John Stossel's 'Give Me a Break'

ByABC News
July 23, 2003, 3:01 PM

July 25 -- It's windy enough on Massachusetts' Nantucket Sound — the waters between Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard — that it makes the Sound an ideal idea place for windmills that generate electricity.

Wind farms are popular in Europe and California, and environmentalists like them because they're a relatively clean way to produce electricity. It's a reason Jim Gordon proposes to install 130 wind turbines 6 ½ miles off the coast of Cape Cod.

But there's a problem.

Although the Natural Resources Defense Council, and its attorney, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., support wind power (Kennedy says he's "strongly in favor of wind-energy production at sea,") Kennedy doesn't want a wind farm on Nantucket Sound, where his family might see it from their elegant compound in Hyannis Port.

Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite doesn't want Gordon's wind farm here either. Cronkite likes to sail on Nantucket Sound. He did a commercial for a group that's fighting the wind farm. In it, he says, "Our natural treasures should be off limits to industrialization and Nantucket Sound is one of those treasures."

His ad was paid for by the Alliance to Protect the Sound, which also supports wind power, but not on Nantucket Sound

The group's president, Isaac Rosen, complains that the developers will "make a fortune," and says, "I think building turbines, building machinery in an area where people go to get away from industry, to get away from machinery is wrong."

Is a wind farm is going to wreck that?

"I think building turbines, building machinery in an area where people go to get away from industry, to get away from machinery is wrong," Rosen said.

Gordon disagrees. He says his opponents "just don't want to live with a half-inch view off the horizon of wind turbines."

Rosen says Gordon and the developers are "trying to say, again, that it's just a bunch of rich people who are concerned with their views."

Don't they have a point?

Rosen said, "I think, you know, rich people and poor people have a right to our public resources."