Maine media sellouts on Windpower: the worst and the dumbest

Top down winner has always been the Working Waterfront tabloid emanating from the Island Institute. Now that the Island Institute and some of its board members are deep into the financial trough of corporate welfare that the federal government is doling out in great dollops to the wind extraction industry, it is no longer so caring about the feisty Maine islanders that  the 'Tute has long made its bread and butter on.  Under the bus the islanders go, along with all windsprawl malcontents.

The Portland Press Herald is next. Tux Turkel  & Ethan Wilensky-Lanford  will NOT mention any opposition to ocean wind farming. Fishermen? What? Maine has fishermen? They don't want windfarms? Yawn. Sorry, Tux et al can't cover that point of view; doesn't fit the spin from corporate welfare types  that all windmilling is good windmilling  


The PPH an d its satellite Kennebeck Journal  will also stupidly persist in writing that the bill is about "nearshore" windmilling, when it is most assuredly about "offshore" windmillery.

There are many other examples of witless windhuggery among the members of Maine's 4th estate.  Someone's gotta educate the news scibblers.

Stay tuned.

Maine first state to ban ocean windfarming. Media yawns.

Sometimes reporters just don't grasp the big picture. Not surprising, as beleaguered journalists  find themselves covering ever more stories per day, and  with time enough only to assemble enough facts and a hook to fill a news hole, then off to the next. But this story seemed extraordinary. A case of not seeing  the forest for all the trees. First the backstory:

On March 24, 2010 By unanimous vote, the Maine Legislature's Utilities and Energy Committee sent a final version of LD 1810."An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's Ocean Energy Task Force", to the floor where it is expected to pass without difficulty and be signed by Governor Baldacci.

The bill  prohibits windfarming in state waters and directs would-be ocean windmill investors to join in an effort to build  floating offshore wind turbines in Maine and then tow them ten miles and further from shore for deployment in federal and EEZ waters.  

The decision to refrain from windfarming in state waters came after intense opposition from lobsterimen, groundfishermen, scallopers and shrimpers, objecting to the threatened  leasing away of their irreplaceable commercial fishing grounds  to absentee power utilities.

The bill also proposes  that the state market deep offshore wind as a special kind of "green ocean energy" that doesn't harm scenery and property values like  land-based wind farms do in Maine. 

The writer for the Kennebec Journal & Portland Press Herald, E

than Wilensky-Lanford,

 

made only the barest passing reference to the former and focused instead on the latter: the state wanting to persuade Maine business and academia to buy higher priced power that the offshore wind farm would generate  

The rather astonishing victory by fishermen, windjammers and other coastal interests in preventing  the closing of the state's marine commons is almost dismissed by

 Wilensky-Lanford's article. In hi article  Panel backs near-shore wind, tide power bill 

 he  wrote: "The bill set short-term goals of developing near-shore wind power, but now is more focused on deep-water projects.

"

Such understatement! the reader cannot tell from this article that there will be no windfarming in Maine state waters,. Can they?  

Tut tut, Ethan.

Tux sux once again - completely misses the big story

Get this: There was a legislative hearing. Unexpectedly the chair of another committee comes to the hearing and tells the committee to throw out its big bill and do it over. This is echoed by the speaker of the house. Both are impelled by a wave of angry communications from their constituents. 

Tux yawns. 

This concerns of course LD 1810, An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Governor's Ocean Energy Task Force.   But Tux has been given his marching orders: the story will be about the heating oil industry being ticked about the wheareases that call for phasing out their polluting industry over time.

This is exciting! Tux thinks. Angry oilmen! Easy story! Tux grins. Simple work.

But in the intersest of illuminating what Tux clouded with his witless prose...Here's what happened:

In the 36 hours before the hearing on LD 1810, members, of the Utility and Energy Committee said, they had heard loud and clear from Maine fishermen about their extreme displeasure with the notion of this bill opening up Maine state waters to nearshore commercial windfarms, pushing scallopers shrimpers & groundfishermen out.  

Then  Representative Leila Percy, co-chair of the Marine Resources Committee, lets the Untily and Energy Committee know both that the bill  threatened Maine fishermen and was not acceptable, and that she spoke for Speaker of the House Hannah Pingree (who couldn't be there)  on this as well.

As the TV cameras rolled, and energy lobbyists reeled in dismay,  the Utility and Energy  committee switched from unqualified support for LD 1810, to considering two alternatives: either 

(1) turning LD 1810 into a Resolve, and shipping it round  to other legislative committees and commercial fishing communities next year before taking any action, or 

(2)  removing from the bill all wording related to anything that would facilitate  commercial windfarm operations in Maine state waters.


Uh...Tux?  


Nope. The Tuxter didn't find that newsworthy.   Fishermen are so...old economy.  So passe'.  Turkel instead gapes at the twinkle and shine of the windmills, whose lobbyists glitter with wealth and political connection.  Fishermen be damned.

Under option 2 the bill would continue with sections that give the wind industry tax breaks and immunizes it from a variety of conservation and environmental laws, also known as  "streamlining"  the laws.  "Streamlining? More like amputating the law," one conservation  activist grumped to the committee,  and the room filled with uneasy laughter.

Also remaining in the altered LD 1810  would be a controversial "Welfare Wind" section, This part of the bill forces Mainers to subsidize the wind industry by requiring electricity utilities to purchase wind-generated power for triple what they pay Bangor Hydro and other  electricity providers,  but then allows the utilities  to pass  the increased cost on to Maine consumers.

The oil heating industry also showed up in opposition to LD 1810  In particular, they opposed a section that calls for phasing their industry out of the home and commercial heating business and requiring Maine consumers to use electricity for heating.  

While oil and lobsters don't mix well in nature, in Augusta they may together push LD 1810, and the energy industry behind it, far away from its original goals.  


But for Tux, this would interfere with the official marching orders to glorify the wind industry at all costs.

Village Soup: blowing the wind story. Again.

 In Sharing the bottom: Maine Fishermen's Forum looks at wind energy, Rockland Herald Gazette/VillageSoup reporter Shlomit Auciello has again indulged in her Khruschev-like excision from the picture of some of the chief participants in the story:  This time covering a meeting on a plan to fill state nearshore waters with windmills. The reporter quotes only from the wind industry and its governmental supporters. Where are the fishermen in the story?  There was a furious roomful, I was there, Auciello was there. the fishhermen and their leaders were there. Last time she ignored the chief litigant in the offshore wind plan of the state in her story on University of Maine's offshore wind plan. Lawsuit? What lawsuit?

Why were none of them in her "coverage"?  Apparently the editorial policy of the Herald Gazette and its Village Soup owners is to censor out any dissenters to uncontrolled land-rush windfarm expansion into Maines nearshore and offshore waters.  Existing users be damned, no matter how many centuries they've fished and sailed here. And the fishermen are furious, as Auciello would know by contacting the commercially fishing  members of her local community. She instead, threw the fishing industry under the bus

She giave her readers a false impression of what happened at this imnportant event, what it means for people living on the coast  and who wins and loses with upcoming legislation that would open entire Maine coast to windfarms.

Just another surgical strike on truth, by the Rockland Herald gazette