Jefferson Leaning Left
by R Wiley
October 16, 2010

History is full of alliances between parties who would be most unlikely to be unified on any issue or whom you would be most unlikely to even put together in the same thought. For example, how peculiar it is for us to try to be fighting something that is being pressed upon us by the Green Party gubernatorial candidate, Howie Hawkins, and at the same time by the likes of Tom Rienbeck, Rich Edsall, Julie Gosier and Janie Hollister.

Hard-core Green Party members and Voters for Wind would both like to see a massive wind farm in Cape Vincent -- but obviously for entirely different motivations. The combination of these motivations, along with the other separate motivations of the wind developers, really create a many tentacled monster that can make you exhausted trying to do combat against.

Please take a minute to consider the recent message from New York's Green Party candidate for governor, Howie Hawkins. The uncompromising positions based on uncompromising ideology just scream out at you. His assertions about green energy job creation are simply that – – assertions. He knows that if you say that green energy will create jobs often enough people will start to believe it. It's an assertion that holds a certain amount of sway even without the benefit of any facts to back it up.

When Mr. Hawkins talks about the evils of nuclear power – – including the high cost of building nuclear power facilities – – he pays no attention to the greater cost (in dollars or carbon output) of blanketing the country with wind farms connected by a spider web of new transmission lines that would be necessary to make variable and intermittent wind power manageable and useful.

Mr. Hawkins frequently uses words like "catastrophe," "precipice, "imperative," priority, "deadly," and "disaster." But he also chooses to completely ignore the growing acknowledgment from the scientific community that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels produced from electric power generation cannot realistically be expected to be significantly reduced without greater use of nuclear power generation. Nuclear power generation simply doesn't fit with the sort of metaphysically low-impact kinder and gentler (delusional) worldview that really defines so much of the hard-core green movement. You can talk to me about atmospheric carbon dioxide and I will listen. But don't tell me my shoes should not be made of leather and V-8 engines in cars are immoral. And don't tell me I live a self-indulgent and overly consumptive, unsustainable high-impact lifestyle because I have a summer cottage that I go to miles from my other (self-indulgent) primary residence.

But don't dismiss Mr. Hawkins as some sort of fringe wacko. You may think that some of these more militant "green" attitudes and points of view are really not taken seriously and don't get factored into the larger official discussion and policy making process. Don't kid yourselves. Howie Hawkins is not going to be elected governor of New York. But many of his ideas and ways of looking at things are widely shared by people who staff many ideologically compatible special-interest organizations and who very much do make their voices heard in government circles and agencies. And believe me, there are more than a few New York State government agency employees who are in sync with an uncompromising green agenda and use every opportunity and opening they can find to incrementally push, push, push – – bit by bit by bit -- any part of that agenda that they possibly can into every internal policy memorandum, every piece of legislation, and every executive order..

You won't see these inside government green militants hanging around in their free time with Tom Rienbeck or Richard Edsall. They wouldn't have much to talk about. But for this brief moment in time they are surely (strange) bedfellows and allies.