Southwest Kansas gets
little national attention. I recall a Calvin Trillin story about a
small town there on the parched plains, isolated and insignificant.
Yet the town had become a vital part of the Vietnam War because of
its factory, then in frantic production manufacturing concertina
barbed wire. Before that, Truman Capote made the small town of
Holcomb, Kan., infamous with his book “In Cold Blood,”
about a farm family, the Clutters, murdered by two drifters.
Now, Holcomb has become the focal point for our great
national and international debate about energy. Two 700-megawatt
coal-fired electricity power plants proposed there have been denied
a necessary state air permit. The reason: their carbon dioxide
emissions. Noted the Washington Post in a front-page story: For the
first time a government agency in the United States cited
greenhouse gases in rejecting a coal plant.
Unlike so
many syrupy corporate pronouncements about “doing the right
thing,” the Kansas official who announced the denial was
clear about the issue. It would be irresponsible,” said Rod
Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and
Environment, “to ignore emerging information about the
contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to
climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health
if we do nothing.”
In the past, our criteria for
evaluating power generation have been relatively simple. Electric
utilities, true to the wishes of their consumers, wanted reliable
electrical service at low cost. Coal delivered on both counts.
It’s both cheap and plentiful. More than 50 percent of the
nation’s electricity is produced by burning coal.
Our criteria for energy choices are now broadening. “Kansas
must take advantage of renewable energy and conservation as we
progress through this century,” said Kansas Gov. Kathleen
Sebelius. “These additional coal plants would have moved us
in the wrong direction.” Even inside the boardrooms of
utilities, there are now admonitions about a future
“carbon-constrained world.” The writing is on the wall,
and well-run businesses are now jockeying for position in this
changing world of energy. President George Bush may never have
issued a clarion call for change similar to Jimmy Carter’s
“moral equivalent of war,” but change is happening
despite him.
That’s not to say the future is
crystal-clear. There is no one easy alternative to coal. Wind,
hydro, biomass and other power sources will continue to expand.
Ground-source heat pumps, now novelty items, are likely to soon
become mainstream, as they already are in resource-poor
Scandinavia. Solar appears poised for a breakthough. And nuclear is
increasingly touted as a powerful option, though it remains
problematic.
The greatest gains are to be had in wringing
greater efficiencies out of existing supplies. We have done this
before, quietly but with large and lingering successes. The
disruptions in oil supplies during the 1970s sparked innovations in
energy use that yielded the burgeoning economy of the last 20
years. We are now going through a similar retooling, only this time
with even greater changes likely, and even more at stake.
These are exciting times. Our backs increasingly to the wall, we
are discovering that there are new ways to live, and also new ways
of looking at the world. Electricity and heat don’t
necessarily have to be imported. We are re-thinking our
infrastructure.
Considering these changes, I reflect upon
the life of my grandfather. He was born in 1890, the year the
frontier was declared closed, in a sod house in northeastern
Colorado, in country like that of Holcomb, Kan. His family burned
cow patties for warmth, rode horses for transportation and, I
suppose, burned coal oil for light. The first electricity for
streetlights was introduced in 1892, in the mining town of
Telluride, Colo., but much of the rural West waited for decades.
Not until the 1940s did my grandparents get electricity. Soon, they
had radios and, in time, television, with Elvis Presley, the
Beatles and all the rest on Ed Sullivan.
Last summer I
visited the high prairie where my grandfather was born. A windmill
remains, but today, other windmills march over the horizon on the
bluffs near the Nebraska border — dozens of them, each nearly 400
feet high. We are adapting, as people always have. Now it’s
time to evolve again. Sometimes it takes a swat from a state
regulatory board to wake us up to the urgency of innovation.
Allen Best is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in the
Denver area of Colorado.
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