The Times ran a cute article today about an enterprising green-energy group that got some towns in Kansas to adopt more environmentally friendly practices by appealing to local values and steering clear of mentioning global warming (link to the story appears below).
The group, the Climate and Energy Project, deserve mad props for having achieved real success and, more importantly, for listening to the actual concerns of real people, rather than imposing solutions from on high.
Still ... no matter how important it is to honor the worldview of those who may not share your own, there are facts that really cannot be put in dispute, and there are times when, quite simply, some people--even if they are a bunch of atheistic eggheads--are right, and other people are wrong.
The article quotes a farmer who "discounts" global warming but whose "ears pricked up when project workers came to town to talk about harnessing wind power. 'There is no sense in our dependency on foreign oil,' he said, 'especially since we have got this resource here.'"
I don't want to rain on the fine work of the Climate and Energy Project, but someone needs to break it to this guy that unless we start strapping sails to our cars, producing cleaner electricity through wind power (which doesn't add carbon to the atmosphere the way a coal-fired electric plant does and thus does not contribute to ... global warming) really has little to do with ending our dependency on foreign oil.
