We don’t know how much the small group of rich people centered at the Oyster Harbors and Wianno clubs, in Osterville, have paid some members of the Wampanoag tribe to oppose the Cape Wind wind-turbine project in Nantucket Sound. Perhaps investigative reporters will find out.

What we do know is that the cynical effort to stop the project, an effort financed in part by people with large oil, gas and coal fortunes who use Nantucket Sound as their playground for a few weeks a year, deserves to die a swift death. This latest Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound scam beats all:

The Wampanoags, for payments to be disclosed, ask that all of Nantucket Sound be declared a “traditional cultural property” and be put on the National Register of Historic Places because maybe back in the last Ice Age some ancestors of local Native Americans might have been there when it was dry land. The line is that Cape Wind’s 130 turbines (but not the yachts of Oyster Harbors members or pollution-spewing ferries) would get in the way of their spiritual greetings of the sun.

And then there’s the notion that the turbines (but not the fishing trawlers that have long messed up the sound’s bottom) might disturb the ancestral burying grounds of people who died 10,000 years ago. Approval of such a demand would set an economically catastrophic precedent in many coastal areas. Let’s close all of Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake Bay while we’re at it!

The Osterville crowd, with its overwhelming sense of entitlement, sees the wind-turbine plan as lese majeste. There’s more than enough hypocrisy to sink at least a fishing boat here: As The Boston Globe noted, the Aquinnah unit of the Wampanoags is hot to build its own wind farm in the Gay Head area, “not far from the Gay Head cliffs that have won designation as a National Historical Landmark.”

All this would be entertaining if it did not also possibly mean that Cape Wind’s turbines, which would provide three-quarters of the electricity for the Cape and Islands, would be delayed yet more, in part because of bureaucrats’ fear of “racism” or some such thing. New Englanders, slammed by the recession and paying among the nation’s highest energy costs, should be angry about the utter cynicism of this maneuver and look forward to learning about the payments to finance it. Personal check, or, better, cash?