OUR VIEW: Power to the people?

It’s an emotional issue that must not be dealt with emotionally.
Good luck with that.
The real problem is that the contrarians’ emotions are all too often their only, or at least main, arguments. Not that it has to be that way. There are plenty of good, logical arguments for opposing a coal-fired power plant proposed by Dominion Virginia Power. And there are good reasons for those who live along the Interstate 81 corridor to research the issue and pick a side. After all, weather and air generally move from west to east. Wise County, where the plant would be built, is west of the I-81 corridor, which means any pollutants it creates would mean pollutants for residents along that corridor.
The Bristol Herald Courier reported that about 50 people, many from area colleges, filed into Washington County to protest the Wise County plant on Friday. The newspaper described the group, Mountain Justice Summer, as carrying windmill replicas and signs that read things like “Honk If You Love Mountains.” The implication there, that you cannot love mountains and support the mining of coal from them, is part of the reason we as a culture are doomed to never understand anyone’s point but our own, if we even understand that.
One man, who refused to provide his name for the Bristol Herald Courier article, got as close as anyone to framing the debate in its correct terms. “I ain’t for pollution,” he reportedly said, “but we’ve got to have some electricity around here.”
Those protesting the proposed plant would counter that “coal is over.” If that’s true, what do we replace it with? Wind and solar? Good luck with that, too. It seems that the anti-coal crowd’s colleagues’ are already laying the groundwork to rope the wind.
A Richmond Times-Dispatch article said that several counties in Southwest Virginia, including Bland, are busy crafting land-use regulations to better control where and even if wind turbines could be built. Others, including Giles and Pulaski, have already instituted a process that would allow landowners to build single turbines but does not, according to the Times-Dispatch, “open the door wider for commercial wind farms.” The moves, and the protest, notably, come after a controversial approval of a 19-turbine wind farm in Highland County.
Our guess is that if coal was killed and turbines started dotting our region’s ridgelines, those 50 students and other green warriors would be marching again, with posters that asked “How Many Migratory Birds Did You Kill Today?” and big posters of windmills inside a circle and covered with a big red slash. The environmentally concerned, as we’ve seen in the case of some of the Kennedy clan, become the environmentally challenged when windmill builders begin to tilt near their backyards. The students would likely be joined by fiscal conservatives, decrying the not-unsubstantial cost – at taxpayer expense, of course.
Meanwhile, the groups will continue arguing without ever trying to truly understand. No energy source is perfect. Wind isn’t. Nor is coal, even when hypothetically scrubbed. Nor is hydro-electric. Anytime a body of water is dammed, there’s going to be consequences, from loss of species to silting to dead zones. And don’t even mention nuclear. To anyone. Ever. At times, with no satisfactory energy replacement, it seems that the opposition is there mainly to oppose, not create, and would be more satisfied if everyone – except for them, of course – were sitting in the dark, hopefully in caves, dressed in the skins of animals that had lived long and happy lives and died of old age on an organically grown pasture.