One of the bright spots in our economy right now is in agriculture, and I think a lot of that has to do with the role farmers are playing in renewable energy such as ethanol and biodiesel and some even in wind energy.

So what I am having a tough time understanding is Al Franken ridiculing the energy bill that started the whole thing. Isn’t he running for the Senate from Minnesota? Lots of concerned Minnesota citizens, members of both parties, were asking our senators and congressmen to support the energy bill. How do you run for the Senate being opposed to a bill that promotes ethanol, biodiesel, wind energy and other renewables? What am I missing?

Thank the good Lord that we have this energy policy in place and thank congressmen and senators from both parties for voting for it, including Norm Coleman. Imagine where the agriculture economy and our whole state’s economy would be if we had today’s sky high production costs and the depressed crop prices that we had in the late 1990s. It would make the 1980s look good.

Franken said he would have voted against the energy bill because it had tax breaks in it for oil and gas. But I think the better approach is the one both Obama and Coleman took which was to vote for the energy bill to get renewables off the ground and then vote to take away breaks for oil and gas companies.

If a majority of congressmen and senators would have taken Franken’s approach, I’d hate to see where our renewable energy industry would be right now. We need statesmen like Sen. Coleman in Washington now, forging deals that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and help us keep some of our hard-earned dollars at work here in America, rather than sending them overseas to fund terrorism.

Randall J. Doyal

Owatonna