press clippings

VT Digger's editor Anne Galloway reported on the write-in race yesterday referring to the write-in campaigners as "NIMBY bedfellows".  Should we adopt this as the name of our group or does it sound too much like a club devoted to slumber parties?

How do they get off with this NIMBY thing?  They imply that when you flip the light switch, someone's backyard has been trashed.  Therefore it's anti-social to insist that it be someone else's backyard rather than your own.  Isn't that where they are coming from?  So that means they are leaving  no space for possible systems that don't really trash anyone's backyard, such as very localized generation like small wind turbines,  solar as a major component, etc.  The real problem is that a non-destructive system like this might not be massive enough to accommodate the needs of operations like the Jay Mtn's water slides.  Just about the biggest user of electricity in the state is the ski industry, devoted to making artificial snow and lugging tourists up the mountains and--key point--exporting most of the profits out of state.  Right up there is IBM.  Shouldn't we concentrate on the big fish, holding them to account, measuring their contribution to the state, its society and economy as against the huge amount of power they consume?

John Dillon at Vermont Public Radio did a decent balanced story on this race yesterday too.  This morning's repeat was edited down to exclude commentary from Stephanie Kaplan and thus was slanted quite differently.