raising the possibility that another motive is at work here, that what the “permit reform” advocates really want to do is “stick it to the hippies.”

Or to put it more responsibly, some Vermonters are still so bitter about losing the fight over the passage of Act 250, 40 years ago, and some other environmental laws since, that they want revenge. If not to repeal the law (a political impossibility) at least to weaken it.

This is not a sentiment confined to the right side of the ideological spectrum. Some feminists still (metaphorically speaking) froth at the mouth when reminded of the failure of the Equal Right Amendment 30 years ago.

But what is the foundation for concluding that Act 250 and the other environmental rules have not suppressed Vermont’s economy?

A good question with a simple answer: Vermont’s economy has not been suppressed.

By almost every measurement, the state’s economy has grown as fast as or faster than the economies of its neighboring states.  In the last 40 years, Vermont’s per capita income, once far behind the national median, has almost caught up with it.  The state now ranks 23^rd in personal income per capita.

The most recent statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that Vermont’s economy grew by 1.7 percent in 2008, faster than the country as a whole, faster than the New England region, faster than the rest of the Northeast, faster than the South or the Great Lakes, and just as fast as the Southwest.

And they got oil.

Furthermore, there are no data – none – indicating that Vermont’s permitting process prevents or even much delays development projects not likely to harm the environment.

According to a recent report by the Natural Resources Board, last year 82 percent of 380 Act 250 applications were approved without a hearing. Decisions on almost two thirds of all applications were issued within 60 days, and 81 percent were issued within 120 days.

Five, or 1.2 percent of the applications, were denied a permit.

But what about the applications that never get filed because the developer finds the process daunting or distasteful or expensive?

Well, one cannot prove a negative. But look at it this way: a smart developer seeing an opportunity to make a profit will file the application even if filing it is a pain in the neck.

Unless, of course, the developer is not sure the project will meet the guidelines. In that case, the law is working exactly as intended, stopping the environmentally damaging projects while allowing the vast majority of proposals to proceed.

This doesn’t mean that a developer has never given up on a project because of the permitting process. No doubt a few have. But it makes no difference. The site the developer was considering is still there.  Another developer will come along with another project.

None of this means that the permitting system can’t be improved. Anything can be improved, especially government bureaucracies, which often move at all deliberate dawdling. Nor is it intended to absolve  the other side of this discussion–the environmentalists–of their own tribal hostilities.

But next time someone says Vermont will go broke unless it does something about its environmental permitting system, remember that some folks have been saying this for the last 40 years, during which Vermont has gotten richer. Whoever spreads that message probably is less interested in prosperity than in sticking it to the hippies.

Hatchery work

Fishing season begins tomorrow. Thanks to the warm weather, fish-stocking season began a couple of weeks ago.

Before it ends, said Tom Wiggin, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s Fish Culture Operations Manager, the department’s trucks will have dumped 350,000 hatchery-raised brown, rainbow, and brook trout into inland lakes and rivers and 284,000 trout and adult landlocked Atlantic salmon into Lake Champlain. Another 160,000 landlocked salmon fry and 150,000 walleye fingerlings will also be put into the lake, according to the Department’s web site.

Those fish won’t last long. Well before trout fishing season ends in October, the fish will have been caught by human, bird, beast, or another fish. Theirs is intended to be a short life.

Whether it is also a happy one can not be determined.

But there is little doubt that their existence makes some people happy.  The life and the death of these planted fish pleases fishermen (and, increasingly these days, also fisherwomen) because the more fish in the water, the greater the chance of catching a fish.

Especially hatchery-raised fish, which are easier to catch.

That’s the purpose of putting them in the water: so that anglers can take them out. Hence their sobriquet: put-and-take fish.

Fish stocking began in the 19^th Century and takes place all over America, where billions of dollars have been spent raising, transporting, and dumping millions of fish into lakes and streams. It’s as American as apple strudel (it was developed in Germany) and widely popular. The stocking schedule, Wiggin said, is the most popular option on the Department’s web site.

But it might be bad science, bad wildlife management and harmful to the environment.

Such, at least, is the judgment of an increasing number of fisheries biologists.

“The data that are available seem to support the concept that stocking hatchery trout in streams with native brook trout populations is not a scientifically sound idea.  I could find no published or stated evidence to the contrary,” concluded Larry Harris of Trout Unlimited in West Virginia after reviewing the scholarly evidence in 2005.

(Full disclosure: The News Guy, who loves to fish, and even wrote a book about it, is a TU member).

Among the fisheries biologists Harris cited was Ray White, who wrote, “Hatchery fish perform poorly in nature, and hatchery programs and their fish harm wild fish.”

That assessment now represents almost a consensus among fisheries biologists. Fish are still stocked from coast to coast less for scientific than for political reasons. Anglers, especially those in rod and gun clubs, like having all those hatchery-raised (and therefore usually less skittish) fish to hook. Those anglers have political clout, and they think they deserve to get what they want.

In a sense they do, They pay for the hatcheries and the stocking. In almost every state, including Vermont, Fish and Wildlife Departments (by varying names) get almost no general revenue money. Only those who pay for hunting or fishing licenses and the excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment finance the departments, even though these days those departments perform services for the general public.

Hatcheries and stocking long ago altered the natural world, for the better in some ways. Without them, there would be no rainbow trout – native only to the Pacific Coast – in the Rocky Mountains, where anglers flock to catch them, or for that matter in Vermont. Only brook trout are native to the Northeast.

But the brookies – and the Northeast – have paid a price for bringing in the bigger rainbow and brown trout. Along with the habitat degradation that development wrought, these invasive species have decimated the native brook trout population, now found in only about half of Vermont’s streams and rivers.

Years ago, biologists figured out that planting browns in a stream would abolish the brook trout population, and introducing rainbows would diminish it. The bigger trout don’t eat the brookies as much as chase them from the best spots in the stream for finding food and avoiding predators.

What has changed in the last several years is that biologists now believe that even putting the same species in a river – stocking hatchery-raised brook trout over a wild brook trout population – is a mistake.

“Basically we’re finding out  that there’s a lot of local adaptation, with the fish in each watershed having its own unique genetic structure,” said Jack Williams Trout Unlimited’s senior scientist. “A brook trout in one river system in West Virginia may be different from a brook trout in Vermont. A lot of the fish that are stocked are not really from that local drainage system., so they’re different from local fish that have the best adaptation to the local system.”

As a result, stocking can weaken the wild fish population. Hatchery-raised fish are often bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. But they are less hardy and more likely to be diseased.

So why does Vermont continue to plant “manufactured” fish where wild fish breed?

With a few exceptions, it does not. Choosing their words carefully, Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife scientists and technicians will not come out and say that stocking is undesirable. That would anger some of their most loyal (and outspoken) constituents. But they do make clear that the state’s stocking policy is, as Tom Wiggin said, “very selective.”

“Where you have a good natural population, we don’t stock,” he said. “We stock waters that do not have good populations. These aren’t the quality waters.”

But that’s not all. Increasingly, the state is stocking these streams with “triploids,” trout hatched from eggs treated by heat or pressure so that the fish cannot reproduce. This guarantees, Wiggin said, that the planted fish won’t introduce a new genetic marker into the river.

“it won’t interfere,” he said. “These fish are put and take.”

Put bluntly, then, anglers who fish the stocked rivers are fishing rivers where the habitat has already been so degraded that it will not support a wild fish population. And the fish they catch are…well, they’re fish, technically, but they’re also manufactured products, sterile and somewhat docile. With a few exceptions, a hooked hatchery fish flops rather than fights. An angler can get a better tussle from an eight-inch native brookie than from a foot-long plant. (They taste just fine, though).

The one big exception to the Department’s policy is the Willoughby River in the Northeast Kingdom, where the wild rainbow trout population is supplemented every spring by hundreds of  hatchery-raised fish. Pressured by members of the Orleans Rod and Gun Club, the Department worked out an arrangement whereby the club raises fish from a brood stock that came “from the same exact run” as the wild Willoughby rainbows, in the words of fisheries biologist Rich Kirn.

Obviously, this, too, was a political rather than a scientific decision, with the Department using good science to make sure that the stocking did not degrade the wild fish population. In one sense, it has succeeded. Anglers flock to the river every April as the rainbows leap their way up the river toward Lake Memphramagog, spending money in local hotels and restaurants and catching (mostly) the stocked fish. The stocked fish that are not caught, rarely survive the summer.

But as some biologists see it, even this kind of stocking is a way of avoiding the underlying problem –that the fishery had declined because of habitat degradation. In their view, stocking is a poor second choice compared to habitat improvement.

“We’re better off trying to restore the habitat and trying to promote the health of those streams rather than rely on stocking,” said Jack Williams of Trout Unlimited. “It’s much better in the long run to address habitat problems or look at changing the fishing regulations, even if it’s easier to meet the demands from the fishing public by stocking.”

The Department does not really disagree. It does a lot of work protecting habitat, but it can’t roll back the farming, logging, and building that has warmed and polluted Vermont’s rivers for the past 200 years.

And as Rich Kirn said, stocking the degraded rivers “helps keep people connected with those waters, and maintains an interest in making them better.”

Another political decision, and arguably a good one.

Things are getting a little strange over in Burlington.

To which many a Vermonter would say: “So what else is new?” These are the folks who like to point out that Chittenden County is a nice place because it’s right next to Vermont.

But let’s not be divisive; it’s one state, and we’re all in it together. And considering that the latest Burlington strangeness was inspired by politics, known to bring out the strange in men and women all over the world, we non-Burlingtonites (Burlingtonians?) should refrain from acting in a mean-spirited manner.

But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore the obvious.

Start with Mayor Bob Kiss’s assertion on election night that the outcome “doesn’t play out as a referendum on this administration.”

Uh, actually, Mr. Mayor, it did. Your party lost  (pending a recount) a Council seat in its Ward 2 stronghold. Your party’s pet political ploy – instant run-off voting – got rejected. Your administration’s handling of the Burlington Telecom mess was certainly one reason Republican Kurt Wright breezed to an easy victory over incumbent Democrat Russ Ellis in Ward 4.

Sounds like the functional equivalent of a referendum on the administration.

In the interests of charity, it should be acknowledged that Kiss was acting like a very conventional politician (which, come to think of it, is what he is). Even extraordinary politicians  seem incapable of calling a setback by its rightful name. Recall that both Ronald Reagan (in 1982) and Bill Clinton (in 1994) were asked the day after the Mid-term elections whether their party’s defeats indicated public displeasure with their policies. No, both said. Yes, was the correct answer.

True, you can’t expect any politician (or non-politician) to be that candid. But wouldn’t it have been refreshing if one of them had said something like, “well, it wasn’t a ringing endorsement, was it?”

But the Mayor was not the only self-deluded politician in town last week. No sooner had the votes been counted than Councilor Ed Adrian, a Ward 1 Democrat, said Kiss should resign.

Resign? He’s the duly elected mayor. In a democracy, elected officials who are not seriously ill or been convicted of a crime should not resign. We should not let them off so easily. Furthermore, we should not let the voters off so easily. They should pay more attention to whom they elect, on the assumption that the winner will serve out his/her term. Voters should understand that they are going to be stuck with their choice until that term ends.

(OK, right across the lake there is a possible exception because Gov., David Paterson (a) has been charged with offenses that are not frivolous; and (b) was never elected governor. But those are peculiar circumstances. Even Burlington is not as strange as New York State).

In addition to political delusion, some Burlngtonians seem to suffer from hypersensitivity. When Kiss blamed the loss of instant runoff voting on the “naysayers” of the New North End, Ward 7 Councilor Paul Decelles, the Republican who represents part of that neighborhood, pronounced himself “appalled.” The Mayor’s statement, he said, was “beyond contempt”  The New North End, he reminded Kiss, was part of Burlington, and “not in Colchester.”

Touchy, touchy. If in fact the denizens of Ward 7 got their noses out of joint over Kiss’s comment, they need to grow up. Maybe they didn’t but Decelles decided to get in on the whining craze anyway.

Again, he was not alone. The people (or, probably, just the mayor and some self-appointed spokespersons) of Las Vegas executed a hissy fit last month after President Barack Obama told a New Hampshire audience, “you don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.” Outraged, a Las Vegas newspaper wondered “why the president of the United States continues to use Las Vegas as an applause line in speeches about wasted money.”

But where do the folks out there think you go to blow a bunch of cash? Akron? Topeka? Perth Amboy?

Or maybe Colchester.

If you live in the nation’s sybaritic capital (or in the North End, for that matter) at least a minimal thickness of skin is recommended.

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Last week, the News Guy was on the radio, on the WDEV-FM morning call-in show hosted by Mark Johnson, who mentioned that a new poll about public opinion on the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was about to be released.

“Who took it?” Was the first reaction from this corner. “You have to be careful about polls commissioned by interest groups.”

The poll came out later that day, justifying the caution. It was taken by a market research company called Infogroup ORC (which just this week was bought by CCMP Capital Advisor, a New York based private equity firm for some $635 million) on behalf of the Civil Society Institute.

The Institute seems to be a lively group of folks who do some valuable work. But they are unquestionably anti-nuclear, and it shows. Among the poll’s questions were whether respondents would support closure of Vermont Yankee in 2012 “assuming that a combination of increased energy efficiency, clean energy, such as hydroelectric, wind and solar, and natural gas could be used to offset the electricity from the reactor.”  Another was whether they would support closing the plant in 2012 “assuming that many new jobs could be created through investments in new clean technologies, such as hydroelectric, wind and solar.”

Would you believe that very large majorities replied that under those circumstances they would shut down Yankee? And would you agree to give away your car “assuming” it would be replaced by a chauffeur-driven limousine with a fully-stocked bar and a drop-down table constantly refilled with caviar canapés, with an all-expenses-paid, two-week trip to the Riviera thrown in as an added inducement?

The irony is, of course, that it isn’t necessary to hype anti-VY sentiment in the state these days. As demonstrated by the neutrally worded poll taken by Research 2000 last month, and by reaction to the recent State Senate vote not to relicense the plant, most Vermonters would be happier without it

But the hyperbole in this poll was so bizarre that it would felt right at home in…well, in Burlington.