Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's Green Beginnings
Governor Brian Schweitzer, who is sometimes mentioned in the Chattering Classes as a possible running mate for Senator Barack Obama is obsessed with the idea of ending America's addiction to big oil. The Governor aggressively promotes renewable energy development and conservation with rock star-like energy, having successfully pushed, among other green legislation, 10 percent ethanol content in Montana's gasoline.
The Governor's passion for turning his red state green comes from his time right out of graduate school farming --true story -- the Sahara for Quaddafi. From Greg Lemon's new biography of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer "Blue Man in a Red State":
"Given the fact that he was a farm kid from Geyser, Mont., Schweitzer figured his best chance to see the world was through farming. He majored in international agriculture at Colorado State University and earned his Master's degree in tropical soils from Montana State University. His first job out of college at the age of 25 took him to the Middle East to work as an agronomist on the massive project to farm the desert for the Libyan government.
"The obvious problem with farming in the desert is water ... And the environment was hostile. Temperatures would climb to more than 130 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing in the winter. 'Sometimes the wind would blow a whole field away,' Schweitzer recalled. 'Forty acres would just move, become a dune a half mile away.' But they could grow crops year around, corn or sorghum in the summer and wheat in the winter. 'To farm the desert is completely different than trying to farm normally,' (Project founder Harry) Kartchner said .. But they were pioneers, which appealed to Schweitzer. He was on land that no one had farmed, in a country that was in a constant state of political and military turmoil. He was seeing the world, by God. He was helping lead a monumental farming project in, of all places, the Sahara, and he wasn't even twenty-five years old."
The Governor of Montana spent several years in Libya and speaks fluent Arabic.
[Image: ABCNews]
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This is a very great thing for Montana. Governor Brian Schweitzer is really qualified to run a program for a green locality. His experiences and educational background gives assurance for a productive way of giving attention to the environment. On the other hand because of insufficient fund of the government to sustain the needs of people it seems that we cannot easily recover from economical downturn. Barack Obama proposes a stimulus package that he thought will help America. For now, payday loans are safe in the Big Sky Country. The Montana House committee that had been appointed to look over anti-payday loans legislation has been deadlocked, in a 9-9 split decision. This would have joined the ranks of other states that have passed rate caps or bans. Despite numerous studies that indicate that payday loans have few real detrimental effects, states continue to consider getting rid of them. Even the Federal Reserve agrees that payday loans aren't all that bad.