We are pleased to provide the following presentation given by Mr. Jon Boone last spring in Palermo.  Mr. Boone is a frequent resource for the work here at AT and we thank him for his permission to post this important information for your review.

At the invitation of the Sicilian government, Mr. Boone, an intervenor in two MDPSC wind hearings and author of many publications about wind technology, joined more than thirty other speakers from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and Britain to present at an  international industrial wind conference entitled, The Landscape Under Attack, held on

March 27 and 28, 2009 in Palermo. Speakers at the conference confirmed that thousands of massive wind turbines are planned for Italy. In response, leaders in Sicily, Rome, Tuscany, and Calabria met with energy experts throughout Europe and the United States to exchange ideas and agree on principles for protecting both the landscape and the consumer.

The conference’s keynote speaker, Valery Giscard d’ Estaing, former president of France, called for strong measures throughout Europe to protect the continent’s essential cultural landscape heritage. He was followed by Raffaelo Lombardo, Sicily’s president, who vowed to keep his region safe from what a prominent Sicilian journalist, in the conference’s wake, called the “leprosy of wind.” Carlo Ripa di Meana, former Italian minister of the environment and current president of Italia Nostra, the oldest and most influential Italian conservation organization, organized the event and served as its host.  Other speakers included leaders from Italy’s nature and conservation groups, politicians such as the mayor of Salemi, a small town in southwestern Sicily, and energy experts from the University of Rome.

On the first day, Boone gave a lecture entitled, Wind Technology is Overblown, in which he demonstrated that wind can only provide supplementary energy (not power), which itself requires a lot of supplementation, in the process subverting the technology’s ability to offset meaningful levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The next day, he showed his documentary, Life Under a Windplant, which he made as part of his MDPSC testimony. All presentations were translated simultaneously in English and Italian.

The conference concluded with a Charter, a statement of purpose, which called for an immediate moratorium on wind development, a thorough examination of its costs and benefits, and protection in perpetuity for the landscape’s cultural heritage.

Mr. Boone’s speech – Wind Energy is Overblown – as presented in Palermo in 2009, is provided for your convenience. A slide presentation to accompany the speech can be found immediately following the text.  The red numbers in the text correspond to slide numbers. You can download a text version without numbers here.:

Mr. Boone’s slide presentation which accompanied his remarks (modified to fit presentation format):

The resulting Charter of Palermo:

Jon Boone has been a formal intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission hearings. He produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant, which has been freely distributed within the United States and many countries throughout the world.

Mr. Boone also developed the website Stop Ill Wind, where anyone can read his complete direct testimony, with many related documents, in the Synergics wind case before the Maryland Public Service Commission.

His essay, The Aesthetic Dissonance of Industrial Wind Machines, was published in the journal, Contemporary Aesthetics. A revised copy of his June, 2006 speech given in Wyoming County, The Wayward Wind, was published last year by McGraw Hill. His paper, Less for More: The Rube Goldberg Nature of Industrial Wind, is pending publication.

A lifelong environmentalist, Mr. Boone helped found the North American Bluebird Society and has been a consultant with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in New York.

He is a former university academic administrator and now a painter who receives no income from his work on wind technology and resides miles from any proposed wind project. .

Mr. Boone seeks only informed, effective public policy–and an environmentalism that eschews wishful thinking because it is aware of the unintended adverse consequences flowing from uninformed, unscientific decisions.