Twenty years ago when my late wife's career took her to Wyoming and we purchased a small condo in Casper, we signed up for the green energy option on our power bill at an extra cost of about $5 per month.
Our electricity source was inexpensive coal – the cleanest burning in the United States. Some of the money the utility made from it was invested in alternative energy.
Our privately owned utility used green option bill payments to build wind power, and Wyoming now boasts that it has enough wind to heat, air condition and light the lower 48 states,
In 2016, the coal mines in Wyoming are closing. None will ever be started up and billons of BTUs of energy will stay in the ground.
Tens of thousands of jobs are disappearing and many Wyoming citizens are dismayed by what closing the mines is costing local economies.
It is not that Wyoming has run out of coal; it is that technology and economics are changing and this particular fossil fuel in this particular jurisdiction is dying.
There is an important difference between what the New Democratic government is doing in Alberta and what the utilities of Wyoming did to get off coal.
In Alberta, the market is skeptical. In Wyoming the government is the doubter.
What has taken place in Wyoming has been market driven and is a more orderly and patient process than the one that Hurry Up lefties have unleashed in Alberta.
The NDP put on an unrelenting face at its convention in Calgary June 10 to 12. It is not going to back down just to be popular with the conservative parties and the critical media.
When the voters of Alberta elected a left-of-centre, environmentalist government, they energized the winds of change in the province.
What the province sees after a year of the NDP in office is what it is going to get for at least three more years, and maybe seven.
The economy will have a fossil fuel sector for a while yet, but the death warrant for coal is written, and oilsands, natural gas and conventional oil are entering the late afternoon of their economic dominance.
- Frank Dabbs is the editor of the Didsbury Review and a veteran journalist and author.
