Sep 23 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Kevin Dennehy Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.

Even for Greenpeace, a group known for turning high-seas drama into political statement, the foray into the Nantucket Sound wind farm debate has played like perfect theater.

Take, for instance, the picture-postcard morning of, when a pair of Greenpeace motorboats surrounded a schooner crammed with wind farm opponents, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It was a made-for-TV face-off that, indeed, was reported on the national news that night.

But for Greenpeace, a $360 million organization that spends about $3.3 million each year on U.S. campaigns, ongoing efforts for the Cape Wind project transcend interrupting a Kennedy sail.

Today, the group begins a four-day public tour of the Cape and islands aboard the Arctic Sunrise, a 163-foot icebreaker they use to research climate change. It's the latest event in a summer-long campaign in this region.

While Greenpeace leaders concede they usually don't get so involved in local issues, it's not often that local issues have such potential for national impact.

Because Cape Wind could be the nation's first offshore wind farm, many see it as a critical battlefield for an emerging energy industry.

"We don't typically find ourselves engaged in a local fight," said Chris Miller, a Washington-based campaigner for Greenpeace who spearheaded this summer's effort on the Cape.

"But this project is important. We feel it's the right project in the right place."

Founded in 1971, Greenpeace made a name internationally for nonviolent, if sometimes notorious, campaigns against the nuclear industry and whalers. In recent years the group shifted to other issues, including genetic engineering and global warming.

During its campaign for the Cape Wind project, an ambitious plan to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, Greenpeace workers have preached the gospel of green energy to sunbathers on Cape beaches.

They've paid for pro-wind energy spots on cable television, toured parades and fairs across the Cape with a solar-powered truck and hosted a speech by an arctic explorer to warn of climate change.

And today they'll open the Arctic Sunrise, a floating laboratory for studying weather trends and glacial melting, to visitors in Provincetown. Through Monday the boat will also make stops in Hyannis, Nantucket and Woods Hole.

During its Cape campaign, Greenpeace has regularly taken shots at the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the local organization opposing Cape Wind, trying to stake a claim as the "real environmentalists" in this fight.

The alliance, Greenpeace leaders insist, is funded by oil industry executives and wealthy waterfront property owners, Not-In-My-Back-Yarders who don't want to spoil the view.

The alliance, of course, insists it, too, is working to protect the environment. It just happens to believe the Sound is the wrong place for the nation's first offshore wind farm.

And it has taken its own shots at Greenpeace. A recent alliance brochure asks: "Why is Greenpeace coming here to tell us what to do?"

Greenpeace leaders simply didn't do their homework before taking on the Cape Wind issue, says Susan Nickerson, executive director of the alliance and a longtime environmental advocate on the Cape.

She notes local environmentalists work for the alliance, including Barbara Birdsey, founder of the Orenda Wildlife Land Trust, and Charles Vinick, a longtime Cousteau Society staffer recently hired as the alliance's first full-time CEO.

Greenpeace, she said, isn't aware of the environmental concerns posed by the wind farm, including threats to birds, fishing and the region's economy.

"They're out of their territory," Nickerson said during an interview this week. "And they got involved in a local issue they don't understand."

Alliance leaders weren't amused by the marine protest during Kennedy's appearance in August. "It's consistent with their style of trying to raise controversy," she said. "That's what they're good at.

"Did they come off sounding rational, like they had something meaningful to add? No. They just made a lot of noise."

Miller of Greenpeace, who says he was ushered away from the marina later by Barnstable police, called it a lighthearted and respectful event.

And he holds up Greenpeace's opposition to a Scottish wind farm as evidence that the organization examines each project individually.

One person who doesn't mind Greenpeace's involvement is Jim Gordon, president of Cape Wind.

The publicity, he said, reflects how important his project has become in the emerging world of wind energy.

And he's glad to have the allies. "They're one of the preeminent environmental organizations.

"When they support or endorse a project, people really take notice of that," he said.