New England

EAST OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS, under a bridge that carries the main street of the town of Randolph, Vermont, over the Third Branch of the White River, lies a small mill.

With the words SARGENT ROUNDY CORPORATION fading on its smokestack, the place might seem to be abandoned. There are many deserted factories in this beautiful land, much of whose industry has seen hard times for a century. But even from a distance, walking down the steep, hairpin turn that leads from the bridge to the river's edge, one can see hints that the place, though ramshackle, is not empty.

In the yard are great stacks of twelve- and fifteen-foot-long logs, piles of three-foot-wide tree-trunk rounds, heaps of irregularly shaped slabs, and cords of tarp-covered firewood. They suggest that the place has been made into a sawmill, and, indeed, the distant whine of ripsaws can be heard. But those sounds turn out to have nothing to do directly with the felled trees. The tools are actually being used to expand the old mill - to increase the size of a showroom.

Inside the decaying, shingle-covered building, the windows are covered with plastic; pink fiber-glass insulation pokes through an occasional hole in the wall; the mood is of bustle barely under control.

It's the kind of purposeful chaos that can be invigorating if one is young enough not to find it maddening. And the crowd swirling through the cramped quarters is definitely young. A girl with a jeweled pin in her nostril, wearing a floor-length skirt, sweeps around one corner just as two dogs explode out of an office and, at a dead run, bang through the side door toward the river. The sounds of thump, clang, and grind fill the air with a resonance that seems to belong to the past.

Baskets of gray metal parts are heaped on shelves, where workers quickly select what they need, and have at them with grinding wheels throwing off orange streams of sparkles. Down the line, a young man with a pony tail sprays black paint at a finished assembly, after which nickel-plated controls are attached. In a side room, artists are making wooden models of proposed new products, which will be converted to aluminum master molds that will then be translated into iron.

Away from the noise of metal on metal, in a space no larger than a good-sized living room, a bank of perhaps a dozen telephone cubicles has been set up, the partitions between them fashioned of two-by-fours that are still exposed, no attempt having been made to cosmeticize them. A box of apples and a large bag of doughnuts sit near a beat-up wood-burning stove at the center of the room. It is throwing out strong heat. The conversations of the folk on the long-distance lines are of chimneys, drafts, thermostats, combustion efficiency, and dampers.

But the conversation always comes back to wood. For this is the headquarters of one of the biggest employers in central Vermont, and certainly the fastest-growing. It's Vermont Castings, makers of arguably the finest air-tight cast-iron wood stoves in North America. In less than five years, Vermont Castings has gone from nothing but one impoverished yet curious tinkerer freezing his butt off, trying to figure out how to stay warm, to an operation employing hundreds, selling more than fifty thousand. stoves a year at prices that can approach $600 apiece. The White House, in order to demonstrate its commitment to energy independence, bought six.

In its display of such Yankee virtues as ingenuity and :shrewd trading, and in its ability to take the liability of Vermont's cold winters and dependence on imported heating oil and turn it into a sparkling asset, Vermont Castings is a fascinating display of the contradictions that make New England so distinctly one of North America's Nine Nations.

At first glance, New England's future is bleak. That becomes clear in a study done by the National Center for Economic Alternatives. The results, based on per capita income figures, adjusted state by state for differences in cost of living, are startling. The poorest of the United States is not Mississippi; it's Maine. Vermont is third poorest. Rhode Island, eighth. Except for Connecticut, with its New York bedroom communities that are not part of this land, no state in New England comes anywhere near being in the top two-thirds in wealth.

Yet this, the poorest of the nations, prides itself on being the only really civilized place in North America, a kind of Athens of the continent. It is hardly a contradiction that thousands of highly educated New Englanders each year abandon their central heating in order to go into the woods to hack at the oaks with ax or chain saw. They are feeding this expensive, hot lump of cast iron they've just ordered from Vermont Castings. They're not only happy about this development; they have acquired a sense of smug superiority about it, matched only by the pride they take in coaxing peas out of the frozen ground in April. The various models of Vermont Castings' wood stoves have names like Defiant, Vigilant, and Resolute. It may sound as if this shop is trying to refloat the Royal Navy, but that's not so. What it's doing is redefining what New Englanders like to think of as their independent national character.

Geographically, New England is unusual on this continent in having political boundaries that are meaningful. Practically since the American Revolution, New England has been described in terms of states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut - and that's still basically true.

But there are exceptions. The southwestern third of Connecticut, for example, is not part of New England. That area, like western Long Island, is firmly in the orbit of New York City and belongs to the nation of the Foundry. These familiar scenes of John Updike-studied commuter affluence, like Darien, Stamford, and New Canaan, are identical with Shaker Heights outside Cleveland or Grosse Pointe outside Detroit. These big-city suburbs have matured to the point that even the expensive tract homes on the curving streets that were such a novelty thirty years ago are beginning to look a little tacky. They're being bought up by people who realize that they may have to drop as much as another hundred thousand dollars or so on renovations and extensions to return them to their proper status position. This is consistent with the now decades-old theme of places like Great Neck, Oyster Bay, and Larchmont, which is to try to prove that money doesn't have to go hand in hand with vulgarity, despite nagging local evidence to the contrary. That is hardly New England.

Perhaps the most telling perimeter clue: most of those people in southwestern Connecticut or on Long Island are Yankee fans. The New England line is firmly drawn at the point where fanatic Boston Red Sox rooters become the minority.

New Englanders consider it a triumph if the Sox wind up the season forty-one games out of first - as long as the Yankees are forty-two out. Their faith, however, is seldom rewarded because of the Sox's crazed habit of staying in contention until September, when they suddenly get tired of the game and blow a twelve-game road trip. Year after year, the Boston club teaches New Englanders a lesson they have thoroughly internalized: you just can't win.

Farther up the map, northern Maine - like those Connecticut counties - is only marginally New England. If Quebec were not so politically defined, it could be part of that nation. The international boundary in Aroostook County has always been a bit vague and arbitrary. It didn't settle into its present position until 1842, decades after southern Maine had been admitted to the Union. The boundary clues up here include a dominant French culture and - an accompanying social phenomenon - the way English-speakers have of being nasty to their French-speaking cousins.

This is also true in northern New Brunswick, which, with its lively French-speaking Acadian movement, could easily be called part of Quebec. The only reason not to include it is that Quebec, as one of the most distinct of the Nine Nations, deserves to be considered within the confines of its current political borders. Most of New Brunswick, however, is akin to the other Maritime Provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia and Prince Edward island) and the other Atlantic province, Newfoundland. And, in turn, all of them are really an extension of "the Boston states," as the Atlantic provinces call their United States comrades.

The major difference between the Maritimes and New England is what the schoolchildren are taught about George III. If you grow up in Boston, you are told that the American Revolution was a good idea. If you grow up in St. John, you're told it. was a controversial and messy one.

Apart from that, the differences between the two regions are quantitative, not qualitative. The Maritimes are more cold, more poor, and, remarkably, even more beautiful. In the hills off the North Atlantic coast around Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, winter comes through your clothes in late September.

From Chatham to Moncton in New Brunswick, you can see people digging for potatoes with their hands. Potatoes are so cheap, and this work so hard, that nobody has even thought to sing the blues about it, as they did about chopping cotton.

Yet the farms and pink beaches of Queens County on Prince Edward Island are such an Eden in the summer that one is tempted not to tell friends about it lest it be "spoiled." Already the lobster catch has been reduced to the point that the shellfish are too valuable to be plowed into the fields as fertilizer. That's how plentiful they once were.

The Maritimes are so much a part of New England that businessmen wishing to travel from Edmundston, New Brunswick, to, say, Montreal, Quebec, 390 miles away, find the best way is to fly 800 miles via Boston.

The case of Cecille Bechard, of New Brunswick and Maine, was celebrated recently in the New York Times:

Cecille Bechard is a Canadian who visits the United States several dozen times a day when she goes to the refrigerator or the back door or to make tea, for instance. To read and sleep she stays in Canada, and she eats there too if she sits at the north end of the kitchen table. Mrs. Bechard's home sits on the United States-Canada border. The frontier cuts through the kitchen wall and across the sink, splits the salt and pepper shakers, just misses the stove and passes through the other wall to sever the Nadeau family's clothesline and cut off the candy counter in Alfred Sirois's general store. Almost anywhere else in the world, Mrs. Bechard might need a passport to take a bath.

Maritimers work and vacation in New England. Maine teenagers drink in the Maritimes because the age limit is lower there. The border checkpoints are jammed at quitting time and when the bars close.

And if any more proof were needed that Maritimers and New Englanders belong to one nation, it is provided by the ubiquitous cable TV connections, which allow Nova Scotians to be driven just as crazy by the Red Sox as the Worcester tenement-dweller. When the boys boot another one to the Yankees, you can hear the curses all over Halifax.

The argument has been made that if North America had been settled from west to east, instead of the other way around, New England would still be uninhabited, and there's something to be said for this theory. It's only inertia, for example, that preserves any commercial agriculture in New England. The standard story about the Vermont dairy industry is that it is trying to breed a cow whose left legs are two feet shorter than her right so that she can negotiate the slope of her pasture. You can recall that during the Vietnam War, then-Senator George Aiken, that quintessential Vermont Yankee Republican, suggested that the way to disengage from the conflict was merely to announce that the war was over, declare a glorious victory for the United States, and leave. In Washington, that has long been regarded as a typical New England solution. It's no more eccentric than making a declaration that all those Yankee acres of rock and clay, with their fourmonth growing season, are actually farmland fit for plowing.

Not only is New England unblessed agriculturally, but it has precious little raw material and, with approximately thirteen million people, a diminished population. Long ago the texile manufacturers moved to Dixie, with its plentiful cotton and cheap labor. The iron-makers moved to the Foundry, where the ore and coal were. And, in general, industry continues to march west - partly because it's easier to distribute goods from a central point on the continent than it is from, say, Manchester, New Hampshire.

The most critical point, though, is that New England lacks the oil of MexAmerica, the thundering cascades of hydro power found in Quebec and Ecotopia, and the uranium and synthetic fuel stocks of the Empty Quarter. Except for its proximity to the fishing riches of the Georges Bank, New England has sparse resource assets - apart from the remnants of an industrialism that derived from the historical accident of first settlement.

Paradoxically, the scenery and the surroundings have become New England's primary asset. New England is rapidly transforming itself into North America's first truly twenty-first-century, postindustrial society, and, as such, it is again a land of pioneers.

Says one Boston banker, who thinks that New England's economically stable state is a euphemism for stagnation, "We don't have any theories about what you do when you reach this state of economic maturity. The finest brains have been telling us how to grow. Nobody seems to know what to do when you get grown."

But New England, intuitively and inexorably, is about to show the world how to find out, for it is producing an amazing consensus, considering its circumstances, about the futures that it will and will not accept. Take its energy future, for example.

People in other parts of North America might think that a nation this short on cash, this cold, and up to 80 percent dependent on imported fuel oil for home heating, would be racing headlong toward any promise of relief. But that is not the case.

The Pittstown Company, of New York, has been trying for almost a decade to put an oil refinery in Eastport, Maine, the easternmost point of land in the United States. In 1979, Eastport had an unemployment rate of 20 percent. Four hundred families in this town of two thousand were getting food stamps. The sardine canneries that used to be the major industry had closed down long ago. At 250,000 barrels a day, this proposed refinery could meet 19 percent of New England's gasoline and home heating oil needs.

But will it ever be built? Don't bet on it. Half of the waters in which the tankers would have to travel belong to Canada, which says that an oil spill would endanger its fisheries. (The more cynical think that the Canadians really see it as a threat to their own underutilized refineries.) The summer home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, an international park, is a mile downwind of the refinery site, and that outrages a select constituency. But more important, beyond the blueberry-covered hills, in Cobscook Bay, dance humpback whales. And of crowning significance, through the local spruce glide more bald eagles, making more baby bald eagles, than any other place in the Northeast. Both the whales and the United States national symbol are endangered species, and it has been made abundantly clear that as long as oil refineries issue mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants, there is no way that one is going to be built anywhere near those eagles.

Does the local population buy these priorities? In a recent Fourth of July parade, the Little League's vastly popular Red Sox float was defeated for first place honors by the Youth Conservation Corps' entry, with the theme "Don't Let Eastport Become a Pits Town."

This, in fact, represents a general New England belief in the equation that energy development in its backyard equals an inevitable decline in the quality of its civilization.

The subliminal part of this is an a priori assumption that New England sets a standard of civilized behavior that is far more rare than kilowatts, and is thus more valuable. That is the reason New Englanders see no contradiction in asking the rest of the continent to subsidize the price of their home heating oil at the same time that they frantically resist efforts to drill for it off their coast.

It's a defensible position. It might, in fact, make sense for Houston to subsidize Boston now so that, when they finally come to their senses, Houstonians will be able to go to Boston for a sight of what a truly civilized city looks like.

The problem is that New Englanders have yet to display the guts necessary to put this argument in a forthright way. When they agitate against drilling for oil in the fertile fishing grounds of Georges Bank, they state the argument in terms of one natural resource versus another. They contend that an oil spill could kill a lot of fish, ruining one of God's great gifts to man. That's certainly true, but if the Georges Bank were to disappear tomorrow, a less than 1 percent increase in beef production in the Breadbasket could make up for any loss in protein, according to the Department of the Interior.

What really bugs New Englanders about energy development is not the threat to fish, as such, but the prospect of having their tidy and carefully ordered portion of the planet screwed up. Take the example of the big idea that the Army Corps of Engineers has for the northern tip of Maine.

That's where, as mentioned in the first chapter, the corps wants to build the twenty-seven-story-high, two-mile-long Dickey-Lincoln dam across the St. John River. The proposal, grander than Egypt's Aswan Dam, would flood 267 miles of river and streams and eighty-eight thousand acres of timber in order to create a reservoir 57 miles long. The power it could produce would replace 2.3 million barrels of oil a year.

For a time, this project was blocked by a three-foot-high plant with unimpressive little yellow flowers, the furbish lousewort. That, too, is an endangered species, and the dam would jeopardize the existence of the skinny weeds. The louseworts' habitat, propagation, and microclimatic requirements are under detailed study to determine if they can be grown elsewhere, and the corps is now looking into buying lousewort sanctuaries. But meanwhile, the dam's cost estimates have quadrupled since it was originally authorized in 1965. A projected cost of $218 million is now pushing a billion, and at that price, some of its drawbacks are becoming glaring - such as the fact that there is so little water in the St. John River during the summer that the dam would operate, on the average, only two and a half hours out of every twenty-four.

But the torrent of economic arguments thrown up by Dickey-Lincoln's increasingly sophisticated opponents is not the real reason this dam probably will never be built. The real reason is that northern Maine has some of the prettiest wilderness in the Northeast. You can dip into a river and safely drink its waters. And in a land as crowded as this continent's Northeast, that's a rare, and thus valuable, commodity. If politics allocate resources, then it would seem that in this case, New England politics are again based on the premise that recreational wilderness is more scarce than Middle Eastern oil, and that, of course, is in fact a defensible position.

Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, is by no means wilderness. The North Atlantic surf curls in the same gray-green, foam-flecked fashion there as it has for millennia, but behind the white sandy beach, the Hampton Beach Casino ("Jewelry, Ice Cream, Food, Snack Bar, Rides, Golf, Gifts, Doughnuts, Fashions, Leather, Boutiques, Jewelry") is jammed. So are the taco parlors, fried dough stands, sweet shops, T-shirt emporiums, discos, and motels that make up the resort.

The competition for a few linear feet of New Hampshire coastline is fierce because there is so little of it - only seventeen miles between Massachusetts and Maine. Hampton Beach State Park marks the spot where the Atlantic breaks through the dunes to form a pleasant harbor, where meandering creeks with grand names such as Browns River, Blackwater River, and Hampton River create salt marshes. The salt marshes, in whose sensitive and fecund ecology the marine food chain begins, boast reeds and cattails that, rippling like wheat in a breeze, are hypnotic. The small harbor guards from the riptides both the wide, high-prowed, low-gunwaled commercial fishing and lobster boats, and the sleek cabin cruisers with names like Shenanigans and Anstrice. Bright-colored lobster buoys line a wall by a small store where you can buy bait, tackle, and cold drinks.

If you're careful not to let your eyes wander a few hundred yards inland, it's possible to forget that the town just across the inlet from Hampton Beach is Seabrook. The motel operators of Hampton make a point, for example, of quickly correcting guests who think they've come to Seabrook.

But although the map of Seabrook put out by Preston Real Estate does not choose to take note of the town's most famous landmark, it's impossible to ignore forever the concrete forms of the largest construction project ever attempted in New England. They're easily visible over the roofs of the shore cottages. For that matter, looming over the forms are dozens of red and white striped canes, so much more massive than the ones on the lobster boats that aircraft warning beacons flash from their sides. Every residential road, as it comes to a dead end in the marsh, offers a spectacular view. You can sit at the Dairy King, eating your dip-topped ice cream cone, and marvel at it. Or you can stop at Captain Berk's Lobster Pond ("Live Lobster, Live Crabs, Spawns, Oysters, Smelts, Haddock, Shrimp, Salmon. Swordfish, Scallops, Halibut, Bass, Eel, Bait, Eel Worms") and catch the act from there. Of an evening, it's much more brightly and starkly lit even than the row of honky-tonks on the beach. It is Seabrook Station. Twin 2300-megawatt nuclear reactors. Strategically located practically on top of the East Coast's main tourist roads - old U.S. Route 1 and Interstate 95. Seabrook Station. The birthplace of the American antinuclear movement.

One thousand, four hundred, and fourteen people were arrested at Seabrook on the afternoon of May 2, 1977, and charged with criminal trespass.

The chief public relations person at Seabrook is enamored enough of the right-wing Heritage Foundation account of the proceedings to press it on visiting reporters. Abridged, it goes like this:

With the issuance of the original Seabrook construction permits in July of 1976, a new and unexpected turn of events took place. Most of the planners engaged in the construction at Seabrook assumed that winning the battle in court and before the regulatory agencies meant an end to opposition to the facility. In this they were mistaken. A group of individuals unhappy with the results of the legal process felt that the time had come to go outside the law. Towards this end they formed the Clamshell Alliance, a group which is by its own declaration "unalterably opposed to the construction of this (Seabrook) and all other nuclear plants". . .

Certainly, in 1976 no one would have been prepared to believe that over May Day Weekend, 1977, the Clamshell Alliance would return with a thoroughly trained, coordinated group of some 2000 persons . . .

The company allowed the demonstrators to enter the site and occupy an area used for parking, and to set up their tents and camping equipment . . . as long as they were peaceful and agreed to leave [before construction workers arrived Monday morning]. Early Sunday afternoon, it was decided that the time had come . . .

The [Clamshell] leadership, after conferring with the demonstrators, indicated that they would not be willing to leave, and that they would also insist on being arrested . . . and 1414 were.

As they refused to post bail, they were temporarily incarcerated in a number of National Guard Armories around the state. Their stand against posting bail was maintained for two full weeks during which time they continued to be housed in the armories.

One result of this incarceration [and these are the Heritage Foundation's words] was that it gave them time to organize. In a real sense, those two weeks amounted to the period of incubation for the birth of the national anti-nuclear movement . . .

The cost of renting the National Guard Armories, along with certain services required from the Guard during the period of incarceration, such as feeding the prisoners and caring for the sanitation facilities, came to $310,863.90. Public health services came to $13,082.26. State police (including those borrowed from other states) cost $51,169.75. Local police, $5,090.84. Finally, the initial cost estimate for the services of the Attorney General's staff as a result of the arraignments associated with the arrests of the demonstrators came to $ 10,000. This cost, of course, as has been mentioned, will escalate severely with time, as a consequence of the appeals process. Thus, the total for the demonstration which took place over May Day Weekend, 1977, comes to $389,206.85.

Further, those figures do not reflect any increased costs which might have been incurred by Public Service Company of New Hampshire [the utility whose idea Seabrook is] in preparing for the demonstration, and which would be reflected eventually in the customer's electric bill.

Of course, since all this, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident has occurred. Antinuclear demonstrations have brought out hundreds of thousands of people. Meldrim Thomson, then governor of New Hampshire, who backed a surcharge on the electric bills of the state's residents to help pay for Seabrook's construction, has been ignominiously defeated at the polls twice. A plan to build reactors of the Seabrook design on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island has been rejected. (The 604-acre site considered for that power plant will, in classic New England fashion, instead be made into a wildlife refuge.) Public Service of New Hampshire is in deep trouble with its financiers. By 1979, delays had increased Seabrook's total price tag by an estimated $1,997,492,200. It's perfectly possible that if arguments in Congress over nuclear technology's safety don't get Seabrook, arguments on 'Wall Street over its affordability will.

So I asked Norman Cullerot, the public relations man at Seabrook, about the problems. I had just taken the tour of this mind-numbing, you've-never-seen-so-much-steel-and-cement, makes-the-Pyramids-look-like-sandcastles construction project. I was sitting among the natural wood surroundings of the $1 .7 million "education center," and I said, Look, I know you've already spent nine hundred and ninety million dollars on this project, and you're still counting. And I know this must be like questioning Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam. But, just between you and me, All questions aside about radioactive waste lasting for a hundred thousand years. Did nobody in this whole, big company ever walk the beaches around here, look out over the salt marshes and the lobster boats and the tourists and say, hey, if we build this thing here, there's going to be trouble? Did it ever occur to anybody that a nuclear reactor here is emotionally impossible for New Englanders?

I guess he responded to my question. He launched into praise for the plant's cooling system. Remember those tall, curved water-cooling towers that became the symbol for Three Mile Island? Seabrook Station doesn't have any of those, he explained. Instead, a little east of the reactors there are two holes, 375 feet deep and wide enough to swallow a small house. On a platform 275 feet down have been pieced together a couple of 340-ton machines called moles. These moles bore through rock with fifty-two cutter blades, pressed up against the stuff by hydraulic rams that produce a thrust of 995 tons. The moles' average speed is about four feet an hour. The granite here is referred to as "stubborn." These moles are drilling two tunnels straight out to sea, one 16,483 feet long, the other 17,410 feet long. These tunnels pass directly under Hampton Beach State Park and the harbor on their way a mile or so out into the ocean. When completed, they'll be more than big enough to drive a trailer truck through, although that's not what they'll carry. One of the tunnels will carry 850,000 gallons of the North Atlantic every minute into the power plant, where it will cool and condense the steam generated. The other pipe will take this water, instantly made 39 degrees hotter, and dump it back into the ocean. Much to the surprise of the fish.

And that, he explained, is why Seabrook was built here. It's as close to this big beautiful body of cooling fluid as possible while being as far away from the city of Portsmouth as it can be without leaving New Hampshire.

And he waited for my next question.

I think that means that the answer to my original question is no.

It never occurred to the planners at Public Service of New Hampshire that their ideas would be viewed as controversial, much less that in the eyes of some New Englanders, observing what was being done to their ocean, Seabrook Station would become the classic and enduring example of technology gone berserk.

This is not, however, to say that management is unaware that it has a public relations problem. And that's why, outside the nature trail with the carefully labeled plants, just down the way from the redwood picnic tables, across from the entrance to the education center with its diagonal wood siding, has been built Seabrook Unit Three.

One and Two, of course, are the 2300-megawatt reactors. Three is a windmill. Very futuristic-looking, it's shaped something like the head of an eggbeater, with three bowed, fifteen-foot blades revolving around a vertical axis, allowing it to accept wind from every direction. It will supply 12 kilowatts of electricity.

On Block Island, twelve miles off the coast of Rhode Island, looming 160 feet tall, is another windmill. It's rated at goo kilowatts, but has a completely different story.

The U.S. government in 1979 spent over $60 million on windmill development, and this island, on which 459 people were recorded at a recent Ground Hog's Day census (an annual event that takes place at a local bar) has, quixotically, managed to snare $2.3 million of that in the form of its new monster.

Block Island was thought to be a dandy place for this wind machine, which has a 125-foot wing span and sits on a 100-foot-tall tower. The islanders claim they pay the highest electricity rates in the country - twice as high as the mainland - because their power is generated by inefficient diesels, the fuel for which must come from the mainland on barges.

Fortunately, the wind gales up to a hundred miles an hour over the island in the winter. The average breeze is a stiff seventeen miles per hour, which is just a hair under small-craft-warning strength.

Equally important, the island gets hundreds of thousands of tourists in the summer, so the sleek orange and white National Aeronautic and Space Administration-built turbine is good p.r. for the government's energy program.

There are a few hitches, but they're being worked on. One is that the wind turbine is calculated to save only $30,000 worth of diesel oil a year, and so, in order to become independent of OPEC, the island will need a platoon of these things to be self-sufficient. At several millio

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