The Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power held a press conference on Monday, Nov. 9, stating that the destruction of Maine’s landscape for the benefit of the wind industry makes no sense and must be stopped.

The major newspapers covering the press conference attempted to provide balance to our message by referring to an opinion poll claiming that 90 percent of Mainers support wind power. This poll was commissioned by pro-wind forces and was designed to elicit a pro-wind response.

The facts about wind power have been concealed behind the propaganda that has accompanied the wind industry’s well planned assault on Maine beginning with the Governor’s “Task Force on Wind Power,” a group of appointed department heads and wind industry insiders whose mandate was to uncover and remove the obstacles to wind power development.

The “Expedited Process Wind Law” closely followed the recommendations of the Task Force, effectively making wind projects immune from legitimate criticism during the Department of Environmental Protection review process. The Legislature readily accepted the recommendations of the Task Force and approved the “Wind Law” as a Governor’s “emergency bill” with no debate and very little scrutiny only 15 days after the bill was introduced.

The Task Force agreed to a goal of 2,700 megawatts of installed land based wind turbine capacity by 2020, which means approximately 1,500 turbines on 350 miles of continuous mountain ridges, and hundreds of additional miles of access roads and transmission corridors through deep forest habitat.

For all of this destruction, only about 4 percent of the electricity consumed daily by the grid will be generated, so claims of climate benefits by the wind industry, the government and once respected environmental groups like Natural Resources Council of Maine have been grossly exaggerated.

Nor will wind power reduce consumption of oil, which is used to produce only about 2 percent of the grid’s electricity. Wind power will not reduce the use of heating oil or gasoline and such claims are intentionally misleading.

The influence that companies such as First Wind and turbine manufacturer General Electric have behind the scenes in Washington is very disturbing. First Wind recently received $40 million in federal stimulus funds for completing construction of the Stetson Wind Project.

GE owns NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC where incessant ads for renewable energy pound home a subliminal message showing turbines at a distance in wide open green prairies. Given such top-down pressure in support of wind power, public acceptance is not difficult to understand. But all that is beginning to change.

People are discovering that the majority of the giant giveaways are going directly to foreign corporations. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is calling for an investigation into the payout of millions of dollars in stimulus funds to build turbines in China for deployment in Texas. U.S. Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) is also investigating the improper payments to wind companies in New York state.

Iberdrola of Spain, which owns Central Maine Power, recently received nearly half a billion dollars in stimulus funds for the “green jobs” it supposedly has created. Where is Senator Snow’s and Collins’ outrage at this misuse of our grandchildren’s tax obligations?

While the misuse of tax dollars to support this industry is appalling, even more egregious is the wind industry’s insistence on placing turbines too close to people’s homes, subjecting them to noise induced sleep deprivation and a cascade of medical problems. These problems are identical to what is reported around the world, but denied by the wind industry in much the same way the tobacco and asbestos industries denied the dangers of their products.

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention has turned medical ethics upside down by ignoring health complaints from the first two wind projects in Mars Hill and Freedom. Today it was reported that similar noise problems have surfaced at the recently constructed wind project in Vinalhaven.

No matter how one feels about the appearance of turbines or the need to replace fossil fuels, there is no justification for permitting the wind industry to impact anyone’s health and well-being. The complicity of the agencies that are supposed to protect the health and welfare of Maine’s citizens can no longer be tolerated.

Wind power is a false promise and the sooner we pull the plug the better off we will be. It is time for the governor, the legislature and the NRCM to admit they made a mistake, correct it and move on with a sensible agenda for Maine’s energy future. The Citizens’ Task Force on Power was formed to work at every level to achieve that goal.