Part 3, Pseudo-science.

 I’m sure civilization has been dealing with pseudo-science since alchemy. This latest round I believe may have started in the 70’s and 80’s with the hysteria about nuclear power. Perhaps even earlier with DDT. Remember The Silent Spring. Clearly people were using DDT incorrectly and over too much ground. But even today, when we know how much DDT would help African nations where children are dying of malaria, we can’t seem to get over it and produce some for limited usage.

As for nuclear power we need to build small plants of all the exact design like the French. And we need to send the spent fuel rods to the salt mine facility in Nevada. No solution to our energy problems is perfect.

Which brings me to the current hysteria about wind turbines on Cape Cod. Pseudo-science is everywhere in this debate. The vegetable oil lubricant in the turbines is hazardous. Every sensible study says no, not true. People within a mile of the turbine can’t sleep because of the noise and the “flicker” gives them seizures. Sound tests in the complainant’s homes indicate the sound can’t even be heard. And on and on.

A manufacturing business in an isolated area of the Cape wants to build a wind turbine to ease some of the burden of its electric costs. Those costs are higher on the Cape than anywhere else in Massachusetts for reasons no one can decipher. Businesses regularly leave the area looking for lower energy prices. This manufacturing company gets the necessary approvals since no one lives nearby. But a woman whose house sits a mile away, she is not even an abutter, sues stating that the tower will ruin her view. Here the housing investment hysteria and the pseudo-science hysteria meet. The business is told to forget about it unless they can prevail in court. The lady involved seeks out others and they launch a group committed to stopping all wind turbines in the area. They find a professor with no credentials or training in this subject who says all the pseudo-science claims are true. They stop wind turbines in Bourne and at the local community college. They shut one down, already built for millions of dollars in Falmouth, because one old neighbor claims it makes him crazy. It’s at the sewage treatment plant. This fellow lives near the sewage treatment plant and he’s worried about the value of his property.

The big wind turbine development on Nantucket Sound has been held up by one appeal or another for 15 years. When one claim of the opponents, they will kill birds for example, is shown to be untrue by proper studies they shift to another.

We have reached a point in this country where anything that changes the status quo is opposed for hysterical and unproven reasons. Whether the proposal is for soccer fields, a public library, a wind turbine or a new house, someone sues to stop it.

The country cannot succeed in addressing the many, mutual concerns of the future if we continue to allow a small minority to stop all progress. Other countries have moved years ahead of us in health care, energy independence, manufacturing, infrastructure development as we have consistently allowed projects to be stymied by lunatics.

Could we build the interstate highway system today? Will we ever move forward?