I truly hope that, if elected, Barack Obama will live up to his promise to this country; a promise to change the way that things are being done. Plain and simple. Enough is enough. After 7 years of a pitiful shame of an administration, Bush now has the chance to seal at least a partially redeemed Presidential legacy by taking the high road, by proposing real changes with our sham of an energy policy; yet, even with nothing more politically to lose, he only panders to the sound bites, and does nothing for the future of this country other than continuing to enrich his clique of cronies, sitting fat in the Texas heartland, engorged cowboys sucking this nation dry to the last drop. When has there been a more self-serving and short sighted man steering this country in our history; when have the ramifications been felt so deeply.
When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.
Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.
If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation.
Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said.
-Thomas Friedman
Gore is calling for 100% carbon-free electricity production in the country in ten years; this, my friends, is the definition of a BHAG (that’s the Big Hairy Audacious Goal) that drives to much of business innovation. We need to think big, and this is exactly what Mr. Gore is doing; some might call it alarmist and unreasonable; others call it the bare minimum; we must, however, reach a moral and societal consensus on this most pivotal of matters. Our time is dwindling.
