Report from the American Council on Renewable Energy Meetings in Washington DC
| December 9, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
Here’s an excerpt from a keynote address, delivered by self-described “conservative Republican” US representative Bob Inglis from South Carolina:
The definition of “sustainability” is “profitability.”
He’s got a good point there; things don’t happen if they’re not profitable.
It would be great if we could achieve a level playing field. Even if we can’t force the oil and coal industries to pay the costs of cleaning up after themselves, we need to stop handing them subsidies that make it impossible for clean energy to compete against them.
Amen. You must have been reading my diatribes here at 2GreenEnergy.
Conservative Republicans now seem to think that they can drive SUVs, use ever-depleting resources without regard to the health and safety of anyone else now or in the future, and land someone else’s kid on the sands of the Middle East, to fight and die to make sure this God-given right never goes away. I don’t call that “conservatism.” I call that “dereliction of duty.”
Wow, Bob. Right on. In what sense of the term are you a “conservative Republican,” exactly?
In a political environment of late so tragically prone to extremism, I applaud these flashes of wisdom from the address by Bob Inglis.
However, I must point out that sustainability is not defined solely by profitability – although it’s very synergistic when the two dovetail. One of the purposes of a government of We the People is to do things for ourselves and progeny that the private sector could or would never do. The interstate highway system is one example, there are many others.
Should we allow profitable alone to define sustainable we should quickly find ourselves misled and mistaken. Sustainability involves using no more than replenishment, and preventing the destruction of the ecological services upon which society – however removed it appears from nature – will always depend. It also involves ensuring a thorough and holistic accounting, in the absence of which dirty fuels now appear highly profitable.
Bob’s comments on a level playing field and dereliction of duty are quite laudible – a few more tons of this kind of talk, and a nice helping of genuine action to back it up, and I might just have to consider voting republican again.
Yes, I suppose we could say that profitability (in our world) is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition to define sustainability.
And yes, I was quite taken by his words on deriliction of duty. The place burst into spontaneous applause when he said that, btw.