A Sustainable Course to Energy Must Contemplate the Harsh Realities of Politics

In the phone calls I place to my mother every few days, we sometimes talk about 2GreenEnergy, which, I’m flattered to say, she reads regularly. Last night she reiterated something she’s been telling me for years:  she sometimes has issues with my posts that are “tangential” to the basic notion of renewable energy.  My recent post on The Social Contract and the U.S. Government came immediately to my mind when she said that; I think I may be in trouble with her on this one….. 🙂

Many people have told me that they think it’s cool that they never know if I’ll be presenting an idea about a poet, a philosopher, a ruler of an ancient kingdom, a physicist, a famous environmentalist, a precocious child, a novelist, a philanthropist, an evolutionary biologist, a musician, or a modern-day political figure.  While Mom might agree that this is, in fact, “cool” in some sense, she thinks I should stay away from my left-of-center political philosophy with all its compassion for humankind, concern for the rights of the common man, fears for the survival of our civilization, blasting the greedy and corrupt actors in government and the private sector, and so forth.

In truth, she’s probably right.  (Mom’s always right, btw.)  Insofar as I’m a businessman, taking an overtly left-wing political stand is a terrible idea.   If I were Jon Stewart or Bill Mahar, that would be a different story, but, sad to say, I’m just a garden-variety business consultant who happens to focus on cleantech.

What we all need to understand, however, is that politics is impossible to ignore for anyone who really cares about sustainability.  The technological and economic aspects of fixing this fossil-fuel-driven mess aren’t really all that challenging.  If we had the political will to solve these problems, we could do so in short order.  In particular, the real hurdle is the unlovely confluence between Big Money and law-making.  There is no getting around this; to avoid the subject is to leave a huge elephant in the room.