“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 174

ready to replace traditional fossil-fuel-i red electricity across the United
States without incurring large costs and confronting big unknowns.

m m m

For many who care about the environment, though, the i xation on
carbon emissions itself appears to be misguided. Laura Israel, a docu-
mentary i lmmaker, took time to come to this conclusion when wind
developers moved into the small New York town where she had spent
her weekends for twenty years. “I have a lit le log cabin in the woods,”
she told me; “I just go there to look at stars. It's practically of the grid
anyway. So when I heard about wind turbines, I thought great! It would
be perfect.”
But there was controversy brewing in the town. Neighbors were
i ghting with the wind companies over leases. h ey were also i ghting
with each other over whether the massive turbines belonged so close
to people's homes. “I work at a place that does a lot of green program-
ming,” Israel explained to me over cof ee, nearly i ve years later. She
was wearing a black l ower print shirt and spoke with a mix of calm
and punctuated excitement. “h ere was a producer in the oi ce and
he was doing something on wind energy.” She became worried that
he was only looking at its upside. “And I said to him, 'You know you
might want to look a lit le bit more into the story. You might want to
talk to some people who are going through this.'” It made sense given
what she saw. “And he started shouting at me . . . 'Do you want a coal
plant? Do you want a nuclear plant? You should not investigate this.
You shouldn't be looking into this. You shouldn't be doing this.'” h at
was enough to convince Israel, then just shy of i t y, that there was
something to see. In 2010, her independent documentary i lm Windfall
made its festival premiere.
h e scenes in it reminded me of the fracking i ght around Athens,
Ohio, and of the anti-shale-gas movie Gasland that had shaken up
the energy world. Every theme was an echo: farmers against urban-
ites, corporate secrecy, money pit ing neighbor against neighbor, and
unexpected consequences tearing a town apart. (In another parallel,
the story for Promised Land , the Mat Damon movie about fracking