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.

Right, it’s only Thursday, but for reasons too complicated (and unimportant) to deal with in any detail, today’s post will perform the tying-up-of-loose ends and other site-related matters usually handled on Friday.

STARTING WITH THIS MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: THE NEWS GUY WILL TAKE NEXT WEEK OFF.

Yup, you heard that right. The whole week.

Bad timing because the Legislature will probably finish over the weekend, leaving much to be disclosed and analyzed. But that’s the way the cookie crumbled. Some things have to be done when they have to be done. Next week is when this trip has to be done. The News Guy will not even be back in Vermont until late in the week. As the TV network anchors say, “we’ll see you again…” (this is false, of course; they won’t see you at all) on Monday, May 18.

(But the site will not be totally abandoned; comments will be accepted).

Now to update the fate of some of the legislation discussed earlier:

–As predicted, H. 176, the bill that would effectively register all young men for the draft when they got their drivers licenses was defeated;

–As predicted, HR 446, guaranteeing higher prices to producers of electric power made from renewable energy, passed the Senate. But the 16-to-10 vote was closer than expected, and perhaps not enough to override Gov. Jim Douglas’s likely veto.

If all four senators who weren’t there – Democrats Claire Ayer of Weybridge and Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park; Republicans Vince Illuzzi of Derby and Diane Snelling of Hinesburg – voted for the override it would pass. And perhaps two of the four Democrats who voted no – Richard Mazza of Colchester and Richard Sears of North Bennington – could be persuaded to switch on the basis of partisan loyalty, which in this context is a euphemism for ‘the chance to stick it to Douglas.’

But the other two Democrats – Matt Choate of St. Johnsbury and Robert Starr of North Troy – are probably firmly against the bill. They’re from the Northeast Kingdom, where one wind power project has already been approved in Sheffield and another in Lowell is in the works.

Interesting. The conventional wisdom holds that most people favor wind power projects, and most of the poll results seem to support that conclusion. But smart local politicians – and both these follows would seem to qualify – know their territories.

Worth looking into in greater detail.

If wind power is less popular in the Northeast Kingdom, perhaps part of the explanation lies with the behavior of the wind power companies. Reading over his posts of Monday and Tuesday (Sun, Wind and Noise) the News Guy feared that perhaps some readers thought he concurred with the renewable energy community’s view of itself as local, environmentally responsible, and generally admirable, as opposed to those impersonal corporations such as Entergy, which owns Vermont Yankee.

No doubt some are. But not all the solar/wind developers are Vermonters, or even Americans. And when it comes to arrogance, high-handedness, and…well, let’s just say a disinclination to be candid, Massachusetts-based First Wind, which is about to put wind towers on a mountaintop in Sheffield, is right up (down?) in Vermont Yankee’s league

Since last Thursday’s post (Vermont is Homeless) the News Guy has been excoriated in comments, by e-mail, by phone, and once (though most courteously) even in person, for suggesting that two studies about housing in Vermont over-stated the extent of the state’s housing affordability problem.

One criticism was right on the money. The post stated that “Clearly… the authors of  “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” (did not know) this little fact: At least 71 percent of the people of Vermont — more than in most other states — live in owner-occupied houses.”

Tough talk, huh? Too bad it was wrong. Right there on its very first page the report says, “Vermont can boast a robust homeownership rate, 72.8 percent in 2008.”

How could anyone miss that? Possibly (this is explanation, not excuse, there being no excuse) the result of reading on the screen instead of on paper. Whatever the reason, apologies to John Fairbanks who wrote the report for the Vermont Housing Awareness Campaign.

And the criticism (bless it) keeps coming. Yesterday’s argument was that if anything the studies understate the difficulty Vermonters have in buying or renting decent digs because they assume that it’s OK for folks to pay 30 percent of their income for housing and utilities, and 30 percent is too much.

It is. The News Guy is old enough to remember the slogan, “a month’s rent should be no bigger than a week’s pay.”  One’s rent or mortgage payment should be closer to 25 percent of one’s income. Otherwise, people are paying too much for shelter, and don’t have enough left over for food, clothing, transportation, and fun. Fun is important.

But the News Guy is not about to withdraw his conclusion that in some ways the studies painted a bleaker picture than is warranted. What they did not include was any correlation between income and age.

There is such a correlation. By and large, younger working people earn less than older working people. They are also more likely to be single or childless, and therefore not to need the two-bedroom apartment that the studies (quite reasonably) used as their yardstick. If a 25-year-old single person, or a 25-year-old childless couple, can’t afford that $914-a-month two-bedroom apartment, who cares? They’re just fine in a one-bedroom or a studio apartment, which perhaps they can afford.

What the studies failed to demonstrate was that there are a large number of people who need a two-bedroom apartment who can’t afford one. It’s possible that those figures are unattainable right now, just one year before the next Census gathers the latest data. But in that case the reports should have noted the absence of the information.

Two more quick points: Nationally, there is a housing glut, with declining prices. Now these reports tell us there are not enough houses in Vermont, and they’re too expensive. That’s not entirely inconsistent; Vermont had the smallest housing “bubble,” with less overbuilding. Also, as “Between a Rock and  Hard Place” did point out, most of the decline in housing prices is in the more expensive houses, little help for the middle-income family that wants to buy a house.

And what about discussing the likelihood that houses are too expensive because they’re too big? All over the country,  yes, even in Vermont, contractors are building huge houses; bigger profits that way. Obviously, the builders are meeting the demands of their customers. But in this country, demand for almost everything – cars, clothes, houses – is to some extent created by the producers, the advertisers, and the culture. Together, they have succeeded in convincing some people that they “need” a semi-mansion for the benefit of…what?  Their standing in the community? Their self-esteem?

Either way, these houses are expensive to build, buy, heat, and light. Not to mention that they are UGGG-LEE (the picture above is from Florida; but you get the idea). They look like they were designed by a computer program; perhaps because they were. Somebody should write a report about how, along with the shopping mall, the office park, the Urban Renewal-created chain hotel/civil center/parking garage complex that has ruined scores of American cities, the luxury residential subdivision is transforming America the Beautiful until one of the ugliest countries in the world.

These are good days for supporters of wind power in Vermont. In February, the state Supreme Court turned down a challenge to the Public Service Board’s approval of the proposed wind towers in Sheffield, removing the last major obstacle to development of that  16-turbine, 40-megawatt, wind generation facility.

At about the same time, officials of Vermont Electric Cooperative began talks with the owner of land on Lowell Mountain about buying power from a 17-tower wind generating plant he’d like to put up on his mountaintop. A new company called Kingdom Community Wind said it plans to apply for a Certificate of Public Good for the project late this year.

Lawmakers are cooperating, too. A state law that went into effect last year encourages electric utility companies to get more power from renewable sources. The federal “stimulus” plan includes “provisions to benefit the wind industry, including a grant program for renewable energy developers and a loan guarantee program for developers and manufacturers,” in the words of the web site of the American Wind Energy Association.

Even Gov. Jim Douglas, while not reversing his stated opposition to large, “industrial” wind facilities, has ignored the issue of late, perhaps aware that the top energy officials in his own administration seem not to share his concerns.

In fact, except for the people who live right near where the towers are slated to be built – with their blades extending 420 feet into the air and emanating a constant  hum –  almost nobody opposes wind power.

And those opponents, of course, can be dismissed as NIMBYs (“Not in My Backyard)  rather than public-spirited citizens trying to protect the state’s mountain vistas and environmental integrity.

Especially because the environmentalists are gung-ho for wind power. The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, generally considered the most uncompromising environmental group active in Vermont, features on its web site a “climate change call to action for New England  (which) defines five steps our region must take in five years to confront the climate threat,” including: “Build 2,000 megawatts of new wind power.”

The Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), challenges the state to “build renewable power like wind, solar and biomass to keep the lights on and create good-paying jobs(rather than) stay dependent on dirty and dangerous sources like Vermont Yankee and fossil fuels.”

The Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) is somewhat less enthusiastic. Still, Executive Director Elizabeth Courtney said, “we are pro-wind.”

Green-group endorsement helps explain why the general public seems to be on the side of building the wind towers. Though they should probably be viewed with some skepticism, such polls as have been taken on the matter show that most Vermonters favor developing wind power.

Nor is there any big mystery about why environmentalists are for more wind power. They are convinced that the greatest threat facing the world today is anthropogenic (that’s the fancy way of saying “human-created”) global warming. Humans create this warming primarily by burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas (though that last one isn’t as bad) in their cars, their factories, and to generate electricity.

So the more electricity that is produced without burning those fossil fuels, the less fossil fuel will be burned, putting less greenhouse-creating goop in the air and therefore easing (or at least not exacerbating) global warming. Right?

No. Wrong.

Or at least doubtful.

Unless the expansion of wind, solar, and other renewable power sources is accompanied by some mechanism to reduce the demand for – and therefore the production of – electricity from coal and oil.

The reason, according to many experts (and not refuted by any) is that the human demand – or at least the American human demand – for electricity is effectively infinite. The more that is produced, the more that will be consumed, as our technological and innovative (and somewhat hedonistic) society creates more electronic gadgets.

“Residential energy use has increased 23 percent over the past decade, as efficiency improvements have been more than offset by increase in air conditioning use and the introduction of new applications” said the most recent report of the Energy Information Administration.  By 2030, the report said, “total electricity use in the residential sector increases by 20 percent from 2007…”

So even if, as envisioned in the bill passed by the U.S. House earlier this week, non-fossil fuel power were to make up 25 percent of the total electricity used in 2025, the U.S. will still burn more greenhouse gas-producing coal and oil than it does now.

Unless, that is, the increase in solar and wind power is accompanied by something to raise the price of fossil fuel-generated power. In that case, wind power might well replace power produced from coal and oil instead of just supplementing it.

“I think that’s what cap and trade is aiming at,” said VNRC’s Courtney. ” If we can cap the amount of dirty carbon fuel that we produce, we can force ourselves into finding other sources.”

Cap and trade, in which the government sets a limit on the amount of carbon that can be emitted, and electric utilities have to buy permits to emit their share, is central to President Barack Obama’s  his energy policy. Right now, though, that proposal faces tough sledding in Congress, where almost all Republicans and some Democrats view it is a de facto tax increase.

It is, though probably not the $3,100-a-year per household tax hike that House Republican leader John Boehner proclaimed it to be yesterday. MIT Professor John Reilly, one of the authors of the study Boehner cited, said the actual per-household increase would probably be about $340 a year.

But it is a tax increase, and a reminder that there is probably no way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without paying for it. Without, in fact everyone paying for it.

In Vermont, there is a mandatory cap and trade regime in effect. It even has a name – Reggie – which is not a guy, but the an acronym for the Regional Greenhouse  Gas Initiative, in which the New England states, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York limit emissions from electric power plants.

But that’s not enough to raise the price of fossil fuel-produced power.

“It’s  really a very narrow program that only applies to electric generating units,” said Dick Valentinetti, the Director of the Agency of Natural Resources Center for Climate Change. It’s not economy wide. Until you get into an economy-wide program you’re not going to be able to see a substantial increase in the credits for greenhouse gases.”

None of this means there is no case to be made for wind power. It’s (potentially) inexpensive. It’s clean. It’s produced locally. It provides tax revenues for towns, generous rental income for land-owners and profits for developers (if  more from tax breaks than from actually selling electric power). But it is nether economically nor environmentally benign. The towers are unsightly to many, and could discourage tourism. Building and maintaining them requires cutting roads through wetlands, across steep slopes, and through delicate wildlife habitat.

All of which might be a worthwhile price to pay. But without some mechanism to reduce consumption of fossil fuel-based power, it will not help in the fight against global warming. Environmentalists who campaign for wind power in the hope that it will combat climate change run the risk of supporting environmental degradation in return for nothing.

Some environmentalists know that. “We don’t want to be trading one environmental value for another,” said Courtney, adding that being in favor of wind towers does not require being in favor of every wind tower proposal.

In its application for a Certificate of Public Good from the Public Service Board, First Wind, the company planning to build the Sheffield project, did not argue that the wind towers would reduce global warming. The industry is not making that claim. It is letting others do the job for  it.

There is, of course, another way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced by power generation: use less power.

That does not require slower economic growth, as demonstrated in one state – this one. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average annual increase in Vermont electricity consumption between 1980 and 2005 (while the state’s economy was growing at a healthy clip) was 1.5 percent, substantially below the national figure of 2.1 percent.

This didn’t just happen. One reason for Vermont’s success in holding down electricity use, Valentinetti said, is the state’s energy efficiency apparatus, Efficiency Vermont, run by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC).

Common sense, then, would indicate that the public and private sector in the state would be united in strengthening this non-profit corporation so that it could continue to reduce the amount of electricity Vermonters use without diminishing their comfort or prosperity.

Apparently not. Instead, VEIC is at the center of a political quarrel between Gov. Douglas and the Legislature. Something to examine at a later date.