If An Oil Producing Nation Wants to Do This . . .

why can't we?

This morning, on my drive in to work, I heard on NPR that Abu Dhabi, a small nation of about a million people who are sitting on roughly 10% of the world's oil reserves, has decided to do something about carbon emissions. They plan on building a small city which will hold about 50,000 people - a city that will not have any carbon footprint whatsoever.

So my question is, if we, as one of the planet's largest global consumers, can't get our act together and move towards sustainable energy and ecological friendly policies (if I hear one more ad for "clean coal" I'm going to scream. That's an oxymoron, folks, along the lines of "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence!"), why can't we at least be moderately interested when another country - an oil producing country, no less - is? Thus far, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is, but it doesn't seem like many other groups in the U.S. are. Which strikes me as very, very sad.