Wind needs to be part of that solution. But a critical question is this: How far do you go in trying to save the planet by destroying it? We appreciate the urgency, but ravaging the planet in the name of saving it doesn't constitute an alternative-energy strategy as much as an alternative environmental calamity. There are many places where windmills would work fine without impact, but the entire effort is wasting valuable time trying to develop the optimum wind sites at the expense of every other consideration. That's an impediment to rigorously confronting climate change, not a solution.

With new fears that the world is building new coal- fired electric generation plants at a pace that can only exacerbate global warming, the need to invest more heavily in alternative forms of environmentally friendly energy becomes ever more acute.

Wind needs to be part of that solution. But a critical question is this: How far do you go in trying to save the planet by destroying it?

Plastering Pennsylvania's ridgetops with massive wind turbines, to the possible decimation of bats, raptors and migrating songbirds, coupled with the visual impairment inflicted on these green mountains, erosion of thin mountain soils and the loss of public access, suggest to us that we need to find more suitable sites for wind and invest in less environmentally problematic solutions to climate change.

A plan to put windmills atop city-owned land on Peters Mountain, within sight of the Appalachian Trial and near the largest roadless area in eastern Pennsylvania, was a bad idea when Mayor Stephen R. Reed proposed it. And now that it has been determined, according to a city-financed study, that it would be uneconomic for the financially troubled city to undertake such a project at an estimated cost of $45 million, it be comes no better of an idea to lease the land to a private energy developer to put in windmills, as Reed said the city would be willing to do.

Everyone should take a good look at what is going on here -- and we concede that good people have conflicting views about the right and wrong of this -- and consider the forces that are unleashed in desperate situations.

In this case, the driving factors have less to do with the environment or an energy crisis than they do with the city's desperate need to generate money, as the Harrisburg Incinerator burns up $1 million a month while the various parties fight over how to stem the losses.

But this is just a microcosm of what potentially awaits us all in the years ahead on a planetary scale.

One would have to be a hermit to have missed the continuous warnings about the need to reduce carbon emissions significantly -- perhaps as much as 80 percent by 2050 -- to avoid reaching a tipping point in the planetary balance that has made the advancement of the human condition possible during the course of 10,000 years of a relatively mild climate. Yet, instead of moving to reduce carbon emissions, most of the world's countries, including the United States, continue to increase them.

This cannot continue without an eventual time of reckoning, which may already be upon us.

We appreciate the urgency, but ravaging the planet in the name of saving it doesn't constitute an alternative-energy strategy as much as an alternative environmental calamity.

There are many places where windmills would work fine without impact, but the entire effort is wasting valuable time trying to develop the optimum wind sites at the expense of every other consideration. That's an impediment to rigorously confronting climate change, not a solution.

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