What College Students Interested in Renewable Energy Should Study

A fine young man, Rudy Chavarilla, called me this morning from American Amp and interviewed me for about half an hour. We recorded a show on the subject: What college should students do vis-à-vis sustainability that will be distributed to over 300 college radio stations.

This whole process makes me feel good all over. I honestly love to speak with college students, though when I do, I have a habit of throwing in the kind of cliches that embarrass the bejeepers out of my kids. “Enjoy these brief moments. These are the best years of your life. Read great books. Learn to live an examined life. Kiss a few good-looking members of the opposite sex.”  Seriously, my kids want to barf when they hear me I carry on like this. So I thought the better of going down that road, and answered the interviewer’s questions without any of this sort of editorializing.

But not a single one of these questions was easy.  “Mr. Shields,” Rudy asked, “What should college students study if they’re interested in renewable energy?”

Wow, that’s a good question. It constantly strikes me that almost every discipline of human thought is called into play when it comes to clean energy. Certainly you have physics, chemistry, biology, oceanography, ecology, climatology and the other pure sciences. But what about:

Sociology (How do we interact in ways that make it cool or uncool to preserve our planet?)

Economics (This truly is “the mother discipline,” as our Econ 101 prof told us, and, of course, he was right. None of this will happen if someone can’t make a buck in the process.)

Anthropology (To what degree is it part of our DNA to care about one another – and our future?)

Political Science (How do 180+ sovereign nations deal with the fact that we share one ecosphere?)

Law (Does our First Amendment protection of the right of free speech permit the corporations that are today’s energy giants to spend unlimited money to affect our elections, and make environmentalism so despised that our planet is destroyed while their shareholders get even richer?)

Philosophy (To what degree do our rights as individuals trump our responsibilities to our fellows, here and in the future? There are seven billion of us here on Earth, at least five billion of whom have no hope for a healthy, happy existence. Is that fair?)

I’ll put the interview online as soon as I get a link to it.  I think I got at least a B, but as always, I’ll let you be the judge.