From NIMBY to BANANA: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody"

Eco-Hypocrites II « John Stossel

California's Mojave Desert was to be the site of 13 solar plants and wind farms -- creating those "green energy" jobs that we're told will save both the planet and the economy. But Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein plans to prevent that with a bill to block development of a million acres of the Mojave. The New York Times quotes a well-known environmentalist who has a problem with that.

This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area.

That's the same Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who wrote an editorial in the New York Times protesting the construction of a wind farm off his family's compound on Nantucket Sound. His uncle, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, tied up the Cape Wind project for years with costly regulatory challenges. Curiously, the Times doesn’t mention that.

The Heritage Foundation says the "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) crowd is everywhere.

It’s not just anti-oil and anti-coal, it’s anti-energy and anti-development.

Even with subsidies, tax breaks and mandates, shifting our energy away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy will be a prohibitively costly and difficult task. Senator Feinstein is about to make it that much more difficult.

In some places the attitude has moved beyond NIMBY to BANANA -- Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.

Apparently these eco-hypocrites only want to save the world if solar and wind farms are built where they cannot see them.