Mashpee selectmen think they are on firm ground in their opposition to the wind farm. Their rock is a non-binding question on the May 7, 2005, town ballot, which asked Mashpee voters if they approved “the concept of a ‘wind farm’ in Nantucket Sound for energy generation purposes?

With a turnout of 18 percent of the town’s voters, 1,075 answered no and 713 said yes. A decisive statement against the concept of a wind farm, but not as decisive as the first question, which was binding. The Community Preservation Act was embraced by 80 percent of Mashpee voters, 1,481 to 208.

A great deal has happened since May 2005. Thanks to scientists and some courageous politicians, the world is far more aware of climate change and its causes, including the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity. If they were asked today, would Mashpee voters have a different view about Cape Wind, which would produce for the region’s power grid the equivalent amount of electricity to cover 75 percent of the total demand for Cape Cod and the Islands?

As we have learned during the past year from the reports produced by panels of international scientists and issued by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the climate change predictions include inundations of small islands states and densely populated coastal zones, more intense hurricanes, water shortages, soil erosion, droughts, a drop in food production, melting of mountain glaciers, and the loss of biodiversity. Some countries are already feeling these impacts.

The chief cause of climate change is carbon dioxide that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun’s heat and causing the planet to warm. With just four percent of the world’s population, the United States produces 25 percent of the carbon dioxide. Coal-burning power plants are the largest US source of carbon dioxide pollution—they produce 2.5 billion tons every year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.

America’s dependence on imported oil has economic ramifications, as well as environmental ones. While the spotlight is on the subprime mortgage market fallout, the price of oil—and America’s dependence on it—is another significant factor in the economic downturn.

Just a decade ago, a barrel of crude oil cost about $11 and the US produced half of the petroleum it consumed. In 1998, the US spent about $45 billion for its imported oil. As the cost of a barrel of crude oil hit $100 on January 2, the tab for expenditures on imported oil for 2007 was being rung up at $400 billion.

Over the past decade, according to Michael Klare, the author of Resource Wars and Blood and War, the United States has “squandered approximately one and a half trillion dollars on imported oil, much of which has been poured down the tanks of grotesquely fuel-inefficient vehicles….”

In an essay called “How Oil Burst the American Bubble,” Dr. Klare says this sum constitutes the single largest contribution to the country’s balance-of-payments deficit and “a substantial transfer of wealth from the US economy to those of oil-producing nations.” This, in turn, helped to weaken the value of the dollar against the euro and Japanese yen, and other key currencies, which boosted the costs of other imported goods.

All this is happening in the context of a dramatic increase in the global demand for oil, primarily from China and India, and a marked slowdown in the expansion of the global supply, due mainly, Dr. Klare says, “to a dearth of new discoveries and recurring political disorder in key oil fields already in production.”

And where do these billions of US dollars end up? In sovereign-wealth funds (SWFs), which are “giant pools of wealth” under the control of government agencies in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and other oil-exporting countries. Recently, these SWFs have been used to buy stakes in Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and other American financial institutions. These acquisitions are “just a small indication of a massive, irreversible shift in wealth and power from the United States to the petro-states of the Middle East and energy-rich Russia.”

What this means, Dr. Klare writes, “is not just the enfeeblement of the American economy, but an accompanying decline in political leverage.”

It also means that more and more minds must be opened to alternative forms of energy and transportation—and, yes, alternative forms of politics and diplomacy.