Tag Archives: gordon

Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

by EdwardMaskell Posted on July 3, 2020

The coronavirus may have canceled many of this weekend’s organized Fourth of July fireworks displays, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t celebrating at home. Roadside fireworks stands are seeing an explosion of business, and firework complaints are cropping up across the country. In Boston, police calls regarding illegal fireworks were 23 times higher this year compared to last year — and that was in May. In New York in the first few weeks of June, such calls were up 236 times over the same period last year.

Bill Weimer, vice president of the retailer Phantom Fireworks, says he’s been “knocked over” by this season’s booming fireworks sales. “The demand and the business we’ve seen so far has been the strongest early fireworks season I’ve seen in my years of involvement in the fireworks business,” he told CNN.

The immediate dangers from exploding fireworks — injury and fires — are high on many public officials’ minds. But as the Fourth draws near and Independence Day partygoers snatch up the nation’s supply of sparklers, StarFires, and Raging Zombies, health experts have pointed to another troubling side effect of the pyrotechnics displays: a spike in air pollution.

They’re specifically worried about particulate matter — tiny dust and soot particles that may cause human health and environmental problems. A 2015 study in the journal Atmospheric Environment found that the average level of particulate matter across the United States increased a whopping 42 percent on the Fourth of July, and the Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter may cause significant respiratory problems. For people with preexisting heart or lung conditions, it can even lead to premature death.

This week, a new study published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology adds to the layers of concern. Not only is particulate matter bad in general, but the study found that the emissions from fireworks may pose unique health risks. After collecting particulate matter released by 12 types of commercially available fireworks, the study’s authors found high levels of toxic metals like copper and strontium in five of them.

Most of these metals are technically allowed in fireworks, said Terry Gordon, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental medicine at NYU Langone Health. In fact, those metals are responsible for producing the fireworks’ vivid colors. But that doesn’t mean people should be inhaling them.

Krystal Pollitt, an environmental health scientist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved with the new study, says that when people breathe in metal particles like the ones let off by fireworks, it can cause cells to experience “oxidative stress.” This disrupts normal cellular signaling and metabolic processes and, if left unchecked, it can lead to cell damage and even cell death.

“Oxidative stress is a mechanism that underlies a lot of different diseases,” Pollitt told Grist, including a number of respiratory conditions. It is also implicated in kidney and liver failure, as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

Gordon and his team were looking for signs of oxidative stress — and that’s what they found when they exposed human lung cells in a lab to the metal-containing particulate matter from the fireworks. Some types of fireworks, like the so-called “Saturn Battery 1,” caused a stronger reaction than others. Meanwhile, cells that were exposed to a control sample of black carbon — a common and relatively innocuous component of particulate matter —showed no signs of oxidative stress.

The researchers later confirmed the damaging effects of the particulate matter in live cells by conducting an experiment on mice. After injecting a subset of the fireworks particles into the mice’s lungs, they found that the particles with higher concentrations of toxic metals caused greater inflammation.

Gordon said he was most surprised to find that emissions from two of the fireworks contained dangerous levels of lead, despite the fact that lead is not allowed in consumer fireworks. One type of firework, called the “Black Cuckoo,” produced particulate matter with lead concentrations greater than 40,000 parts per million.

“That means it was 4 percent lead, which is outrageous,” Gordon told Grist. Even though the industry says it follows rigorous testing procedures to prevent this kind of contamination, he added, either regulators or manufacturers appear to be failing to keep it out of consumer fireworks. “To me, it’s almost criminal activity,” he said.

The American Pyrotechnics Association, an industry group, expressed concern about the fireworks’ metal content, saying the contaminated products should not have gotten past routine regulatory testing. “All consumer fireworks imported into the U.S. are prohibited from containing any form of lead,” the group’s executive director Julie Heckman told Grist. However, she added that the study did not provide detailed information on the fireworks or their manufacturers, making it difficult to determine where the oversight occurred.

Though Gordon’s study focused on small-scale fireworks displays — the kind you might have in your backyard — he said his results raise questions about the safety of larger shows. Gordon suspects that big firecrackers use many of the same chemicals as the little guys, and big displays produce much greater amounts of particulate matter. Plus, air pollution from big celebrations can blanket urban areas and linger for days.

Although some of the largest Fourth of July fireworks shows won’t be happening this year — events in New Orleans, Orlando, Minneapolis, most of southern California, and elsewhere have been canceled — others are plowing ahead. Macy’s NYC fireworks show, the largest pyrotechnics display in the country, is going on as a series of short, unannounced displays to prevent crowding. And after a 10-year moratorium on pyrotechnics at Mount Rushmore due to fire danger, the Trump administration is planning to bring “THE BIG FIREWORKS” back to the national monument, along with an anticipated crowd of 7,500 people.

These events raise obvious concerns about spreading the coronavirus through person-to-person contact, but the danger posed by pollution remains unclear without more research on the population-wide toxicological effects of exposure to firework-generated particulate matter.

“We don’t know what the risks could be,” Gordon said, calling for more research. But until we know more, he says it could be worth it to investigate alternative ways of celebrating Independence Day. Laser shows, he noted, are bright and colorful without the toxic emissions.

For the time being, he recommends that viewers exercise caution, whether they’re staying home to detonate a Lava Blaster or heading to a big pyrotechnics show. “If I’m in a fireworks celebration and the wind’s blowing right at my family and me,” he told Grist. “I’m not a happy camper.”

Continue reading:

Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, Gotham, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

Can Oakland still stop the coal trains?

by MayraLoureiro Posted on May 17, 2018

When a federal judge struck down Oakland’s ban on coal shipments this week, it represented a setback for environmental advocates. Nearly two years ago, the local city council had voted unanimously to keep coal out of a proposed redevelopment of the Oakland Army Base — pushing the argument over the dirty fuel source into the courts.

A quick survey of advocates in the wake of the new ruling indicates it is not a crippling loss. That’s because the proposed port to ship coal out of Oakland hasn’t been built yet, and the people who want to stop it have several more cards to play.

“It doesn’t mean we are going to have coal trains going through Oakland,” says Erica Maharg, managing attorney for San Francisco Baykeeper.

Dear reader, like what you see here?

Keep Grist’s green journalism humming along by supporting us with a donation today. Your gift will help us fight for a planet that doesn’t burn and a future that doesn’t suck.

Support Grist   

Margaret Gordon founder of West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, says that the port still faces a high hurdle in the form of mitigations for pollution from the new facility. If approved, the port would be built in West Oakland, a historically polluted, and historically African American, neighborhood. And those mitigations — Gordon would like to require zero-emission technology on all the equipment at the port and all the trucks and trains serving it — could be economically prohibitive.

“We knew we were going to have to have more mitigations, win, lose, or draw,” Gordon says.

On the other side, a representative for Phil Tagami, the port developer, says his client was “still digesting the decision and had no comment at this time.”

The current case was really about a contract between Tagami and Oakland. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria explained that the city made a deal with Tagami that it would not add any new regulations on port operations unless those new regulations were required to prevent a “substantial danger” to the people of Oakland. And, in his assessment, Oakland just didn’t offer the evidence to show that a coal ban was required to protect its residents.

Chhabria was scathing in his appraisal of the evidence Oakland presented: It was, he wrote, “riddled with inaccuracies, major evidentiary gaps, erroneous assumptions, and faulty analyses, to the point that no reliable conclusion about health or safety dangers could be drawn from it.”

That assessment came as a surprise to Earthjustice staff attorney Colin O’Brien, who worked on the case. “The science has long been unequivocal that fine particulate matter is harmful to human health,” he says. “I’m not sure that level of proof should be required of the city.”

Interestingly, San Francisco Baykeeper’s Maharg points out that Chhabria also explicitly opened the door to a defense of the coal ban with better evidence. The judge wrote that there may be sufficient evidence to prove that a coal port really is a health hazard, but the coal-ban advocates simply hadn’t presented it in court.

The coal-ban proponents could appeal the decision to the 9th Circuit Court, but they haven’t decided yet if they will do that. They have other options, and this ruling — which focuses narrowly on whether Oakland violated a contract — may not be the right hill to die on.

“In the big picture,” O’Brien says, “I’m not sure how much this decision matters.”

In that big picture, the West Coast is quickly turning into a coal blockade. As Jeremy Sussman, an analyst at Clarksons Platou Securities, told Bloomberg, “Most realists have come to the conclusion that West Coast states such as California, Washington, and Oregon simply aren’t going to allow a lot of coal exports now or in the future.”

This decision knocks a chink in that blockade, but it does nothing to change the political will that created it in the first place.

Excerpt from – 

Can Oakland still stop the coal trains?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Oakland still stop the coal trains?

You Thought 2016 Politics Were Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

by KennethU81 Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Best of Enemies co-director Robert Gordon confessed to me a while back that his biggest fear was that “people won’t go see this movie because they think it’s going to be boring.” It isn’t. The documentary—which premieres October 3 at 10 p.m. on PBS (Independent Lens)—chronicles the often fiery debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal that ABC aired during the 1968 election cycle in an effort to boost ratings. “It sounds like a dry documentary because people forget how witty these two guys are,” Gordon told me.

Gordon and co-director Morgan Neville—whose Twenty Feet From Stardom won the 2014 Oscar for best documentary—skillfully weave archival footage together with interviews with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Brooke Gladstone, Dick Cavett, and Buckley’s brother Neil. The movie climaxes during one of the duo’s final debates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where, while discussing Vietnam War protesters, Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” The latter’s response, which could even make Donald Trump blush, was perhaps the first viral sound bite in modern media history. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley retorted, twitching with anger. “Quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Indeed, the televised verbal brawls between these two brilliant intellectuals anticipated the culture wars that would define, for decades to come, America’s political struggles—and how the media would cover them. I sat down with Gordon in San Francisco not long ago to chat about the de-evolution of our political discourse and the challenge of making a film about conversations that took place decades ago.

Mother Jones: How did this project come to pass?

Robert Gordon: In 2010, a friend of mine acquired a bootleg DVD of the debates and shared it with me, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is today’s culture wars expressed by these two guys.” As a documentarian, you are always looking for that cache of film you can use to build a movie from; there was 2.5 hours of raw debate. It seemed so relevant to the division in the country that I just thought, “Let’s get on this immediately.”

MJ: Had you worked with Morgan Neville before?

RG: This is our fifth film together. Between the fourth and fifth, he made 20 Feet From Stardom and got the Academy Award. I called him up and said, “Way to go Morgan! You’re really putting the pressure on us now.” But it’s a big help having that accolade. People who don’t know us are more willing to trust us; it’s the stamp of legitimacy.

MJ: Was it challenging to get backers on board with such an unconventional documentary subject?

RG: Yes, it took a while. Most said to us, “This is all very interesting, but why do you see it as relevant today?” And since the movie has been made, the response has been, “I can’t believe how relevant to today this footage is.”

Gore Vidal (front) and William F. Buckley get primped for their clash. Independent Lens

MJ: Most of your past work has involved music. What made you want to stray from that subject?

RG: Most everything I’ve done has been about music, but music as a way to talk about bigger social issues, bigger cultural moments or movements. I don’t see it as that big of a leap. The debates are the operatic vignettes that recur, and it’s quite musical to me. The important thing to me is that my documentaries are about changes in America, and so is this.

MJ: It was quite a year, 1968. How did you decide what historical and cultural context to include?

RG: There were cultural touchstones that have been investigated over and over and over, and we didn’t want to redo those. And there are a lot of them to work with. I mean ’68, like you said, it’s rife with material, with cultural disagreement, violence, internationally—it’s all there. But we wanted to focus on our guys and what they stood for and where those changes occurred in relation to them.

MJ: But you did incorporate some major historical events into the film, like the riots outside of the DNC in Chicago.

RG: Yeah, totally, but only because it was there. It felt like the fighting on the street was being played out by these two guys in front of the glare of the national TV camera.

MJ: Was there anything that surprised you while researching these two men?

RG: I was surprised at the vigor with which Vidal pursued Buckley and his other enemies. Vidal seemed to thrive on animosity and on feuding, and at the same time could be very charming. You see him on Dick Cavett, and there’s a certain charm to him, you like to watch him, you like to see him talk, and I thought, “Well, surely this ‘man of ice’ was a put-on.” But then you read things like his obituary on Buckley, and, you know, he is a man of ice.

MJ: So did you feel like you had to hold back your own opinions about Vidal and Buckley?

RG: The film wasn’t about our personal views and our personal politics. That would have undermined the film’s potential. One of the interesting things I learned in the course of it was Buckley, whose politics I tend not to agree with, was strong enough to publicly change his mind on the Iraq War. He had come out very for it when it began, and over time, when he learned more about it, he changed. And that’s a brave position for someone in his situation. I think it’s very honorable and admirable.

MJ: There is that moment after the famous blowup between Buckley and Vidal when you pan through all the interviewees in the documentary sitting in shocked silence. And then Dick Cavett goes, “The network nearly shat.” Were those really these people’s reactions?

RG: That’s taking liberty in the editing room, is what it is. It was Cavett’s response that suggests that those were their real responses, because I asked Cavett about it and you see him turn and think, and he has a long silence, and then he gives that very funny answer, and we thought, “Wow, what if we extend that silence? Because that’s kind of musical in a way.” And we tested it and it was like, “Ohhh, this is funny.” And it never hurts to be funny.

The showdown Independent Lens

MJ: Yeah, the film has a lot of funny moments; Vidal and Buckley are very entertaining to watch.

RG: These guy were so smart, and they had a command of so many things: history, philosophy, economics, and, people forget, of humor as well. They were smart, witty guys.

MJ: I was struck by how intellectual their rhetoric was. It seems ironic that these debates helped inspire the trashy political debate we now see on cable.

RG: Yes, TV is pursued for the lowest common denominator. Networks, which had been civil to a fault up to that point in time, have worked themselves up to the point where all they are is a series of Roman candle explosions. The reason that the audience built for Buckley and Vidal is that, in addition to their cattiness, they were offering a lot of ideas and a lot of exchange, and they were humorous, too. It wasn’t just that explosive moment that made this what it was. But TV today seems to want to have you come back from a commercial and go right into a fight turned up to 10, and three minutes later go into a commercial—and that’s success! People have been introducing the show in theaters as “delicious,” and I think that suggests an appetite for more integrity on television; more intellectual exchange, less vacuous shouting.

MJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone citing Pericles on network TV now!

RG: Yeah, I watched the Vidal-Buckley debates with a dictionary the first few times because I wanted to learn the words, and they were saying things I didn’t know, and what did it mean, and why were they choosing those words, and whom were they quoting? Wouldn’t you like to watch a half an hour of political TV and then take your notes and go look up what they were talking about? You glean what you need to glean, and then afterward you can take home more—it’s a prize that comes in the box!

Originally posted here:

You Thought 2016 Politics Were Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

Posted in FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on You Thought 2016 Politics Were Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

As a Private Lawyer, Ted Cruz Defended Companies Found Guilty of Wrongdoing

by EmmanueGoff Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

In his bio on his presidential campaign website, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) boasts of what he did as Texas solicitor general to defend the Second Amendment, the Pledge of Allegiance, and US sovereignty—all conservative causes. But Cruz does not detail another important chapter in his legal career: his work as a well-paid private attorney who helped corporations found guilty of wrongdoing.

After serving over five years as the state of Texas’ top lawyer, Cruz in 2008 joined the Houston office of the high-powered international law firm Morgan Lewis to lead its Supreme Court and national appellate practice. He stepped down as a partner in the firm after being elected a US senator in 2012. During his stint at Morgan Lewis, Cruz, who casts himself as a politician who stands on principle, handled several cases that cut against his political stances. He twice worked on cases in New Mexico to secure $50-million-plus jury awards (though, as a politician, he has called for tort reform that would prevent these sorts of awards). He assisted a lawsuit filed by a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and nearly executed (though, as a politician, he has insisted the criminal-justice system functions just fine when it comes to capital punishment). And in one case, he filed a brief supporting President Barack Obama’s stimulus (though, as a politician, Cruz has slammed this Obama initiative).

Continue Reading »

Continue reading:  

As a Private Lawyer, Ted Cruz Defended Companies Found Guilty of Wrongdoing

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As a Private Lawyer, Ted Cruz Defended Companies Found Guilty of Wrongdoing

This Is Why You Should Never Take Moral Lessons From Films You Stopped Watching Halfway Through

by MerlinAviles Posted on September 13, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jordan Belfort (aka the Wolf of Wall Street) went to the 92nd St. Y to talk about how great and innocent and redeemed he is. The whole night was a predictable shit show with casual sexism and the like, but this bit struck me as particularly funny:

Belfort said people should realize that the actions portrayed in the film were bad and not something they should follow. “If you’re in this audience and you can’t go to see The Wolf of Wall Street and realize that that’s bad, then there’s something wrong with you. You are fundamentally screwed up. It’s obvious,” Belfort said. Belfort said that he idolized Gordon Gekko’s character in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. He said that had perhaps Gekko fallen, then he would have felt differently. “At least in The Wolf of Wall Street, I lose everything. My life is destroyed. I go to jail,” Belfort said.

In the end of Wall Street, Charlie Sheen wears a wire and narcs Gekko to the feds. Gekko is sentenced to more than a decade in prison and, upon his eventual release, a year of hard Shia.

Excerpt from:  

This Is Why You Should Never Take Moral Lessons From Films You Stopped Watching Halfway Through

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is Why You Should Never Take Moral Lessons From Films You Stopped Watching Halfway Through

Robots Aren’t Here Yet, But That Doesn’t Mean They Never Will Be

by Silvester Mongan Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Robert Gordon is one our preeminent scholars of economic growth. He’s also a well-known pessimist about the future: he believes that well-known trends in demographics, education, inequality, and government debt will suppress growth rates over the next several decades.

Fair enough. But what about the possibility that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will have a huge impact between now and 2050? In a new paper, Gordon dismisses the idea in a few disdainful paragraphs. Here’s an excerpt:

Much attention has been paid in the popular media to small robots since “Baxter,” the inexpensive $25,000 robot, made his debut on the TV program 60 Minutes….Reflections on Baxter lead to skepticism that it/he is a major threat to American jobs outside of routine tasks in manufacturing, which only makes up 8 percent of American employment. For his demonstration at the TED conference in Long Beach in late February, 2013, Baxter had to be packed in a suitcase. He could not get his own boarding pass and walk onto the plane. This is the problem with robots — they are both mentally and physically limited to narrow tasks. They can think but can’t walk, or they can walk but can’t think.

….This lack of multitasking ability is dismissed by the robot enthusiasts — just wait, it is coming. Soon our robots will not only be able to win at Jeopardy but also will be able to check in your bags at the sky cap station at the airport, thus displacing the skycaps. But the physical tasks that humans can do are unlikely to be replaced in the next several decades by robots.

….What is often forgotten is that we are well into the computer age, and every Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and local supermarket has self-check-out lines that allow you to check out your groceries or paint cans by scanning them through a robot. But except for very small orders it takes longer, and so people still voluntarily wait in line for a human instead of taking the option of the no-wait self-checkout-lane. The same theme — that the most obvious uses of robots and computers have already happened — pervades commerce. Airport baggage sorting belts are mechanized, as is most of the process of checking in for a flight.

I promise that this is a fair excerpt (and of course you can decide for yourself by clicking on the link). Gordon’s entire argument is that computers were invented a long time ago and we still don’t have smart robots today. And if we don’t have them by now, we won’t have them anytime soon.

This is an embarrassingly bad argument. I can somehow imagine a circa-1870 version of Gordon arguing that all this folderol about electricity is ridiculous. Why, we’ve been studying electricity for over a century, and what do we have to show for it? Some clunky batteries, the telegraph, a few arc lamps with limited use, and a steady supply of techno-optimist inventors who keep telling us that any day now they’ll invent a practical generator that will replace steam engines and change the world. Don’t believe it, folks.1

It’s funny. Every time I write about AI, I get email from some friends and regular readers telling me that I’m all wet. And these correspondents have good arguments. I don’t happen to think they’re right, but they’re good arguments from people who have obviously thought about this stuff. Gordon, however, doesn’t even pretend to engage with the AI literature. He just says that since the current level of AI is primitive, it’s obviously all a bunch of bunk.

But if that’s all you’re going to say, why even bother? A little over a year ago Gordon wrote an op-ed in which he dismissed the prospects of several evolving technologies, but didn’t even mention AI. At the time, I wrote that this was a blinkered view: “At the very least, you need to acknowledge it, and then explain why you think it will never happen, or why it won’t produce a lot of future growth even if it does.” This time around, Gordon hasn’t ignored AI completely, but he certainly hasn’t taken it remotely seriously.2 This is, to be frank, not the work of a scholar who seriously wants to engage with the prospects of future technological growth. It’s the work of someone who’s just checking off a box in order to fend off critics of his pre-ordained conclusion.

1Ironically, Gordon writes that in the mid-1870s everyone knew what was coming: “Inventors were feverishly working on turning the telegraph into the telephone, trying to find a way to transform electricity coming from batteries into the power source to create electric light, trying to find a way of harnessing the power of petroleum to create a lightweight and powerful internal combustion engine. The 1875 diaries of Edison, Bell, and Benz are full of such ‘we’re almost there’ speculation. Once that was achieved, the dream since Icarus of human flight became a matter of time and experimentation.” But for some reason, similar feverish work on intelligent machines in the 2010s is treated as obviously going nowhere.

2This would actually be fine if he’d just say so. AI is speculative enough that it would be perfectly reasonable to simply treat it as a wild card: write a paragraph acknowledging that, yes, it could upend everything, but that this particular paper is a look into a future in which AI remains immature for the foreseeable future. Nothing wrong with that.

See more here: 

Robots Aren’t Here Yet, But That Doesn’t Mean They Never Will Be

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Robots Aren’t Here Yet, But That Doesn’t Mean They Never Will Be

Clock is ticking for Cape Wind project

by mlodyseo7 Posted on October 23, 2013

Clock is ticking for Cape Wind project

By

Shutterstock

The Cape Wind project, which would install 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Massachusetts, is in a race against time.

It’s intended to be the first offshore wind farm in U.S. waters, and once it’s up and running, it could provide three-quarters of the electricity used at Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. But if construction doesn’t start by the end of this year, its backers stand to miss out on a federal tax credit and $200 million worth of investment promised by PensionDanmark, throwing its future into doubt.

What’s the holdup? The project has been besieged by lawsuits, most of them filed by folks who worry that the turbines would interfere with their views and boat outings.

But now Cape Wind executives say they expect to resolve the remaining suits shortly, potentially clearing the way for the project to beat the Dec. 31 deadline. From Bloomberg:

Two legal appeals remain after the company won 13 previous challenges, Vice President Dennis Duffy said [Tuesday] at the American Wind Energy Association’s Offshore Windpower 2013 conference in Providence, Rhode Island.

Cape Wind, based in Boston, has spent more than a decade pursuing the $2.6 billion project in Nantucket Sound, fighting opposition from environmental groups, local fishermen and members of the Kennedy family. …

“We are waiting for those decisions and we think we’ll have them this fall,” Duffy said. “That will give us the opportunity to get the notice to proceed to get the project really going.”

Meanwhile, William Koch, whose billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David fund so many anti-renewable campaigns, is working as hard as ever to stop the project. Koch owns three mansions with grand views of the sound. Maybe he doesn’t mind fossil fuel pollution, but he’s sure as hell not going to stand by quietly while a wind farm creates what he calls “visual pollution.”

The New York Times reports that Koch has spent about $5 million over the last decade on efforts to oppose Cape Wind. He serves as chairman of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, a “nonprofit environmental organization” dedicated to blocking the wind farm’s construction:

Still, Jim Gordon, Cape Wind’s developer, who has spent $70 million of his own money on the project since 2001, vows that it will go forward. …

“This is a very sophisticated adversary,” Mr. Gordon said. “Koch has already spent a decade trying to push us off the path toward a better energy future.”

The two men have circled each other for a decade in an escalating test of wills. Mr. Gordon has tried unsuccessfully to enlist Mr. Koch, who once financed green energy plants, in his cause; Mr. Koch has successfully delayed Cape Wind for years by tying it up in court. A few lawsuits, some of them backed by the Nantucket Sound alliance, remain to be settled.

The clock is ticking: There are fewer than 70 days left until the federal tax incentives and PensionDanmark’s investment are due to evaporate.


Source
Koch Brother Wages 12-Year Fight Over Wind Farm, New York Times
Cape Wind Offshore Farm Sees Lawsuits Cleared by Year-End, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Source – 

Clock is ticking for Cape Wind project

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clock is ticking for Cape Wind project