As a Vineyard summer resident and owner of a small oil and natural gas exploration and producing company in Midland, Tex., I have followed with interest the public debate on both the Cape Wind project and the efforts of the state of Massachusetts to allow wind turbine development in state waters close to the Vineyard’s southwest shore.

The parallels to what proponents of offshore wind farms in public waters are seeking to accomplish, and the efforts of America’s oil and natural gas exploration companies to developnew sources ofsupply on federal lands in theU.S. Intermountain West, are striking. Anyone seeking any form of development on public lands today faces virtually insurmountable obstacles created through legal challenges by incredibly well-fun ded environmental foundations and related entities. There is no end to these legal challenges.

Access to publiclands of the United States is governed (supposedly)by a policy of multiple use. Federal public lands are owned by all Americans, and the recreational, commercial, and cultural resources they contain should be both protected andexploited for the benefit of all citizens. However, there i s little question that this doctrine has been tilted heavily in recent decades toward an anti-development viewpoint.

The areas in Nantucket Sound and off Gay Head currently being studied for wind farm development are miniscule compared to the millions of acres of federal lands that have been declared off limits to oil and natural gas development in the western United States by both congressional and presidential mandate. As to the limited lands that remain open and prospective for such development, after years of lawsuits by environmental groups against the federal government seeking more restrictions, th e U.S. Bureau of Land Management finally negotiated a compromise and instituted a system of “categorical exclusions” — essentially geographic areas where sufficient debate had proved that development under defined parameters should proceed without the need for further environmental impact studies and other purely delaying legal challenges. This system, in effect for just a few years, has now itself been subjected to a new legal challenge, resulting in Interior Secretary Salazar announcing just two weeks ago that the pending leasing of certain federal lands for oil and natural gas development will again be placed on hold.

If natural gas companies operating on federal lands are subjected to substantial restrictions and outright denial of access because of the presence of cultural or historic resources and other environmental concerns, why shouldn’t the same standards apply to offshore wind farms? Certainly the cultural and spiritual heritage of Native American tribes still residing in a given locale deserves at least as much respect. The fact that the subject of this debate is clean energy doesn’t change the essential aspect of fairness and equal treatment under the law one iota.

Speaking of clean energy, America’s natural gas and oil companies, in response to public demand and a better market price incentive, have completely changed the fundamentals of future American natural gas supply in just the past seven years with new technology that allows recovery of huge new supplies of natural gas from shale in many previously unexplored areas of the country, including several eastern states. New Englanders, who have gambled a significant part of their energy and electricgeneration future on natural gas over the past 20 years, should be ecstatic. Clean burning natu ral gas is still a fossil fuel, but significantly less polluting and less carbondioxide-emitting per unit of energy produced. Unfortunately, the more extreme environmental groups are less enamored with this remarkable progress and are pressing for ways to limit or prevent drilling in these new are as in places like Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

America’s energy companies are completely in favor of developing all sources of energy —wind, solar, nuclear, and the cleanest possible sources of fossil fuels — to meet our demands. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that every private as well as government study indicates that regardless of the degree of progress in developing alternative energy, in 2030 the U.S. will still be dependent on fossil fuels for 66 per cent of its energy supply — the same percentage as today.

There are no perfect, cheap or totally environmentally friendly alternatives to satisfying America’s ever-increasing thirst for energy. What we have are tradeoffs. Is developing small-scale wind farms in pristine near-shore waters a sensible contribution to our region’s energy needs? Keep in mind that only multiple thousands of wind turbines will make a meaningful dent in New England’s energy portfolio, at huge, perpetual taxpayer-subsidized cost. In what offshore waters will the next several thousand wind turbines be placed? And all wind-generated electric power has to be backed up with another source (most likely natural gas-fired plants) to supply power when the wind isn’t blowing sufficiently.

Your headline article two weeks ago on possible large-scale wind farm development in federal waters further offshore, made possible by rapidly developing deep water technology, should beone final compelling reasonto abandon the two near-shore wind farm proposals currently underconsideration. A fe w years from now, their contribution to our wind-generated electric power capacity will be less than miniscule — at great social and economic cost.

Robert. E. Landreth lives in Midland, Tex., and Vineyard Haven.