3/23/07, 5:29 pm EST

Assignment Ten Finalist: Matthew Tuthill on Manchester’s “Bright Idea”

Note: This is not an official Rolling Stone article. What follows is a submission to the “I’m From Rolling Stone” writing competition.

Manchester’s “Bright Idea”

by Matthew Tuthill
Age: 26

The state history books may come to remember it as the turn of the tide.

March 3, 2007 was the day a group of citizens in Manchester, Vermont got together and voted that the town invest in carbon offsets, the first town in the state to do so. It represented the culmination of years of work by Jim Hand, a local businessman who converted his offices to run on biodiesel in the early 1980’s.

“It was during the oil crunch,” Hand says, pointing out to a pair of giant heaters through his office window. “It was just a practical decision at the time.”

More recently, Hand has felt the imperative to make an impact on a larger scale. In 2005, he spearheaded Manchester’s “Bright Idea,” by convincing then town manager Pete Webster to offer compact fluorescent light bulbs to residents at a reduced rate.

The initiative was a resounding success as more than 40,000 incandescent light bulbs were replaced by CFLs. The savings to the earth’s atmosphere will be an estimated 7,700 tons of carbon over the bulbs’ collective lifetime.

All of this might seem par for the course in a state as liberal as Vermont except for one major caveat: The key players are not hippies.

Hand is a Chevy dealer and Webster is a conservative Republican.

“I thought the jury was still out on climate change,” says Webster of his first meeting with Hand. “But he changed my views on a lot of things.”

Hand, meanwhile, has purchased carbon offsets for his fleet of 30 rental cars and introduced biodiesel fuel alternatives to other dealerships.

It is a radical change brought about by men who are decidedly un-radical. If they can pull off something of this magnitude, there may be hope for the rest of the country.