A few evenings ago I was excited by the lights of Billings while passing through in my excellent fossil fueled and lubricated all wheels driven touring car. Back in the day when our family of six motored in an old black 1953 Cadillac from Miles City to visit all our relatives in Butte for my father’s annual two week vacations, we hardly noticed Billings. For us the high point was waking in the dark as we passed deadman’s curve on two-lane Harding Way, in time to break over the pass and see all the lights that mom called “a bowl of jewels.” Our ancestors worked under the ground there for generations, helping create a city in the mountains more important to America’s World War II effort than the Manhattan Project. People smoked more then and the no smoking signs were in 16 languages. This year for the first time I felt that familiar excitement among the light studded petroleum refinery towers of Billings. 

Butte’s scores of mine head frames and whistles lessened with the advance of open-pit mining technology and ended with happenings in far away Chile. The lighted towers of Billings are bound to eventually change as people make decisions about how to address climate change. For us it will next be a plug-in hybrid that uses the solar panels we’ve had on our house for 16 years and Montana’s gas stations to range our state. As technology evolves we will get a fuel cell electric vehicle. 

By then some of the talented managers, engineers, safety experts, materials makers and construction people who’ve built this fantastical world in Billings will lend experiences from a mature industry to making carbon-free green hydrogen. Idaho National Engineering laboratories has just demonstrated that green hydrogen electrolyzed at high temperature requires 23 percent less energy.That means a future of small nuclear power plants or those strange-looking solar power collection towers. Who knows where the water will originate? It would be nice if Billings got a piece of that generational response to climate change.

Meanwhile let the child in us enjoy the experience of lights dancing in the glow of the setting sun. Whoever would have imagined Billings having more going for it than Wonderland and pre-school girls who threatened to rub my eyes with snowballs?  I’m as delighted to be married to a Billings woman who grew up thinking airports were always up on rims.