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nimby

Neighbors to Twitter co-founder: Cease and desist

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home. A year and half ago, they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house.

Not so fast. This is San Francisco, after all, where even little changes are hard, especially in old neighborhoods like this one, which sits near the peak of a picture postcard hill just south of famous Golden Gate park. The planned tear-down … Read more

With solar power, it's Green vs. Green

Reuters

When Mike Peterson jumped into a colleague's single turboprop Pilatus and flew over the remote Central California valley that he now hopes to turn into a solar plant, he saw sunshine, flat land that would require little grading, and two big transmission lines to tap into. "Wow," he remembers thinking at the time. "God made this to be a solar farm."

But when Kim Williams looks out at that same land from her lowslung ranch house, she sees an area rich with wildlife that is helping support her grass-fed chicken farm, her neighbor's cattle operations, and her peaceful way of life. She supports solar energy on a small scale--the electric fence around her chicken coop is powered by solar--but says when she learned about the solar plant she felt shock and disbelief. Now, she's suing to block it.

The push to create an alternative to carbon-based fuel has hit an unlikely snag: environmentalists. … Read more

As alternative energy grows, NIMBY turns green

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod's historic coast.

But when you're trying to build where the wind is strongest or the sun is brightest, you never know what obstacles you may run into.

In Massachusetts, a proposed wind farm called Cape Wind was dealt a blow last Friday that will delay what would be the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. The Massachusetts Historical Commission agreed with local Indian tribes who claim that the location for the wind farm should be considered … Read more