This letter was signed by over 2000 climate activists, including Ross Gelbspan, Bill McKibben, and the Steering Committee of CCC.

 

Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Chief Prosecuting Attorney
Riverkeeper
828 South Broadway
Tarrytown, NY 10591

Dear Mr. Kennedy,

As advocates for a clean-energy future, we admire your forceful advocacy for action on global warming. We are now writing to respectfully request that you reconsider your position against the vitally important Cape Wind project. 

Cape Wind would provide roughly 75 percent of the electricity for Cape Cod. It is crucial to establishing America’s economic and environmental leadership on global warming. Cape Wind would prove the viability of wind as a good source of energy to American investors, politicians and the public, and will address issues of poverty and social justice in greater Boston.  The management of Cape Wind plans to use the abandoned Quincy Shipyard, with its deepwater port, as a manufacturing center for wind farms up and down the East Coast. That manufacturing facility would create hundreds of jobs for under or unemployed residents of the area.

Like the tens-of-thousands of other Americans in the growing movement to stop global warming, you know that addressing this crisis will require a dramatic transformation of America’s energy economy. Doing so will require more than simply buying hybrid cars and installing fluorescent light bulbs. It will require the development of a large-scale, alternative energy infrastructure capable of meeting the nation’s energy needs.

According to both the U.S. Department of Energy and a Massachusetts state energy agency, wind power could provide all the electricity used in the United States today. By contrast, the continuing use of coal-generated electricity (since coal is the most carbon-intensive of fuels) will hasten the day when large parts of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and the outer Cape are submerged by rising sea levels.

Nothing threatens the Earth’s most special places more than global warming. The changes being wrought by our warming of the atmosphere is melting the Arctic tundra, overheating the Amazon rainforest, and heating the oceans. We are, simply put, in a state of ecological emergency. Constructing windmills six miles from Cape Cod, where they will be visible as half-inch dots on the horizon is the least that we can do.

A diverse coalition of Americans, including forward-thinking CEOs, evangelical leaders, and college students, is building a hopeful future of clean-energy sources, cutting-edge technologies, and rewarding, and high-paying jobs.  The installation of the Cape Wind farm will be an important turning-point for this new grassroots movement.  

We urge you to reconsider your opposition to Cape Wind, and to support the truly hopeful movement it represents.