2 Texans Down Under

As I write this I am a passenger in a rented hybrid car passing through a forest of huge windmills generating electricity southwest of Sweetwater in West Texas. The three-bladed white giants are arranged in rows that stretch to the horizon on both sides of Highway 70. I’m told they are more than 20 stories tall.

This small area west of Abilene produces vast amounts of electricity in one of the cleanest possible ways, by harvesting it from wind.

The Hertz car rental agency near Love Field in Dallas let us have this Prius for $5 a day extra and it is getting between 45 and 50 miles per gallon of gasoline (or as our Aussie friends would say, petrol), saving us money when we stop to buy fuel that costs nearly $3 a gallon.

These rolling hills near Sweetwater have always been beautiful to my eyes, but now they seem useful as well. It is thrilling to see evidence of humankind’s attempts to adapt to the realities of economic and climatic change.

Kristi and I are encouraged by changes in our home state such as these windmills and the availability of relatively energy efficient cars, but we are disheartened to see even more abundant signs of waste and wretched excess.

Many of the attitudes about conservation of water and energy to which we have become accustomed in Australia are noticeably absent here.

There are even more Hummers and other gas-guzzling vehicles, it seems, than when we moved to Brisbane in 2005. We don’t see people being careful to turn off lights or television sets or computers that are on but not in use. Few people take bags to grocery stores to avoid having to use the story’s plastic ones, and we haven’t observed much special effort to conserve the water that flows so freely from the taps.

Of course, who are we to talk? Each of us will have flown 17,000 air miles or more by the time our trip to see family and friends has ended, in addition to the thousand or more miles we’ll have driven.

How long will such luxuries be available to us? How long should they be? We may get answers to such questions sooner than we want to. — Bob