The Answer To Climate Change May Be Blowin' In the Wind

"How many times can a man turn his head, And pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,  The answer is blowin' in the wind"  --Bob Dylan, 1963

I am driving on Route 90, the longest interstate highway in the United States at 3,021 miles. It’s an overcast, gray and misty August afternoon, somewhere in between Rockford, Illinois where I began my trip at 9 am and Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where I hope to arrive in time for supper.  Two-hundred ninety-one miles traveled, 121 miles to go. I’m on a summer road trip, my second in the past two years, as I itch to just get away from our still COVID pressed world. In almost three weeks of travel, I am exploring the United States on highways and byways and backroads. Searching for peoples and places I’ve yet to meet or explore.

I never know what I might find, and this day delivers an unexpected surprise.

As I climb a long but gentle highway hill, I see at the horizon a line of gargantuan constructs that rise up out of the unending fields of corn, alfalfa, and soybean fields in southern Minnesota. Like some unearthly collection of aliens, who chose to land their otherworldly crafts on to this landscape, these objects stand so tall, point so high up into the sky that I wonder if they might bump their heads on the clouds. Their oversized arms, three on each machine, lazily spin circles in the wind, like supersized pinwheels.

What I see are sixty-seven 1.5-megawatt General Electric wind turbines, scattered among the agricultural bounty that is Minnesota on these hot and high days of summer. These amazing modern-day monoliths, each standing more than 295 feet high, are sited in and around Dexter, Minnesota, population 341 souls. I’d say I was in the middle of nowhere but that would be rude, considering the folks who actually call this windswept part of the country home. They are the ones who plant and harvest the food we city folks and suburbanites sit down to eat, rarely giving thought or thanks to where our next meal comes from or who helped produce it, with God’s help.

And now these farmers are harvesting the wind too.

These turbines collectively generate enough power on an annual basis to provide energy to 39,000 homes, and it’s all clean and renewable and, increasingly, competitively priced with fossil fuels, like oil, natural gas, and coal. The turbines do not pollute or contribute CO2 to global warming. They are passive energy producing machines that harness natural, abundant, and theoretically endless energy.

I’ve seen these odd looking yet beautiful and graceful behemoths here in the mid-west and I’ve also viewed them dotting the peaks of hills in California and even spied a few spinning away off of Route 6 on the way to Cape Cod.  But the truth is that my home, Massachusetts lags far, far behind most other states in our wind energy production. Those turbines in and around Dexter produce 100.5 megawatts of power. My entire state produces just 120 megawatts of power.

It's not that we haven’t tried. More than fifteen years ago, Cape Wind was proposed by developers as a huge offshore wind farm, in the waters of Nantucket Sound, our nation’s first major ocean-based wind project. But it went down in failure, defeated by a flood of lawsuits concerning environmental issues, aesthetic concerns and fierce opposition from folks who lived closest to the project.

But there is finally some good news blowing in the wind for the Bay State.

Construction began last November on Vineyard Wind, sited about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket islands. This wind farm will include 62 turbines and when it goes live, will produce more than 800 megawatts of power, enough to provide electricity for 400,000 homes.  

So, there may be more in common than we think between the gently rolling hills of southern Minnesota, with its sea of crops, and the gently rolling waves off the coast of Massachusetts, with its sea of water. Both offer an abundance of wind. God’s creation in both places, in all places, is increasingly fragile, even broken in some parts. In Massachusetts we experienced two of the longest heat waves on record this summer and in the past three years, our summers have been the hottest ever recorded since record keeping began. Minnesota is becoming both warmer and wetter, hotter by some 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 and in the past decade, increasingly subject to violent spring and summer storms, that give way to flooding and crop damage. Wacky and scary weather knows no state boundaries.   

The distance between southern Minnesota and eastern Massachusetts is about 1,300 miles as the crow flies, two days or so by car, four hours by jet. Yet when it comes to the promise of renewable energy and the threat of climate change, we might as well be next door neighbors.  And that’s a good thing. 

Now it’s back to the road. What will I discover next? I’ve no idea and that is where the adventure lies and the fun too. May you find your own special road trip in these precious and waning days of summer.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.