NIMBYs vs. Tower near the Museum of Modern Art
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9MXtDWx4hg

The band called "The Vandals" states it is hard core punk.

Today is a great day for your small renewable power start-up. You started with a passion for clean technology, concern for the environment, and an idea. That idea became a business plan and in turn an artist's rendering. You located a prime property, found the best materials, and now your financing has come through. Your idea is a real business.

You want to shout it from the rooftops: tell your friends, tell your family, tell your other investors, vendors, and utility partners. But, what about the guy next door? The guy who will watch your contractors (and all their trucks) arrive and begin to dig, pour concrete, erect a monopole, raise the blades and set your turbine spinning. The guy who is concerned about what your pole will mean to his home's value, the quiet tranquility of his morning walks, the light that he gets in his favorite reading chair, and a host of other things: after all, he has never been neighbor to a wind turbine before.

Nah...you'll wait on telling him. Well, there is your first mistake.


Early Identification is the Foundation of Your Community Engagement Strategy

What have you got to gain by holding off on telling your new "neighbor?" Too often, project developers make the mistake of waiting for the time to be "right" before engaging project opponents. More on engagement is coming in tomorrow's installment, but early identification is critical to how you begin and manage the whole community process.

You have to know who is out there. Finding that out might tip your hand, but the fact is that you are not going to sneak your project by anyone anyway. Trying to keep the lid on for too long can be just as costly as taking it off to soon, because it creates mistrust and creates an atmosphere of conflict.

De Facto Opponents

The goal of your community engagement process will be to turn potential opponents into allies. Nonetheless, while it is pretty easy to guess at who might be opposed, you have to do the work. Going into any permitting or other post-conception phase of your project without having as much information as you can get on "where the bodies are buried" would be foolish and will be cos

- Start with public records and determine who lives nearby. Do they own the property? If not, who does? Also, it may seem obvious to some, but make sure you know the local political players. Whose district are you about to dig up? Are the abutters his most loyal supporters? Are they on the state party committee? Are they voters at all? All of that data is available in the public record.

- Next, take some time to reconnoiter local boards, committees, municipal bodies and other stakeholders. Who is on the conservation commission in town? Are there any particularly active or well-connected civic groups or business associations? How has the town responded to development proposals in the past?

Armed with this info, you can begin to formulate a communications and engagement strategy. One size does not fit all, so you need to have the whole lay of the land.

Broaden the Discussion

Too often, project proponents are focused on the downside of community engagement, don't forget the flip side.

- Who will build your project? Labor is often among the most well-organized and influential groups in community and political debate at the community level. We will touch on how you can leverage their support on Wednesday in our section on "third voice integration."

- Along the same lines, look for partners among burgeoning grassroots green groups. Across the country, climate action groups are making themselves and their key issue (climate change) more relevant in local political discourse.

[...] the article continues on: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2009/09/powering-past-nimby-

By Joe Walsh. Read more

The handbook of public affairs
By Phil Harris, Craig S. Fleisher

1. Voter Rationality in Space: The Paradox of NIMBY Voting on Jessica’s Law
2. Examining the Issues Behind NIMBY Positions Society: For seven years, UCI assistant professor has studied opposition
3. Local Leader Fights NIMBY
4. NIMBY Then and Now: Land-Use Conflict in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1876–1900
5. NIMBY localism and national inequitable exclusion alliances: The case of syringe exchange programs in the United States
6. Wind power and the NIMBY-myth: institutional capacity and the limited institutional capacity and the limited significance of public support
7. Absentees, Libertarians and NIMBY

Source: http://www.suboxonemilwaukee.com/no-more-nimby/

As the financial crisis continues to take its toll on the global economy, another serious challenge looms large: preventing the planet from warming more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Policymakers are now faced with the daunting task of stimulating growth without using carbon-intensive practices and stabilizing the climate without dampening economic recovery. If the financial crisis has shown that the future is unpredictable and that the nations and people of the world are interconnected in ways we do not always perceive, the climate challenge reinforces these lessons and suggests the need for timely, global coordination. View Larger

In advance of the 15th annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen this December, world leaders will convene at a number of high-level forums in the hopes of building consensus around key elements of a post-2012 climate change agreement. These forums include the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh and an all-day dialogue with the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on September 22 in advance of the General Assembly meeting. World Bank President Robert Zoellick will bring together finance and development ministers in October emphasizing that climate change is not only an environmental issue, but also one that affects economic and financial stability. With the need to get policies right in short order, Brookings experts and colleagues from the public and private sectors offer a range of recommendations for policymakers to forge sustainable climate change solutions that revitalize the global economy and alleviate the adverse effects of a changing climate on the world’s poor.

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"NIMBY wars and citizen engagement are here to stay. Politics, rational and irrational, often dramatically impact local land use decisions. This book outlines the strategies and details the tactics that are used by opponents and proponents of projects. Illustrated with examples and real life situations, the book offers the opportunity to plan ahead and gain support for good projects before they are overtaken by fear mongering and opponents." --Maureen McAvey, Executive Vice President, Urban Land Institute

NIMBY WARS perfectly captures the aura and flavor of the highly charged zoning public hearing. This analysis of the politics, the theater, the motivations and the strategies for zoning matters is spot on. Opposition to development has become so pervasive, that a primer on the subject is valuable even to the most seasoned and experienced land use practitioner. NIMBYism will never go away. In this book, we now have a road map for dealing with it. --Steve Elrod, Partner, Holland and Knight: Chairman, National Land Use Team

The old ways may have been good enough before, but they don t work now. Set aside conventional wisdom and embrace land use politics the compelling approach these gifted consultants detail in this clearly written guidebook will give you the skill set you need to be a victor in land use battles. --Attorney, Dwight Merriam, Author of the Complete Guide to Zoning

NIMBY Wars: The Politics of Land Use (Hardcover) by P. Michael Saint P. Michael Saint (Author) Robert J. Flavell (Author), Patrick F. Fox Patrick F. Fox (Author)

Buy it on Amazon

A new way to think about the transportation of nuclear waste.
By Timothy Noah

Critics of the environmental movement rightfully point out that "not in my backyard," or NIMBY, is a poor argument against waste dumps. If the waste isn't dumped in my backyard, it will get dumped in someone else's backyard, and that "someone else" will almost certainly have less money and less political clout than me. Environmentally, NIMBY is a zero-sum game—what doesn't get dumped here gets dumped there—and inegalitarian to boot. No principled liberal wants to play the NIMBY game.

The NIMBY taboo has made it awkward for environmentalists to align themselves with the state of Nevada in opposing the shipment of spent nuclear fuel to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, an issue on which the Senate is expected to vote this month. (The House already voted to allow the shipment.) Nevadans don't want nuclear waste in their collective backyard, but if the alternative is to keep nuclear waste scattered at 38 sites around the country, isn't it better to ignore Nevada's parochial concern? That seems to be the consensus, endorsed even by liberal publications like the Christian Science Monitor. But the nonprofit Environmental Working Group has come up with a creative way to reframe the Yucca Mountain controversy. Rather than cry NIMBY, it has devised a Web search engine to demonstrate that the real issue is what Chatterbox will call NIEBY—not in everybody's backyard.

Click here and enter your street address and ZIP code. Then click "Get Map." A map will appear with a green star denoting your home. Thick black lines on that map indicate rail or highway routes by which nuclear waste will likely travel to Yucca Mountain. (The source is Appendix J of the Energy Department's Environmental Impact Statement on Yucca Mountain.) The proximity of these lines to your house or apartment is the degree to which the waste will likely travel through your backyard. (The Energy Department projects 175 rail and truck shipments a year, starting in 2010.) Just above the map, inside a rectangular box, it says how far your home is from an existing nuclear waste route, and how far you live from the nearest waste source.

Chatterbox lives 48.5 miles from the nearest spent-fuel depot, at Baltimore Gas and Electric's Calvert Cliffs power plant on the Chesapeake Bay. That's not Chatterbox's backyard. But—uh-oh—the nearest likely rail route for nuclear waste to travel on its way to Yucca Mountain is 0.2 miles (three city blocks) away. That is Chatterbox's backyard. To be sure, Chatterbox's welfare isn't a major societal concern. (We can always get more columnists.) But what about President Bush? The White House is 1.1 miles away from the nearest likely waste route. Chatterbox ran his thumb down his Christmas mailing list. Martha and Peter, who live in Claremont, Calif., live 2.9 miles away from the nearest likely waste route. Joao and Elsa, who live in Rye, N.Y., live 1.5 miles away. Phil and Pam, in Portland, Ore., are 0.1 miles away. Mike in Pittsburgh is 1.8 miles away. Wistar and Tom in rural Vermont live 92.8 miles away. OK, listen up. If terrorists start blowing up trains carrying nuclear waste, let's all meet at Wistar and Tom's place.

The point is not that Chatterbox has an unusually large number of friends who live near likely nuclear waste routes. It's that our nation's hub and spoke transportation system, combined with most people's tendency to want to live near an urban center, puts almost everyone near a likely nuclear waste route. Indeed, Environmental Working Group says one in seven Americans live within one mile of such a route. E Pluribus Unum: Out of many NIMBYs, one NIEBY.

The Energy Department and the nuclear industry answer that we already live in a NIEBY world. Each year, there are 300 million shipments of hazardous waste along these same routes. Some of this is flammable, which spent fuel is not. None of it, though, is so radioactive that Congress plans to store it in a cave for 20,000 years. All right then, continue the utility companies, if the stuff takes that long to degrade, why leave it scattered at nuclear plant sites around the country? Isn't it vulnerable to terrorist attack there, too? Wouldn't it be better to stash it in the hard-to-reach caverns of Yucca Mountain? The trouble with this argument is that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has admitted that nuclear plants are projected to generate spent fuel almost as fast (2,000 tons annually) as Yucca Mountain will be able to store it (3,000 tons annually)—and that's not counting the 45,000-ton backlog. Even after Yucca Mountain opens for business, a heavy volume of nuclear waste will remain stored at plant sites.

Chatterbox's only beef with the Environmental Working Group's new NIEBY paradigm is that it's coy about the ultimate solution to this problem. "We don't have a position on whether or not a single repository is a good idea or a bad idea," says Mike Casey, vice president of public affairs. Chatterbox can't speak for Casey or the Environmental Working Group, but in general it's Chatterbox's sense that over the long term, environmentalists know that closing off options to store nuclear waste is an effective way to shut down nuclear power plants. Chatterbox thinks this is a smart strategy. If the problem is what to do with waste that remains a threat to human health for 20,000 years, why not limit the scope of the problem by restricting the quantity of this waste? "We want to shut down nuclear power" sounds crazy and radical, and so Greens avoid saying it. In fact, though, it's the sensible conservationist position.

Source: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066870