Energy Policy and the Imperative to Make a Better Future
So much of our discussion around the politics of energy revolves around compassion for others – both the people who live with us here and now, as well as those of future generations. I’ll be 56 in a few months. Will I personally see the day when our current energy policy, if left in its current sad state, brings us catastrophic terrorist strikes, horrible climate issues, never-ending wars, a continuing spike in cancer rates, and broad-spread social chaos from the scarcity of fossil fuels? I don’t know. But the fact that I’ll be saying goodbye to this Earth in a few decades doesn’t render me uninterested in dealing with this matter before I check out.
But what exactly is the imperative on us to take inconvenient actions now for the benefit of others we’ll never meet? I’m not sure I can articulate that. So let me introduce Og Mandino, a writer and speaker of the 20th Century, who said:
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
When we read this closely and thoughtfully, we have no doubt that he was 100% right. Do any of us think we have better, more fulfilling lives because we can somehow ignore the needs of others while we focus on our own immediate gains?
Yet how hard it is to act the way Mandino suggests.
Craig, a woman told me yesterday she had “given up” on us and our movement. I refuse to give up. Reading your post is therefore timely. (We are the same age btw.) Just today a person recommended to me emissions trading before even considering or recommending actual reductions! And from her sincerity, I think she considers emissions trading an actual way to lower emissions! So our main challenge, IMHO, is how to actually achieve reductions in energy use and emissions, how to avoid simply aiming for lobbied-for subsidies & gov programs (often more abt marketing than reductions), offsets and trade-offs. Even when I do certified accounting of grid-tied PV energy surpluses, I do not carry surpluses to future months or years. Only apply them to the current billing cycle. After all, at least where I am (KY), there is no storage. When I use my PV-surplus credits to buy future power from a utility, I’m buying coal-fired power. We need to honestly account for that, not cover it up with offsets or poetic claims. I tell consumers to take advantage of the incentives but not to lose focus on the objectives.
Thanks for writing. It’s funny to hear people say that they’ve “given up.” It’s not like this is a polo match we’re losing, where we can give up, curse our luck, and repair to the clubhouse for a cold martini. Keep up the good work.