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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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WINDMILLS AND LIMOUSINE LIBERALS There is a rich irony in watching Senator Ted Kennedy join forces with Representative Dan Young of Alaska to stop a windmill power-generating project in Nantucket Sound. Rep. Young –conservative Republican and chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee – often opposes environmental proposals. His ranking from the League of Conservation Voters is zero. Mr. Kennedy’s ranking is 95 percent. The Cape Wind project they are fighting would place 130 windmills near the center of Nantucket Sound, perhaps seven or eight miles due south of Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, where the Kennedys’ famous seaside property it situated. Messrs. Kennedy and Young propose that the windmills be set back 1.5 nautical miles from shipping or ferry lanes. This would make the project impossible in the narrow waters of the sound. Mr. Kennedy couches his objections only as a concern for shipping safety – delicately failing to mention that the 24-square-mile windmill-field would degrade his ocean view. (The 417-foot towers would be clearly visible from Hyannis Port.) Environmentalists – whose staunch ally Mr. Kennedy has been – aren’t buying it. They and the Cape Wind developers are outraged at the senator’s NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) posture. This is “ironic” because Mr. Kennedy is a “limousine liberal” who rarely meets a liberal cause he doesn’t like. But he and others who champion liberal causes – often very intrusive and expensive ones – don’t expect those causes to affect them. Occasions when this happens fall into the man-bites-dog category. I cite a few examples (from a long list) where LLs expect immunity. Quotas. By being on the politically correct side of racial, gender or sexual preference quotas (a.k.a. affirmative action), limousine liberals are generally protected from any disadvantages in their own schooling and careers. People of Mr. Kennedy’s generation (b. 1932) were far enough up the career ladder to avoid being hit by the quota-mania, in the late 1970s. They could be indifferent about how quotas affected younger people. Wealth and position are advantages here. Public schools. LLs have no worries about public schools and their myriad problems. Their kids and grandkids will never go there. They live in a world apart, where access to the best private schools is a given. It is a nice situation that lets LLs ally with powerful public education unions that want no school-competition, no accountability for students’ achievement, complete control over curricula, and ever-flowing streams of money. High taxes. Independently wealthy, his multi-million-dollar fortune protected from most taxation, Mr. Kennedy can pose as champion of the little guy – demanding that “the rich pay their fair share”, while knowing that his own share will be modest. Many LLs, like Mr. Kennedy and Teresa Heinz Kerry, are Old Money. Mrs. Kerry’s billion-dollar fortune consists mostly of securities that pay tax-free dividends, making her taxes on an income of at least $40-50 million a year quite modest. Mr. Kerry knew the high-tax ideas he was proposing during his presidential campaign would not touch his family. Energy. Limousine liberals are aloof from energy concerns. They can advocate expensive energy restrictions – e.g., blocking oil-drilling in the ANWR and off the coast of California – because they don’t care what energy costs. Whatever the price is, they can always pay it. A century ago, gasoline cost 10¢ a gallon. (That sounds great until you realize that many people earned only $1 a day.) Economists say the 1906 economy transposed to 2006 would mean $10-a-gallon gas. Many LLs would like to see prices that high. This would present no problem for them (and would cut down on traffic, too). Their opposition to nuclear energy – no new nuclear plants built since 1982 – has made electricity costlier. Denouncing “dirty” coal has also forced most power plants to use natural gas – drawing down gas reserves and driving prices up. We have thousand-year reserves of coal and the technology to burn it cleanly, but the LLs don’t want you to know this. They are aligned with green positions on these matters. Radical environmentalism. By being “green”, LLs can look morally superior about the environment. In return, they expect immunity from radical green policies. If gasoline-powered cars were abolished – as Al Gore advocated in Earth in the Balance – LLs would still have their limousines. As part of the environmental nomenklatura, they would naturally rate automobiles. This is where we came in on Senator Kennedy. He has been true-green on environmental issues – even radical ones – right down the line. Probably this included wind power, but the senator certainly never expected a forest of windmills in Nantucket Sound, within sight of his Cape Cod digs. Environmentalism was supposed to protect him and his family. I can sympathize with Mr. Kennedy for being shocked at how things have turned out. In 1929, Mr. Kennedy’s father – bootlegger, film-maker, and stock-market millionaire Joseph Kennedy – bought the beautiful cottage (see photo) and property that he had been renting in Hyannis Port. Over the years his children built homes there. It became known as the Compound. Old Joe’s purchase was timely. The property could not be developed similarly today because of the many restrictions on wetlands and seacoast property that Senator Kennedy has helped enact. Environmentalism has helped folks like the Kennedys pull the ladder up after them. Under green political protection, the Compound would be surrounded by pristine land (and water) forever. But somehow things went wrong. Mr. Kennedy ran afoul of environmentalism in a way he never expected because he forgot a primary rule of politics (or thought it didn’t apply to him): i.e., when a movement or institution lacks accountability, it will eventually go off the rails. This has happened to environmentalism. Clearly, it is out of control. Conservatives like Rep. Young knew this already. Mr. Kennedy is learning it now, but he will probably forget the lesson as soon as he solves his windmill problem. Born of a quest for clean air and water, environmentalism has enjoyed public support from the late 1960s on. Lakes and rivers were brought back to life. Spills and toxic waste dumps were cleaned up. All this was cheered by a strong majority of citizens. Environmentalism became politically untouchable. But this once-benign movement has gone amok. When I lived in Maryland, a neighbor cleaned out some old brush and tidied up his acre of property. The county’s environmental officer fined him $1,000 for “wetlands violations”. (A small creek ran across a corner of his land.) Another man was jailed for filling in a puddle on his land which officials called a “wetland”. Investors can’t use seacoast land because environmental police claim development would ruin dunes, marshes and other topographical features. Radical “global warming” proposals call for destruction of the American economy by drastically reducing production of carbon dioxide. Similar instances are too numerous to recite. Suffice it to say that we are way beyond clean air and water now. If he didn’t realize that before, Senator Kennedy is learning it now. I wish him good luck against a force that even the famous Kennedy Charm might not overcome.
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Joseph Kennedy’s Cottage at Hyannis Port
