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Hey Ishmael, Tell Me About Our Crazy Captain Tilting at Windmills and Hot Air Spin [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-10

I’m back on the road, heading for Frances Perkins’ old home to complete my final national park unit in the lower 48. I had a great summer eating lobster and looking at boats from my inflatable dinghy. [In case the ‘help desk’ is reading again, I have absolutely no intention of adding any footnotes or bibliography to this, so sue me.]

Before Drake started the modern oil industry, American energy came from whale oil, and that meant boom times in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The voyages often took years and were very dangerous. Many of the old homes in the city still have widows’ walks on their roofs where desperate spouses would watch the sea and wait in vain for their family’s ship to come home.1

The first colonial settlers moved here in 1652, and the fishing & whaling industry hired folks from around the world, especially Portuguese, Madeiran and Cape Verdean immigrants. America was founded later. Escaped slaves could easily find work in the city, and one chose the name Frederick Douglass soon after arriving and before he began giving speeches. Racists being who they are, the Confederates sent the CSS Shenandoah (unrelated to the beautiful eponymous ship above) around the world during the Civil War to capture whaling ships and take their black crewmen back to slavery (even some men never previously enslaved). The last act of that war was when the slave-catching ship finally surrendered in London, seven months after Appomattox. (Yeah, look it up yourself).

Anyways, suffice it to say that the folks in New Bedford have seen it all and have been through a lot. Ishmael met Queequeg in an inn here before joining the crew of the Pequod in Nantucket, or so the story goes. Their captain was a complete nutter, obsessed with white power, I believe. Of course, there’s no way to reverse the progress towards more sensible energy in the long run, but that doesn’t stop madmen from making everyone suffer before they become tangled in their own lines and are finally dragged under.

After whaling, the city diversified into mills, employing many poor women and children, working 12-14 hour days. Those mills were still profitable for many years after the industry here went into decline. One young investor considered the mills undervalued cash cows. According to a descendent I knew, a primary Yankee owner of Hathaway mills was too cheap to take stock in the young guy’s new company and insisted on being paid in cash. That may have been the worst investing decision ever, as Warren Buffett began his firm Berkshire Hathaway with that stake in the New Bedford textile mill.2

Scallops have since made New Bedford the most valuable fishing port in the US— no, I’m not footnoting that fact either —, although Attenborough’s film Ocean made me lose my taste for them a bit. Anyways, unemployment never really recovered after the mills shut down. Until the wind turbines arrived. The same huge shoals offshore where scallops live underwater are perfect for huge wind offshore wind farms with regular high winds, reasonable depths and within relatively easy landfall for electric cables to major population centers in New York and New England. Big contracts were signed for hundreds of giant turbines to be built, and employment surged.

You have to understand that New Bedford has a fairly large amount of public housing, low educational attainment and poverty, especially compared to the rest of the Bay State. We also have fascinating history, fantastic clam chowder and $13 lobster rolls—true, but again I’m not footnoting—. And we have a great deal of cultural pride. In the middle of every summer, the city shuts down for 4 days for the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, there are games for kids in the streets, loud music, many folks drink a surprising amount of Madeira wine, and we have the largest Portuguese parade in the world. I love it. Then many of the Portuguese shops and restaurants shut down for the month of August, as the owners go back to see relatives in Portugal. Not great for the economy, but again, great for culture.

Another thing I’m not going to footnote is the commonly held view that the local government is corrupt, including elected representatives and leaders of the police department.3 But that’s another story, involving racism and abuse of power. In any case, everyone seemed to be making money off of the wind turbines. European firms with years of experience in the North Sea brought their engineering to New Endland. Locals assembled the huge 5 part towers and blades. Barges would carry them out to sea, with the towers vertically gimballed during transit. Bubble curtains would be blown to insulate the sound of drilling into the sea bed. And the turbines would start producing electricity. The turbine bases formed artificial reefs supporting a rebound in the local fisheries. Vineyard Wind is one such company, and you can read about the status of the various projects here.4

Clean, carbon-free energy from capturing the wind, powering millions of homes, with infrastructure that pays for itself many times over time. What’s not to like? Of course, since rich people’s IQ is inverse to their wealth, a bunch of Fox News viewers on Nantucket sued last year over a broken blade that had a few pieces of insulation wash up on a beach. Instead of worrying about climate change eroding their million dollar homes into the ocean, they complain and lie about the wind turbines, claiming that they ruin their views (despite not being visible from shore), that they cause cancer (not true), that Portuguese manufacturing was unreliable (the turbines are Danish), etc. Which of course caused the extremely expensive project to halt for no reason, even though many of the turbines were complete and producing valuable energy flawlessly.

And then more Fox viewers elected Ahab-Quixote. Now, Deepwater Horizon-esque oil leases are being handed out like candy and wind turbine permits are being canceled wholesale. More lawsuits have ensued, and the Supreme Court will no doubt bow to Tyranny and Idiocy, once again. Why on God’s green earth are former fiscal conservatives picking losers over winners in our once free market economy? I have no idea, but it’s a colossal waste of taxpayer money that adds massive uncertainty to the local economy and will undoubtedly drive cascading unemployment in New Bedford and beyond, far quicker than any new leaking oil platforms can be built.

I suppose Wall Street believes that somehow AI will fix everything by eliminating more pesky employment. There’s too much craziness in the news today to keep track of everything, but I’m going to keep posting here when time allows. As always, let me know when I get something wrong, so I can correct it. And please don’t complain to the help desk about my lack of footnotes just because I tried to tell you something that you didn’t know was true. Thanks.

CF

1 Seriously? I said there would be absolutely zero footnotes.

2 I’m not kidding. Look it up yourself.

3 OK, I know I said I wouldn’t, but in the interests of supporting local journalism, you can read some sordid details in the pages of The New Bedford Light .

4 Don’t tell the help desk I sent you to that very helpful free link with colorful maps and numerous up to date facts.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/10/2342833/-Hey-Ishmael-Tell-Me-About-Our-Crazy-Captain-Tilting-at-Windmills-and-Hot-Air-Spin?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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