What are folks in Montana saying about our addiction to foreign oil?
You can quote me on this. I don’t care if we grow it, blow it, dig it, or drill it as long as we don’t import it. We have phenomenal energy resources.

How about eastern Montana? That’s a key portion of America’s Wind Belt.
Let me tell you a story, and it’s a metaphor for where we went wrong in this country. My dad’s about 87 years old. All four of my grandparents came from Europe and homesteaded in Montana. Now one time I was sitting with my dad a few years ago. You know it’s amazing what you can learn if you just sit and listen to an old-timer. So I say, “Dad, what was the biggest change in your life when rural electrification came to the farm?”

And he thought about it a little bit. Of course, I’m half Irish, that’s the talking part, and I’m half German, that’s the thinking part. And so he thought about it a long time before he said anything. And he says, “Well, you know, the REA [Rural Electrification Administration] was part of the New Deal and the proposition that Roosevelt had is he didn’t want to have islands of poverty and an ocean of prosperity. So he thought the minimum standard ought to be that electricity should be at every small town and every farm in America. By the time we got copper wires and it made it all the way to our farm it was 1948.” Then he said, “But your question was about the biggest change in my life after it arrived.”

“Well,” he says – and you can see him kind of rocking back and forth and nodding – he says, “I suppose that it was that we could weld at a little hotter temperature.”

Since 1923 they had had wind chargers on the farm and batteries in the basement. The American Great Plains had been electrified with wind energy and batteries in the basement since the Twenties. They had electricity. It was clean, it was green, it was renewable, it was American. They didn’t depend on somebody 500 miles away, or, worst yet, 5,000 miles away for their energy. They produced their own. They looked out the window, and they said, “Well, now, what do we got a lot of around here? I know: wind.” And there were wind chargers all over the Great Plains.

Now, here we are. We are nearly 100 years later, and you’ve got 535 members of Congress and 35,000 lobbyists in Washington, and they’re all looking at each other and wondering how we can do this. But you know maybe they ought to just ask an old-timer like I did.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED, AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE