Letter: Offshore wind opponents are only muddying the waters

Posted 2/8/23

A “Gish Gallop” is a debate technique where you attempt to overwhelm your opponent with an unrelenting barrage of arguments, with little regard for the truth. Using quantity over quality …

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Letter: Offshore wind opponents are only muddying the waters

Posted

A “Gish Gallop” is a debate technique where you attempt to overwhelm your opponent with an unrelenting barrage of arguments, with little regard for the truth. Using quantity over quality to blindside your unprepared opponent with an endless list of half-truths and utter nonsense is the name of the game.

Gish Gallop popped to mind when I read last week’s letter to the editor from the group Green Oceans, heralding a series of letters on the evils of offshore wind. Having seen these folks’ presentation on the topic, and having spent more time than I care to admit chasing down some of the outlandish claims, I can assure you we will be witnessing a textbook Gish Gallop right here in our newspaper’s opinion section in the coming weeks.

If this series of letters to the editor is anything like their presentation, we will all be subject to quarter-truths, wild exaggerations, and some outright dishonest stuff. You might find yourself thinking “This is all so terrible, why haven’t I heard this before?” The answer is because very few of their claims pass even the lowest journalistic standards. We should all have little patience for arguments that defy the laws of physics and rely on faulty arithmetic.

An honest accounting shows that offshore wind will produce cheaper and cleaner electricity than any other large- scale new source that could be built in our region in the next few years.

Nonetheless, you might be told in Green Ocean’s letters that wind turbines cause more pollution than combustion- based power sources and that 25 grams of carbon dioxide is larger than 500 grams of carbon dioxide.

You might be told that wind power priced at nine cents per kilowatt hour is more expensive than our existing natural gas-dominated electricity sources priced at 18 cents per kilowatt hour.

You might be told that wind turbines don’t even generate much electricity, and that on Block Island the wind turbines are broken and tourism has crashed.

You might be told that wind turbines will decimate whales and phytoplankton across the Atlantic, despite the marine biology community’s broad support for these projects.

And lastly, you might also be told that any marine biologists and environmental organizations that throw cold water on Green Ocean’s anti-wind fever dreams are bought and paid for by Big Wind, for mere thousands of dollars. If that were remotely true, and these scientists were selling their credibility to the highest bidder, at the very least Green Oceans should offer to buy them off for a few more thousand dollars.

It's never wise to try to rebut each wild claim when this absurd debate strategy is galloping at full speed. Three new preposterous tales will arise in the time you spend debunking one. That is the strategy after all. So with that in mind, just remember that you are reading these eye-popping “facts” in the Opinion section of our newspaper.

Andrew Morley

Little Compton

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Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.