To the editor:

Kansas fought and won a 40-year court battle with Colorado for water rights from the Arkansas River. Now, if the proposed coal plants are built in western Kansas, we would use much of that hard-won resource to generate electricity, most of which will be sent back to Colorado.

This seems counterproductive, given that a shrinking aquifer and near-drought conditions have plagued western Kansas for years. And though the Arkansas water would literally be a drop in the bucket compared with the massive demands that agriculture has for that resource, its use for generating power that we would not use is wrong.

It is true that modern coal plants are much less polluting than those built years ago. Yet, we need a multisource plan for our power needs that is less harmful – that being the diversified use of wind, solar and nuclear sources of power, rather than the current near-monopoly that coal has as our national source for electricity.

The infrastructure and technology are not in place for us to switch over to 100 percent renewable sources of power, yet why not begin to aggressively develop and integrate them into the national grid?

This seems to be the only real way we can meet an ever-growing demand and wean us off our obscene consumption and dependence of finite, and environmentally damaging, fossil fuels.

This would be a logical approach to this problem. Yet more often than not, logic falls to the wayside when it goes up against the status quo.

Steve Craven,

Lawrence