Real estate attorney Bryan Echols takes issue with the view of a panelist at a recent Vanderbilt-hosted event that energy-efficient construction should be a matter for states to shove down local governments' throats — er, take the lead on.

[T]he mindset of the author follows a more frequently espoused theory these days; that this whole democracy thing is way too cumbersome, and if we don't force the people to adopt our enlightened positions, they will wander in the darkness. Essentially, the author was suggesting that local governments were too slow to adopt advanced positions.