Article published Oct 5, 2007

Fossil fuel

The Age of Fossil Fuel is over. We haven't realized it yet, and may not in time to save ourselves and our children's children.

So long as there are big bucks to be made from bulldozing the mountaintops off the Appalachians in West Virginia and dumping them down to clog the streams in the valleys, so long as it is profitable to strip away the prairie in eastern Montana which can never be replaced, and solong asit still pays to rape the earth for gain, the energy companies will not make whole-hearted efforts to replace fossil fuel energy with energy that is renewable and given to us gratis.

Namely the wind, the sun, the earth (think heat pumps) geothermal, water — already a proven source. As real money is devoted to refining the methods of using these natural resources, they will become cheaper, more efficient, and will replace the methods by which we are poisoning ourselves now in our pursuit of easy comfort and convenience.

I keep hoping that I will seeit in my lifetime. One place to start would be to decide not to build the Highwood Coal Generating Plant.

But as the pollution drifts down to Fort Benton, my asthma will take its toll, and I will not live to see the day of renewable energy arrive.

Pity. I was looking forward to it.

— Lorene Stranahan, Fort Benton