Since April, New Yorkers have watched two environmental
disasters in two different parts of the country with sadness and
horror. On April 5, an accident at the Upper Big Branch coal
mine in West Virginia killed 29 people. And, on April 20, 11
people died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion -- a disaster
that has sent as much oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico every
four to five days as was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident of
1989. Both these events provide potent reminders of the dangers
and risks of our addiction to fossil fuels to power our
vehicles, homes and businesses. If New York needed a wake-up
call for cleaner energy sources, these two accidents should ring
our alarms loudly and clearly. Amid this flood of disastrous
environmental news, one piece of progress was reported on April
28. On that date, the U.S. Department of Interior approved the
first-ever, utility-scale offshore wind energy project -- the
Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound -- after a nine-year
federal review process. This process