July 20, 2011 | 4:20 PM | By

RFK Jr.’s Cape Wind stance called “utter hypocrisy”

Michael Conathan, Director of Ocean Policy for the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, takes aim at RFK Jr.’s apparent embrace of hydroelectric power.


It is simply impossible to portray Kennedy’s latest salvo in the ongoing battle over Cape Wind as anything less than utter hypocrisy. Kennedy suggests that the project, which has undergone more than a decade of environmental and economic review, could be supplanted by “renewable” power from Canadian hydroelectricity – the same alternative that has been proposed to replace Vermont Yankee’s nuclear energy. And yet in 2004 as a senior attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, Kennedy penned a piece titled “Hydro is Breaking Our Hearts.” His article lamented that hydro development in Canada had “turned pristine rivers into power corridors, ancient lakes into holding tanks, and a sacred homeland into an industrial complex.”

— thinkprogress.org