(From today’s Boston Globe: “As record oil prices turn attention to the need for renewable fuels, momentum is building in Congress to buck Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s bid to block the proposed Cape Cod wind energy project, potentially reviving efforts to construct the sprawling windmill farm in Nantucket Sound…. The maneuver to stop the wind farm ‘is clearly a backroom deal, and they’re going to get called publicly on it,’ said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA. ‘The Democrats are going to kill the first big offshore wind farm in the United States because of their relationship with Ted Kennedy.'”) Posted on April 25, 2006: Gas prices have skyrocketed and the 36th annual Earth Day just passed. So it’s hardly surprising that many Democrats have taken the opportunity to bash the president’s environmental and energy policies. Senator Minority Leader Harry Reid has demanded a “bipartisan national energy summit to solve the problem of America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil….” And Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida delivered his party’s radio address on Saturday. He urged a higher “mileage standard for all passenger vehicles,” which is interesting because Democratic Sen. Carl Levin has often led the charge against stiffer mileage standards. Nelson further warned Americans, “We must confront some powerful interests, including the oil lobby” if we our to cut our “dependence on foreign oil.” Like Sen. Nelson, Greenpeace is also confronting “some powerful interests.” According to the National Journal, the group has taken on the Senate’s premier liberal for his opposition to a proposed wind farm that “would provide 75 percent of the area’s energy needs with clean and safe wind power.”
Of course, I don’t blame Sen. Kennedy (or Sen. Kerry for that matter). I wouldn’t want to sit on the porch of my beachfront mansion staring into a sea of turbine generators either.
