To the editor:

“Westar Energy customers are getting socked with record electricity-producing fuel costs at the same time the giant utility is seeking a $177.6 million rate increase,” or so says the Journal-World of Aug. 12.

But it doesn’t have to be so.

The private enterprise system is founded on the customer paying what the market will bear. The fossil fuel companies have invested lavishly in lobbying and other less obvious means of assuring that their positions for maximizing profit are protected and dominant. That’s what big businesses do.

Make no mistake about it, we are in a life and death struggle to make a transition to an eco-industrial model. But in all probability, much of the fossil fuel will have to stay in the ground and the organizations whose vision is unable to accommodate that will have to be faced down by a strong leadership backed up by a vocal population. Right now we have neither.

Will the people have the stomach for the confrontation? The answer to that question is by no means assured. If we have a failure of nerve or let the public relations firms convince us that it is all a big hoax or a delusion, then we are likely to witness the beginning of the end of the age of enlightenment and the end of progress for the human race.

Les Blevins,
Lawrence