In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, community leaders, including Elizabeth Yeampierre, of uprose, were part of a push toward a new clean-energy model for the waterfront, through the development of an offshore wind project. Now, such a project will be built by the Norwegian oil company Equinor. As Inside Climate News reports, the waterfront’s “73 acres of cracked concrete and rusting fences will be cleared away and replaced with the modern port that will anchor the burgeoning offshore wind industry. Crumbling bulkheads will be shored up to support 200-foot cranes. The decrepit piers, which look out over Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be reinforced to hold turbine blades as long as football fields.”
Amy Coney Barrett Should Recuse Herself from Big Oil’s Supreme Court Case
While we’re on the theme of taking on Philistines, Geoff Dembicki, at the Canadian publication the Tyee, gives the best account I’ve read of how upstart Brooklyn community groups managed to fight off plans for luxury development and preserve the South Brooklyn waterfront as an industrial space “where people could earn decent salaries building the wind turbines, solar panels and low-carbon technology necessary for a Green New Deal.” Dembicki quotes Elizabeth Yeampierre, one of the heroes of the fight: “We would say it isn’t David and Goliath. It was David and five Goliaths.”