Just when you thought it was a safe environmental bet to put up wind turbines - after all, who is going to object to "clean" energy - along comes the NIMBY factor.

For those unacquainted with the term, NIMBY was coined in the 1980s by British politician Nicholas Ridley, the UK's Secretary of State for the Environment, and first used by the Christian Science Monitor, an independent, online, international newspaper.

It means "Not in my Backyard", and is a knee-jerk reaction, usually by residential homeowners, to having anything built within view of their homes. Objections usually focus on power plants, landfills, prisons, homeless shelters, cell phone towers and the like - in other words, anything that either spoils the view or property values.

The immediate case in point is a wind turbine project proposed for the Atlantic coastline called the Cape Wind project. Comprised of 130 horizontal axis wind turbines, which stand almost 150 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty, the $900-million project by Cape Wind Associates would offset almost a million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year and deliver enough power for more than 400,000 homes.

Its location, in Horseshoe Shoal, Nantucket Sound, between 5 and 10 miles off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, is fully visible from Martha's Vineyard and Hyannis, Massachusetts, the location of the famed Kennedy compound.

This compound, in the Hyannis Port Historic District, comprises six acres of priceless waterfront property and contains three homes, one each for Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy (former U.S. Attorney General) and John Kennedy, the former U.S. president. All are deceased, but the three homes continue to be occupied, largely as summer residences, by the rest of the Kennedy family, most notably Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist whose vociferous condemnation of the project earned him negative press and a left-handed salute by Greenpeace, which pulled up alongside his protest sailboat with the sign, "You're on the wrong boat, Bobby".

The negative press was a response to Kennedy's op-ed in the New York Times, which drew the ire of such eco-notables as Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, and Russell Long, the founder of Bluewater Network and a veep at Friends of the Earth.

In spite of the Kennedy clan's opposition, the state of Massachusetts recently approved the undersea cable that would transmit the power to shore. Hurdles still to jump include state and local permitting, and approvals by U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of the Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration. The Kennedy hand weighs heavy in at least one of these three venues, where Bobby has been mentioned as both the potential head of the Interior Department and a serious contender for EPA secretary under the incoming Obama administration.

One wonders how the state of Massachusetts managed to defy this iconic family and its titular spokesman, but Cape Wind Associates insists it expects to leap the final hurdles in March of this year.

I guess we will see. I greatly admire the Kennedy family, and recognize its good works. I would hate to think its members are as corrupt as the Bush administration, which used its influence to taint, alter or abridge two decades worth of environmental safeguards.

Related Reading:
Offshore Wind Power: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Great Lakes Wind Could Supply 1/3 of US Electricity