A research scientist, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize, posed a provocative question: Is it wise for North Dakota's energy industry "to cling to something that's dying?" He was talking about reliance on fossil fuels, that we must look increasingly to renewable sources and less on oil and coal.

It was a brave thing to say in North Dakota. Steve Chu, a research physicist and director of Berkeley Lab, was here as the keynote speaker at the Renewable Fuels Action Summit at Bismarck State College.

He issued a challenge that sounded more like an ultimatum: The nation's energy supply should be 50 percent renewables within 20 years.

That sounds impossible to achieve. But then again, maybe not.

Chu didn't soft-soap the difficulties of energy generation from the wind or fuel production from biofuels and how to deliver the energy to markets. But, he argued, climate change demands the effort.

It's hard to argue with a noted scientist, especially one recognized with a Nobel Prize.

It has to start with conservation efforts, and that's something that nearly each one of us can accomplish.

The marketplace may turn into a more effective goad to force us to accept change than even a persuasive argument by an authority. The prices of gasoline and diesel certainly are talking loudly to us right now.

The matter of setting mandatory benchmarks is problematic. If they're realistic and achievable, fine. But it seems like every choice has a Draconian element to it. Solutions might create new kinds of employment while making other jobs redundant. Easily affordable energy comes with costs to our environment, and who wants to live in a drastically blasted environment that we helped come about?

It's important that there be energy discussions like the one at BSC. Equally, the education that will go on at its energy center is needed to train people who might just find some answers to our quandaries. The lack of capacity to store energy from wind generation will have to be tackled.

Solutions and realistic expectations will have to come from sound, hard science, rather than doctrinaire fanaticism - especially that rational science rather than hysteria should make us act.

And science needs to be heeded far more than politics when matters such as global warming and greenhouse gases are being considered, and those who produce the science must be above reproach, untainted by political agendas.

As one early 20th-century British politician said, "Some things are too important for politics."