Want to turn a status-quo-is-fine-with-me person into a rabid environmentalist? Mention affordable housing or renewable energy. Immediately, they care about trees, wildlife, and ecosystems.

ecoRI News, most notably former reporter Tim Faulkner, relentlessly covered the few-years-long controversy of building a fossil fuel power plant in the forested corner of northwest Rhode Island.

Pushback came from most every nook and cranny in the state. Overwhelming public opposition was the major reason why the methane/diesel-powered Clear River Energy Center proposed for Burrillville was ultimately rejected in 2019.

Missing from that fight were most if not all of the names and faces currently attached to the region’s anti-offshore-wind campaign.

The proposed power plant was going to operate three 500-megawatt natural gas/diesel turbines. At least 64 acres of forestland and some 10 wetland acres — home to rare plant and animal species and important habitat for migrating birds — were going to be lost. More climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions were going to be produced.

I went back to compare the names and email addresses that bombard us now whenever we publish a story or opinion piece about offshore wind with those who commented on our voluminous Clear River Energy Center coverage. I couldn’t find any overlap.

Pile-driving 900-foot-tall wind turbines into the ocean floor is far from ideal. It will have a considerable impact, as all energy generation does. Few, besides those whose pockets will be lined, clamor for industrializing the oceans any further.

Some 12,000 active offshore oil and gas platforms, including a few thousand in the Gulf of Mexico, exist worldwide. Beginning in the 1940s, when ocean oil drilling began in the Gulf of Mexico, the offshore fossil fuel industry expanded rapidly and rigs are now situated on the continental shelves of 53 countries, making offshore oil and gas production a major global industry, according to a 2019 research article published in the journal Frontiers.

In the United States, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management manages nearly 2,300 active oil and gas leases with some 55,000 wells across 12 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. Nearly 60% of these wells, some 32,000, are permanently or temporarily abandoned, posing serious environmental risks in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans.

In the past eight decades, some 6,000 oil and gas rigs have been installed in the Gulf of Mexico alone. These structures range in size from single well caissons in 10-foot water depths to large, complex facilities in water depths up to almost 10,000 feet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. About 3,500 structures currently stand in the Gulf of Mexico; of these, some 3,200 remain active.

The longest oil spill in U.S. history — it lasted nearly two decades — originated from an abandoned offshore well in the Gulf of Mexico, about 10 miles off the coast of Louisiana and near the mouth of the Mississippi River. A fixed offshore platform owned and operated by Taylor Energy began leaking in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan struck. It leaked oil until 2022.

International shipping makes up about 90% of the global trade in goods, with more than 50,000 container ships currently cruising the high seas. These vessels are powered by low-cost, more-polluting bunker fuel, also known as heavy fuel oil, which contains higher sulfur levels than diesel. Sulfur dioxide emissions can damage the human respiratory system, can harm trees and plants by degrading foliage and decreasing growth, and contribute to acid rain which can harm sensitive ecosystems.

What is far worse than offshore wind, however, is continuing to rely on the use of fossil fuels. If we can power society in a less polluting and just way without offshore wind, I’m all in. We could also carefully remove all those oil and gas rigs and replace them with wind turbines — the holes have already been drilled, some as deep as 2 miles.

The Energy Information Administration projects that global energy consumption — currently dominated by the burning of fossil fuels — and associated emissions will increase through 2050. Global energy consumption growth accelerated in 2023 (+2.2%), much faster than its average 2010-2019 growth rate (+1.5% a year).

The fossil fuel-controlled status quo needs to be disemboweled. This slow-to-get-going energy revolution requires responsibly sited renewables and more geothermal energy and nuclear power. It means decentralizing energy production by building systems that are localized and closer to the point of consumption. It means creating microgrids. It means canceling car culture and building a robust, reliable, and efficient public transit system.

It also will require a drastic reduction in consumption, both of energy and materials, especially by wealthy nations like the United States.

No issue more than affordable housing, though, better creates short-lived eco-warriors. The slightest possibility that municipal ordinances, especially in rural towns, could be amended to allow for the development of multifamily housing causes an immediate uproar, led by the temporary tree huggers.

Here in Portsmouth, for example, the mere mention of affordable housing causes panic among a certain segment of the Aquidneck Island community that wasn’t the least bit concerned about the pollution their useless cesspools were unleashing on coastal waters.

When town officials were considering a ban on plastic retail bags to better protect the environment, these same people loudly voiced their opposition, and blamed the plastic pollution here on bags blown in from Providence.

They also don’t want any of the capital city’s low-wealth families finding their way to Portsmouth, despite the fact all 39 cities and towns are needed, and mandated, to address the state’s appalling lack of affordable housing.

Portsmouth’s cesspool-protecting population gladly sacrificed water quality while they fought municipal sewer, because they believed it was government overreach to require them, even with financial assistance, to update their rocks-in-a-hole way of treating human waste with modern septic technology.

But when affordable housing is proposed, they quickly pivot — after spewing offensive rants about crime going up — to the environmental impact of more development leading to increased stormwater runoff that stresses drinking water supplies and causes more flooding. They also suddenly become concerned about trees being cut down and worried that the coyotes they despise will lose habitat.

(In 2021, Portsmouth voters, myself included, ignored the cesspoolers and approved the redevelopment of the dilapidated senior center property on Bristol Ferry Road into what is supposed to be affordable housing. Construction recently began.)

Meanwhile, the dense development of second homes and massive single-family residences — typically housing just two people, according to my neighborhood sources — along the East Passage of Narragansett Bay in a gated playground for the rich continues unabated and the town’s plastic bag defenders don’t say a peep.

About a mile down the road from the senior center redevelopment project that so riled the faux environmentalists, and closer to the bay, work recently began on a Willow Lane subdivision. Twenty-eight housing units, most of them single-family with a handful of duplexes, will be built on 6.4 acres in a Federal Emergency Management Agency flood zone.

The property is owned by Newport Beach Club LLC, which touts itself as “New England’s premiere waterfront residential sporting community with custom-built homes, tennis, equestrian and water sports,” and will feature more unaffordable housing — for Floridians looking to better escape hurricane season and others bored by owning just one home.

It won’t include any affordable housing, so no letters to the editor or rants at town meetings about the project’s environmental impact, despite the fact impervious surface coverage around the bay will increase and wildlife habitat will be lost.

Note: Of the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that end up in the ocean annually, only 5% of that pollution is from major spills, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The major sources for this marine contamination is oil residue from roadways and oil dumped into storm drains.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.