Things are getting a little silly in Kansas after a recent decision by the state government to not allow a proposed expansion of a coal-fired electrical generation plant to go ahead.

First we had a "concerned citizens " group pop up calling themselves "Kansans for Affordable Energy." The KAE ran ads claiming that by not allowing the expanded coal facility it would somehow open the doors to foreign natural gas exporting countries like Venezuala, Iran and Russia.

The ad featured photos of Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladamir Putin with the caption "Why are these men smiling."

Now that's a cute piece of fear mongering. But it wasn't KAE who picked up the bill for the ads, it was coal giant Peabody Energy and the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation (who lost the expansion bid).

They also forgot to mention that three-quarters of Kansas natural gas is imported from Canada.

Things got even sillier this week when the Kansas Energy Council, a government appointed group charged with developing a long-term energy plan for the State, made a decision to remove a paper from their website outlining the science of global warming and possible solutions.

Here' the offending paper (pdf). Not much to it really, other than a few statements that would probably irk the energy-sector heavy members of the Kansas Energy Council.

Things like:

"To put it into a global perspective, if Kansas were an independent nation, it would rank as the 44th largest emitter of carbon into the atmosphere, just after Iraq."

And,

"The newest information evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leads the Panel to conclude with very high confidence that climate change is caused by human activities."

I guess its much easier to ignore such realities than it is to deal with them.