At a time when this country is finally emerging from eight Jurassic years, many Kansas legislators are determined to resurrect a 1,500 megawatt dinosaur of a power plant that their governor — supported by two-thirds of her constituents — vetoed three times last year.

Actually, I stole the "dinosaur" description from a disgusted Kansas City Star reader, who employed the word in four pithy paragraphs attacking legislators for their new attempts to push through the Sunflower coal-fired power plant. Like us, he wonders why they don’t look to the state’s famed wind for power instead of coal-fired power that will dump 11 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, adding to the planet’s global warming burden. He also quite properly links this new scheme to a denial of science and of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gives the Environmental Protection Agency authority to control CO2.

We must conclude that common sense, prudence, and accountability — virtues for which Kansans are noted  — are being trampled in the legislators’ rush to create profit for a few and a burden for the rest.