Note: The demons of the cyber world did their worst Monday morning, countermanding the  order to publish that day’s post shortly after midnight. Off in the big city (Burlington) for the day, the News Guy did  not find out until mid-afternoon, could not nullify the demonic achievement until almost 4 PM.

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.

One more look back at the election before proceeding to matters of greater substance.

Start with this surprising statistic: fewer Vermonters voted last week than in the last mid-term election of 2006.

Sounds peculiar, doesn’t it?. That one was a runaway, with incumbent Republican  Gov. Jim Douglas whomping Democrat Scudder Parker  by 56-to-41 percent.  Then-Congressman Bernie Sanders won the open U.S. Senate seat by an even wider margin. Peter Welch’s victory over Martha Rainville for the House seat Sanders was vacating wasn’t quite as huge. But  53-to-44 percent isn’t exactly close, either. Well before election day, few doubted who the winners would be.

But 262,524 Vermonters went to the polls, roughly 20,000 more than the number turning out for this year’s neck-and-neck race to choose the first new governor in eight years.

This year’s final tally is neither official nor complete. According to the web site of WCAX-TV (Channel 3), which had by far the best vote-counting operation of the night, with 99.9 percent of the vote in, 241,697 votes had been cast for governor. Unlike the official count of 2006, that total does not include write-ins. But write-ins plus that last tenth of a percent are not likely to add more than a few hundred votes to the total.

Bernie Sanders is both more polarizing and more fun than most politicians, which might have boosted turnout. And until the last week or so, the Welch-Rainville race seemed kind of close. But neither of those factors, nor the two combined, seem sufficient to explain why turnout was higher for those romps than for this year’s nail-biter. The question deserves further examination.

But first a digression. It is high time that Vermont politicians and Vermont news organizations – both print and on-air – stopped bragging about the state having voter turnout rates in the 70-to-75 percent range. That may be the percentage of registered voters who came to the polls last Tuesday. But the standard measurement for voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters, meaning citizens who are at least 18 years old.

Thus in 2,000, the year of the last Census, there were 461, 248 Vermonters who were over 18. But about 10,000 were non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote (though this state does not disenfranchise inmates or ex-convicts). That left 451,982 Vermonters eligible to vote, of whom 63.1 percent did cast ballots in that close presidential election.

Last year, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, there were 671,760 people in the state, of whom 20.3 percent, or 136,213, were under 18. That left 535,547 Vermonters of voting age.

The 2000 count is from the “actual enumeration,” as the Constitution requires, while the 2009 statistics are a Census Bureau estimate The estimate, as it turns out, might be more accurate but it did not count non-citizens. Considering the immigration of the last several years, there are probably many more non-citizens in the state than there were in 2000.

But just for the purposes of discussion, assume there were twice as many. That would leave roughly 516,000 eligible voters in the state, making this year’s turnout about 47 percent. That’s still higher than most states, but not that impressive.

OK, let’s return to the question of why this year’s turnout was relatively low. Obviously, we are in the realm of conjecture here (even more than in the process of comparing not-totally-comparable statistics), but here are two theories: Early voting, which increases every year and seems to depress turnout in more places than not; or “negative” ads.

The quotation marks are there because, while acknowledging that this is the widely used term for dishonest, trivial, misleading political commercials, what is really deplorable about these commercials is that they are dishonest, trivial, and misleading. There is nothing at all wrong with a candidate being “negative” about his or her opponent as long as the negative message is true and relevant.

‘True,’ in this case, means what it means. ‘Relevant’ means that the commercial be about an actual policy position of the candidate – or in some cases, a blatant act of personal dishonor – not a distorted interpretation of some long-ago vote to refer a bill to committee, or the revelation that the candidate once went to dinner with an unlikable fellow.

This year’s campaign in Vermont had plenty of false and irrelevant ads (though no one seems to have sunk quite as far as the dinner-date theme), and plenty of analysis that the tone of the advertising hurt Republican candidate Brian Dubie, whose ads were criticized even by some Republicans.

It may have hurt him because it undercut his major political strength – his image as a nice fellow. But it also may have been one factor holding down the turnout.

The political scientists disagree here, with some pooh-poohing the assertion that many voters are so turned off by nasty campaigns that they decide to stay home. But in some campaigns, the most contentious mud-slinging has been followed by the most meager turnouts, and if the cause and effect is not provable, neither can it be ruled out.

If that happened here this year, Dubie might not have done any better had he chosen a different strategy. The people who stay home out of disgust with the tone of campaigns tend to be middle-of-the-road voters, and in most of the country, more middle-of-the-roaders vote Democratic, if they vote. If that’s true here, Dubie might have lost by a larger margin had he run a higher-toned campaign.

And in conclusion, a brief word about the national results.

A big Republican victory. A meaningful Republican victory, the significance of which should not be minimized.

Or maximized. Here is what politicians learn every time their party wins big.

No, scratch that. Here is what politicians fail to learn every time their party wins big.

The winning big does not mean the people agree with you.

At best, it means that on that day, those voters who voted (in the off-year, always less than half the eligible electorate and about two-thirds of those who will vote next time) agreed with you marginally (or perhaps minimally) more than they agreed with the other party.

More likely, all it means, especially when the out-of-power party wins big, is that the voters are dissatisfied, and that voting for you, you being “the other guys” was the only way they could express that dissatisfaction.

If you fool yourself into thinking it means any more than this, you’ll be….just like all who went before you.