Write Your Own Joke
Greensburg, KS (the town wiped out by a tornado) has gone full-bore eco-freak and decided to become “the greenest town in the country.” Their projects range from erecting reinforced-concrete silo houses to building a wind farm to power the town.
Wiped out by tornado. Building wind farm.
Wiped out by tornado. Building wind farm.
The altruistic triumvirate of Obama, Gore and T. Boone Pickens would be proud, because to some, it’s no joke, as briefly summarized in “Greensburg signs up for wind farm development” at nebraska.tv.
Apparently this whole green-crazed Greensburg thing has been going on for a while now. “Like the town, ‘Greensburg’ is the little show that could” is an article about the second season (what?! we missed the first?) of the town’s reality show on the Planet Green network. (oh, that’s why we missed it—plus the aritcle says “By reality-TV standards, Season 1 was low on drama,” so it doesn’t sound like we missed much.) It notes in passing about all the film crews that have converged on the town lately to obtain footage for the predictable annual media pilgrimmage to celebrate any and all anniversaries of tradegy.
Combine tradegy commemoration with green propaganda and you’ve got a orgiastic media frenzy. The national news stories are bound to be down-right NSFW (not safe for work).
At least there is some Kansas-style honesty in the Kansas-based reporting. Take this gem of unvarnished truth from the Kansas City Star:
“[Greensburg’s] timing was ideal. Not only was green technology emerging, so was a media movement to promote it….Volunteers continue to pour in to help, as have media outlets that are eager to tell the story of ‘the greening of Greensburg.’” [our emphasis]
But, hey, more power to you if you want to pursue your green utopian dreams—as long as you pay the price yourself.
Another Kansas report, “A Greener Greensburg Grows on Kansas Prairie” from the Wichita Eagle, sheds a bit more light on the town’s greening process. Take a look at the comment section. There aren’t many, but you get the sense that:
- Kansas people are sick of hearing about Greensburg,
- half of the townsfolk were driven away because they objected to or couldn’t afford the green plans,
- there’s no tax base left to pay for the millions and millions of dollars that it is costing (Leo DiCaprio and various self-interested corporations have come to the green-dream rescue and tossed some money in the pot—but it’s hardly a “sustainable” model for the rest of us, as they surely wouldn’t do that for every citizen and town in the country), and
- one-eighth of the town’s population is now carpet-bagging green profiteers that have come in to sell their new neighbors on green-pie-in-the-sky products and have gotten disaster relief funds when they lost nothing themselves.
A section in the article itself touts how one home has had its heating bills cut by two-thirds (without giving details of the old heating system versus the new) and then off-handedly mentions that the new house cost $340,000. That would exclude the cost of land, which was already owned before the tornado ripped the old house down. So for a house out in a tiny, barely populated rural town, isn’t $340,000-plus a rather hefty price to pay? Spending that much up front on energy efficiency, how long before you break even on energy costs?
And then there’s this little green bedtime story in the article:
Jeff Robinson, 42, who lost his job when the tornado wiped out the Coastal Mart, is packing his silver Ford pickup outside one of the last trailers in FEMAville. He is leaving because it is too expensive to build green, and he has another job in a Kwik Shop in Hutchinson, he says.
Robinson, who has lived in the trailer since August after moving around, says he was “green” before “green” was cool, but the cost of building a house is more than $100,000, and mortgages are too high.
Also “the city promised there would be jobs, but nobody’s come,” Robinson says.
Jeanette Siemens, Kiowa County economic development director, acknowledges that expectations were to have new jobs by now.
It hasn’t worked out. But she still gets calls from businesses showing interest. Among them are a couple of manufacturers and smaller retailers, she says. “We still think it’s going to happen. It’s pretty much a given.”
Small rural towns, as a rule, don’t grow. But with new businesses, new jobs, new homes, schools and hospitals, Dixson and other leaders predict the town will reach its previous population of 1,400 in three years, then keep growing.
We’ll just have to join the annual media pilgrimmage in three years to find out if they attracted 600 more carpet-bagging green oil salesmen…and just how that wind farm’s doing.
That is, unless the media’s ad campaign and green math didn’t work out too well, and they silently abandon it, slinking on to fresher, unsullied greener pastures, so to speak.
3 years ago