Today is the national release date for Stephen King's nearly 1100-page novel Under the Dome, in which a giant impenetrable dome mysteriously appears over a small town in Maine. I'll have a review of the book in tomorrow's paper, but in the meantime, H+ Magazine informs us that officials in a small town in Vermont actually considered building a giant dome over their town in the 1970s:

In the late 1970s the U.S was in its second energy crisis of the decade and roiled by double-digit inflation. Oil was at a then-shocking $38 a barrel ($107 in today’s dollars), having risen eightfold in the previous ten years, and Jimmy Carter went on television in a Cardigan sweater to urge Americans to turn down their thermostats. Few towns were hurting more than frigid Winooski, whose residents spent about $4 million a year to stay thawed.

One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and Mark Tigan, then the city’s 32-year-old director of community development and planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over the city.

The next morning it still seemed like a good idea — or, at least, not necessarily completely absurd...Tigan had his staff prepare a white paper on the dome. They wrote that a one square mile dome would reduce resident’s heating bills by up to 90 percent. Tigan presented the idea to the city council. Clem Bissonette, then on Winnoski’s city council and now its ex-mayor, asked Tigan, “Are you nuts?”

This all sounds like it could be a hoax, but this Time Magazine story from 1979 seems to imply that it was true. I bet if Fox News was around in the Carter administration, "Dome, Baby, Dome!" would have been the "Drill, Baby, Drill!" of the energy crisis.