Not-in-my-backyard attitude reveals hypocrisy of the rich

Every so often, a purely local dispute rises above its station and assumes national importance. This was the case with the Cape Wind project, a proposed wind farm that seemed to have everything going for it: It would deliver badly needed additional electric power to energy-hungry New England, reduce utility bills for everyone and cut down on air pollution. There was just one little problem. The spinning windmills would be located in Nantucket Sound, within view of some very expensive homes and some very wealthy and powerful citizens.

Cape Wind is a cautionary tale. Wendy Williams, a journalist who lives on Cape Cod, and Robert Whitcomb, a vice-president and editorial page editor of the Providence Journal, give a blow-by-blow account of the project from its inception in 2001 to its ambiguous conclusion today. In so doing they show how quickly self-interest can be rallied to frustrate the broader public interest and how difficult it may be to change old habits of energy consumption in the US.

This is a story that seems to have everything: waterfront mansions, yachts, a tenacious blue-collar entrepreneur, bare-knuckled political infighting at the state level and high-stakes political poker in Congress. It offers the delicious spectacle of self-described environmentalists, infatuated with the idea of alternative energy, tying themselves into knots trying to explain why a wind farm would be a splendid idea anywhere but in Nantucket Sound. Throw in a few Kennedys, and you have the ingredients for a first-rate politico-eco drama.

Alas the authors squander this opportunity. As unabashed cheerleaders for Cape Wind and seething with indignation at its opponents, they make no pretense of laying out the facts evenhandedly. They have a white-hat hero, Jim Gordon, the Boston energy entrepreneur who conceived of Cape Wind and fights the political power brokers — local, state and national — every step along the way. They have deep-dyed villains who appear onstage to the sound of authorial hisses: notably Senator Edward Kennedy, whose family compound in Hyannis looks out on the sound, and Mitt Romney, then governor of Massachusetts, who began nearly every speech on Cape Wind with "I support renewable energy" and then blocked the project at every turn. Their partner in crime is John Warner, the senior senator from Virginia, who has had longstanding ties to Cape Cod through his first wife, Catherine Mellon.

The premise of the book is simple. As the authors tell it, a cabal of martini-swilling fat cats, surreptitiously encouraged by Senator Kennedy, worked the political system night and day to stop a beneficial utility project so that they could enjoy an unencumbered view from their energy-wasting mansions and sail their yachts without worrying about running into a wind turbine. They wrote big checks, told big lies and intimidated anyone foolish enough to get in their way, aided and abetted by a servile local newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, depicted as a thoroughly unscrupulous advocacy group financed by local residents.

The facts are damning enough. The wind farm, consisting of 130 propellered turbines installed over an area of about 67km2, would generate up to 500 megawatts of clean energy. It would also reduce Cape Cod's dependence on two fossil-fuel plants that help make its air among the most polluted in New England. Nevertheless local grandees and celebrities, among them the former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and the historian David McCullough, came out foursquare against the project even before details were known. Opposition boiled down to four words: not in my backyard.