And the award for best producer of April, 2010’s weirdest news goes to Planet Earth. In his poem "The Waste Land", T.S. Eliot wrote, "April is the cruelest month." April 2010 saw ice on fire in Iceland as a volcano thrust Western Europe under a cloud of ashen spew, while sundry earthquakes and extreme weather in diverse place were so numerous that they often only got second billing and brief sound bites. Humans were perhaps trying to trump the planet’s mayhem by creating a monstrous oil blob of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, that was, for a brief time, aflame. However, the month ended with one bright spot: The approval of the long embattled Cape Wind offshore wind farm near Cape Cod, Massachusetts — America’s first offshore wind farm.
I wrote an in depth article for my website about this project and the fight to stop it when that fight began in 2003. The article focused on how General Electric, a company with a poor environmental record, was getting into the renewable energy business. The article was entitled: "Green Change or Hot Wind at GE?" Here’s a reposting of that article to give you a history of our first offshore wind farm and how it came to be:
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2010.