America needs a new environmentalism

Preventing clean-energy infrastructure from being built is no way to save the planet

FILE -- A wind farm in Carbon County, Wyo., Feb. 1, 2021. To President Joe Biden, a $2 trillion infrastructure plan is about creating union jobs, hundreds of thousands of them, in wind and solar power, electric cars and road- and bridge-building. (Benjamin Rasmussen/The New York Times)Credit: New York Times / Redux / eyevineFor further information please contact eyevinetel: +44 (0) 20 8709 8709e-mail: info@eyevine.comwww.eyevine.com — Image: Eyevine

Jan 29th 2023|Medicine Bow, Wyoming

WINTER IS windy season in Wyoming. On a particularly gusty day, those brave enough to travel on the I-80 highway will find that their fingers curl in a death grip around the steering wheel as winds buffet the car. The side of the road becomes a graveyard for lorries that have been blown over. Yet the same terrifying gusts make Carbon County, of all places, an ideal site for a wind farm. PacifiCorp, the biggest utility in the American West and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway’s energy arm, operates a suite of wind farms in the county. Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who made his fortune from fossil fuels, wants to turn his Wyoming ranch into a sea of turbines.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Green v green”