Goodbye, web design. Here marks the official fork in the road where my web development blog becomes my everything-I’m-interested-in blog.
The wind farm project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard gets a lot of media attention—way more than it deserves. But we all love a feisty scandal. And the two (or more) sides in the fight represent a quintessential foaming-at-the-mouth not-in-my-back-yard panic. It’s just a ball to watch. Each stakeholding group manages to craft an attorney-stamped sound bite for the twenty seconds of attention the average media consumer can manage.
I understand how those with unbridled ocean views would not want their treasured vista littered with a dinosaur cage of wind turbines. It’s really a shame. Of course, this is America. So for most of the stakeholders this is about money.
I’m not a lawyer. (Remember, I’m a web designer.) I don’t know how the rights to an area of ocean are purchased. I always thought the ocean belonged to all of us even within our “national waters,” which extend some 20 or 50 or 100 miles out to sea. These waters are public domain. How can someone purchase the rights to farm the wind on a given mile of sea?
The idea that we can jam some towers in the ocean floor and attach giant propellers to create power is very appealing. The idea that we have to ruin the ocean view to achieve that is not very appealing. Why can’t those turbines be installed far enough out to shore so they’re invisible—or nearly invisible?
I imagine the further offshore the installation, the less efficient the energy transmission and much of the power generated is lost to heat in the transmission line. But in the West, people are talking about building monumental wind farms to power both coasts. Clearly, if a wind farm can be installed in Oklahoma and its power transmitted to Las Vegas, the Cape Wind Project could move its turbines 75 or 100 miles out to sea where they will not be visible. Problem solved?
Again, I’m no expert. I’m just a web designer with an opinion. It could be that these turbines rely on sea breezes that only occur near the coast. Perhaps there are laws or treaties that prevent the construction of such objects that far out to sea.
But it begs the question, what is this worth?
Why all the attention for a small wind farm between Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod?
I read that Cape Wind investors have already ponied up $45MM for the project. Chump change in the big time entrepreneur world. So why all the media attention?
The demographics of this issue are interesting. Our country sees anyone with a home on Martha’s Vineyard as part of the nation’s elite. This is probably generally true. And it’s also widely assumed that the “elite” generally believe in the crisis of rising temperatures. So they also probably support the creation of wind farms. Only when that wind farm obstructs their multi-million-dollar vista, then we have a problem. It’s more than NIMBY—it’s “Not in my ocean!”
Then again, it just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to build a wind farm offshore. Sure, it’s not pretty—and I’ll admit to being an ocean lover who doesn’t want to see a wind farm offshore dripping grease into the sea. But beyond that, wouldn’t a winter Nor’easter just tear apart a wind turbine? How much power can we generate compared to turning all of west Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas into a wind farming region? How much does it cost to go out there and service these giants with barges and boats?
Most of all, how is a small wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts going to save the world? It’s not.
Why don’t we spend time worrying about how to create new solutions to save the world? What about terrapower? What about turning CO2 from coal plant emissions into something that doesn’t escape into the atmosphere to cause global warming?
No, this is not a story about sustainability or environmentalism. This is a story about people. People fighting. People fighting sells the news. Ideas don’t sell like a good scrap.
But a good scrap isn’t going to take us anywhere, and we need to go places.
How do we get there?
Many of my ideological conservative friends like to drum up the term “liberal media.” And I agree that much of the traditional media is liberal (with many notable exceptions). But this is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle they support. The media is failing us as a whole because they have incredibly low standards. It’s not a left or right issue. They all sell cheap stories because when faced with the choice of an easy, exciting story or the boring detail of an abstract event or idea, most readers choose easy and exciting. But for most Americans, the important issues we face are boring. Way less exciting than People magazine.
The Cape Wind Project vs. the residents of Martha’s Vineyard is a story fit for the stage. So the media grabs it and sells it to us at regular intervals. But to find out about the real deal, the big ideas that are going to craft our future—not just the future of Cape Cod and the entrepreneurs who want to profit there—it takes a lot of work. I have to go out of my way to seek the big ideas, and I just don’t have the time. Journalism can’t turn a profit anymore without the cheap, fast and shallow story. The 24-hour news factory puts the whole world on spin cycle for the general public.
Like sinking ships in a North Atlantic fog, the big ideas fall to the bottom. Floating on the surface is a classic drama that leads nowhere.
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