You didn’t have to be Pythagoras to determine the motivation behind the Liberals’ pulling the chute on offshore windfarms was purely political. It had to be the easiest conclusion to draw since Bligh deduced his crew wasn’t fond of him.

What remains to be seen is whether it was political genius or folly.

We might suspect the Liberals have done an incredibly stupid thing. They went unabashedly hard on promoting alternatives to fossil fuel-generated electricity, to the point of offering more money to people to generate it than they will receive from the people who use it. They unilaterally excluded municipalities from the approval process, lest their sense of urgency not be shared.

To place a moratorium on offshore wind projects after being so gung-ho — and do so not because either of those things was wrong, but because there is insufficient science to support them — seems outrageous, because there’s no less science now than there was when the Liberals were going full speed ahead in the name of ending our reliance on coal-fired generators.

Skeptics aren’t ready to credit them with sudden enlightenment, but history might.

For now, their political opponents can let the Liberals stew in their own juice but it’s an election year and eventually they’ll have to throw something into the pot themselves, and then we’ll see how palatable the green energy broth is to electors.

Will the Tories come out in support of offshore wind, just to be distinct from the Liberals? At what political price? Can the NDP and Greens, who fundamentally oppose both fossil fuel and nuclear options, keep any claim to the moral — i.e. green — high energy ground if they oppose offshore wind, too?

By the time the other parties discover there is no universally popular position on energy, they may realize the Liberals were brilliant to be both champion and the voice of caution.

That’s of small comfort to the Windstream folks who had time and money invested in the project off Wolfe Island — until, of course, such time that it’s politically expedient to lift the moratorium.

via Killing offshore wind farms could be genius or folly – The Whig Standard – Ontario, CA.