Northern Pass, Power to the People,

The Northern Pass project will run a new high voltage power line down from Quebec to Franklin NH. It will bring in 1200 Megawatts of clean Canadian hydropower to New Hampshire. Quebec has a vast surplus of hydropower which they have been exporting to the US for better than 50 years. Hydropower is a green as it gets, no CO2 emissions, no coal mines, no oil spills, no nuclear waste, freedom from fuel price hikes. Long as it keeps raining, we have juice.
To bring jobs to the North Country we need to offer reliable and low cost electricity to industry. No company is going to put in a plant without good electric service at a reasonable price.
The new power line will largely follow existing power line rights-of-way which mitigates the unsightliness. Big power lines are an eyesore, but adding a second set of towers side-by-side with an existing power line doesn't make much difference. A pair of side-by-side power lines is no more unsightly than a single line. We already have the single line, making it a double line doesn't change things much.
After much advocacy from anti-electric-power advocacy groups, the National Institutes of Health published a comprehensive study of the safety of electric power lines in 1999. The furor over power line electromagnetic fields was started in 1979 with the publication of a report linking leukemia to power line exposure. This study was inconclusive, and the effect reported was small. Numerous follow up studies failed to resolve the matter one way or another. Some studies showed no effect, some showed a small effect, and many showed different results depending upon the method used to measure intensity of the electromagnetic fields. These studies were all statistical, counting the number of cases of leukemia and using statistics to decide if the number of cases was abnormally high. Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics.
No laboratory experiments on animals has ever shown adverse effects from the electromagnetic fields around power lines. The science of physics and of chemistry shows no mechanism by which electromagnetic fields could alter the biology of humans or animals. The NIH report concludes that the risk from power line fields is unproven, probably non existent, but cannot be totally discarded because of those few statistical results.
Electromagnetic fields drop off rapidly with distance. A simple calculation shows the fields from your house wiring are as strong as the fields from a power line at the edge of the cleared right of way. So, even if there were some adverse effects, just keeping off the right of way keeps you safe.
So, in view of the great economic benefits (1300 construction jobs, $2.5 million/mile added to the tax base), the savings in fossil fuels, and carbon emissions, the Northern Pass project ought to go ahead. We need the jobs, we need the juice, and it's as green a project as there is.