Charlyn Fargo*, who is, I guess, the SJR's agribusiness editor (according to her bylines on the State Fair and rodeo stories that come up on a google search for her), has a column up today advocating the re-election of Mayor Davlin. I'm trying not wade into the thorny issue of promoting candidates--I only want to talk about the policies. A couple of sentences in her column jumped out at me though, and I just have to question them:
His crowning achievement is the power plant. The only thing Springfield will likely regret about its new power plant is that it decided not to build a bigger one. Also, not long ago, the utility was reeling after losing tens of millions of dollars on a dicey power trading deal gone bad, and CWLP's coffers were still serving as a bottomless piggy bank for the rest of city government. Under Davlin, the utility is back on its fiscal feet and a cap has been placed on CWLP funding of the city budget.
I left the whole paragraph there so you could see where Fargo was heading with those two bolded sentences. I don't dispute that a fiscally healthy CWLP is a good thing. I'm not so sure, however, that in the future our only regret will be that CWLP didn't build a bigger power plant. Perhaps we'll regret not doing more to shift away more quickly from carbon-intensive forms of energy. Perhaps we'll regret not doing more to invest in an infrastructure that uses the energy within Springfield's borders. No, of course not--only silly hippies would think a thing like that. (Silly hippies like ... ConocoPhillips, a major oil company which has joined the ranks of other silly hippies like Alcoa, Duke Energy, Caterpiller, BP, and DuPoint in calling for mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions.)
Sadly, anything I more could say here would be trying to kill a gnat with a Buick--these are two toss off lines, and I doubt Fargo really has any sense of what she means, other than bigger and more are always better. There's no sense of what preparing for the future really means, or the many different ways in which we can meet our energy needs. Nope, we can just keep on keepin' on.
* UPDATE: I checked back a little later to see what comments on the op-ed were like, and found that the SJR removed Fargo's byline and left it as just the SJR's opinion.