Wanted: Energy Pragmatists

It’s the 202nd birthday of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (pictured). He’s best known as the first existentialist philosopher, but he was also active in many other fields, including the writing of fiction. According to the Writer’s Almanac:

He published many works under a variety of aliases… to disavow his own authority. He would adopt a “character” who wrote about a particular philosophical viewpoint, and then would adopt another persona to explore the opposing viewpoint.

I bring this up simply to note how incredibly rare it is to find this capacity for thought today, if it exists at all. Here in the 21st Century we’re programmed to accept a certain piece of dogma, or perhaps its opposite, but certainly not both of them simultaneously.

This may be the single most lethal aspect of the politics of energy. Our representatives are elected either because:

• They are shills of the oil companies and will perpetuate legislation based on the idea that fossil fuels are plentiful, cheap, and benign (which is completely untrue), or

• They appeal to those who believe that fossil fuels need to be gone in the next couple of years (which is completely impossible).

There are, somewhere, people who could be called “energy pragmatists,” but do not expect them to become political leaders; that’s not going to happen.