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As President Obama prepares for his trip to Copenhagen he'll argue the United States is, belatedly, doing its part to reduce carbon emissions.

Even so, he should brace himself for criticism from those in the States who think he could show stronger leadership.

He could do worse than point his critics to a little town in Kansas.

To the people who live in Greensburg "the environment" isn't an abstraction.

The Kansas climate changed their city for ever in the most brutal fashion possible.

Their tragedy had nothing to do with global warming, but everything to do with the weather, and it has transformed the city of 900 people into a beacon of hope for those who want to do away with reliance on carbon fuels.

Long time resident Matt Deighton drives me through the plains surrounding Greensburg.

"It's so flat that if you squint your eyes and look east, you can see two days coming."

On 4 May 2007, they saw the future, alright.

All day they had been monitoring the weather channels, fearing the worst. At 2140 in the evening, the sirens sounded a tornado warning.

At 2150, the siren stopped. The electricity went dead. At 2200, .

It flattened just about every building. 10 people were killed that night.

Greensburg is a small place, and many of the descendents of those who arrived here in the 1880s are still around. Friendship and family is strong, people rely on each other.

Matt says the instinct, as their homes disappeared, was to turn to a friend, a brother, a mother, for comfort and shelter. But their homes had gone too.

He points out the land where the federal government set up 288 emergency trailers.
They have now disappeared but the ground is dotted with what look at first sight to be ancient burial mounds.

But what is buried are metal shipping containers, makeshift storm shelters.

Now people have been rehoused in elegant, long bungalows. Energy-efficient homes.

The citizens decided to make a virtue of necessity and rebuild putting the "green" into Greensburg.

All large buildings have to be built to the highest energy efficiency standards, as are most homes.

The aim is to get all the town's energy from a wind farm that is being built on the outskirts of town, although the day I visit it is not only cold, but still, and the huge windmills are still, too.

, which claims to be the greenest town in Europe, and is a part of Germany's long commitment to clean energy.

But Greensburg is somehow more startling, bang in the middle of America, off a highway where giant trucks, running on cheap petrol, thunder by.

In a country where many regard worries about climate change as a fad, which has certainly been doing a lot less than Europe to cut carbon gas emissions, Greensburg wants to earn the title of the greenest city in the world.

There's is a quiet evangelism, not preaching possible disaster, but demonstrating American virtues of optimism and hard graft, speedily re-build a city, quite literally from the ground up, as a living symbol of a better future.

I sense it has given them a sense of purpose, a tight focus, after a senseless natural calamity that broke their lives.

Matt tells me that his home town has become an inspiration to people from all over America, he says it's like a new hippy movement which has caught people's imagination.

He was in charge of the volunteer operation as people came from all over the country to rebuild this green Shangri-La.

Perhaps the centrepiece of the showcase is a new school.

It surely has to be something special when it is costing $50m for the 125 pupils.

We wade through a muddy field of tubes, sticking out of the ground like so many giant worms. Nearly 100 of them, going more than 400ft (120m) into the earth.

The liquid that will eventually be inside of them will go into the school and heat a gas which will keep the pupils warm in winter, cool in summer.

Matt is enthusiastic about the science. "It's like living on the moon," he tells me.

At first, I thought he meant the devastation after the tornado, but he means living at the cutting edge of science. He's enthusiastic about all the new techniques that are being used that will mean new jobs and more money coming into the local economy.

The school will need all the heating it can get in the winter: it is freezing outside.

So I warm up with a coffee in the "Green Bean", one of the buildings in a block called "the incubator" which boast its own "rain harvesting system".

There, I bump into Pastor Marvin George of the Baptist church, a big tattooed man in shades and a baseball cap. He's not my stereotype image of a preacher from the Midwest, except in his open enthusiasm.

The town's eight churches were among the first buildings to be rebuilt and they all went green.

Pastor George says he's all for the town's new passion:

"It's the necessary thing to do. Stewardship is important. God gave us responsibility (for the earth) and this is the way to go."

He adds his church's bills for heating and air conditioning have been cut by a third:

"The money can go to mission now, its right we spend it on the Kingdom, rather than utilities."

It is the Obama administration's hope that the USA can come to see itself as a giant Greensburg, where American ingenuity and science, economic self-interest and Christian concepts of stewardship can lead to a Green America.

But many are not persuaded. And the political opposition is huge, and perhaps growing.

More from Kansas on that side of the story tomorrow.

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