Cape & Islands News

How Kennedy stopped the wind

A nod and a wink at a Senator's wife's funeral killed Cape Wind
April Fool's Day suggestion by a conservative old lion

The Boston Globe today reveals the specific whisper on the way to a graveyard which lead to a deal between the Senate's #1 Artic Oil promoter and Massachusett's #1 environmentalist.

The story states that it all happened at a funeral on April Fool's Day,

As Kennedy filed out of Memorial Baptist Church in Arlington, Va., another colleague of nearly four decades, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, approached him and offered a favor.

Stevens, an irascible conservative Republican, told Kennedy, the stalwart liberal Massachusetts Democrat, that he'd figured out a way to block the wind farm proposed for the waters off Cape Cod: Stevens would insert a provision in a sure-to-pass bill funding the Coast Guard that would give the state's governor the ability to veto the project.

''That sounds fine," Kennedy recalled replying, in what he said was a five-second conversation.

 The Globe goes on to state that Kennedy reminded Stevens of the plan a few days later.

But this was not the first time the Massachusetts Senator had used his mastery of US Senate rules and favor-tradiung to try to protect the view from his Hyannisport  Compound;

The bill Kennedy teamed up with Stevens on was the culmination of an extensive -- though mostly behind-the-scenes -- campaign by Kennedy to block the 130-turbine project that would tower over the water just a few miles from his home in Hyannis Port. At least twice previously in recent years, he has worked quietly with Republican senators to delay or halt the project through other avenues.

Environmentalists across the country, as well as many other leading Senators on both sides of the aisle, strongly criticize the so-called Steven Amendment which was tacked onto the completed $12 billion dollare Coast Guard Reauthorization Bill after it had been accepted by both houses of congress.

"Dark side of his bipartisan organizing power"

Seth Kaplan, a senior attorney at the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, told The Globe, ''It's the dark side of his bipartisan organizing power. We have to be building wind power turbines. It is tragic for a master of the Senate like Ted Kennedy to be standing in the way of this most important of movements."

cribing other US Senators opposed to this stealth amendment, John McCain, Peter Demenici, etc., the story reminds readers of the other times Senator Kennedy has used his decades of power in Washington to stop the same project;

In 2003, he worked with Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, to try to amend an energy bill with a provision that would have given any governor veto power over offshore wind farms... In 2004, Kennedy supported an effort by John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that would have indefinitely delayed the Cape Wind project by suspending all applications for offshore wind farms until Congress produced a set of guidelines for such projects.

The complete story in today's Globe is here.