The unnamed Courier editor comes out in favor of a small energy project in Chino Valley that will save the town a ton of money pretty quick. The numbers make it a dead obvious choice, so obvious that it should be unremarkable. But to the editor, and to an unaccountably large number of our fellow citizens, solar energy projects are still thought of as exotic and experimental.
After the reader slogs through his customary cut-and-paste from the front-page story a couple of days ago, the editor whacks out, "one of the nation's most pressing imperatives is to adopt a program on the order of President John F. Kennedy's effort to reach the moon before 1970 to achieve independence from foreign energy, especially oil." This sort of rhetoric was inspiring when Jimmy Carter presented it to us in the '70s. Now it seems more than a little antique.
The challenges we face with climate change and dwindling petroleum resources should be carrying us to a vision of not just independence from foreign oil, but total independence from fossil carbon as an energy source. As the Chino Valley project and a vast number of other more ambitious plans and projects are proving every day, we have the economically obvious technology in hand. What we don't have is the political will to reduce the market incentives favoring petro energy and big corporations, or to level the playing field for clean energy and smaller-scale production. That's the sort of vision that the editor could be offering, and, for the good of us all, should be offering.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I encourage you to share your own views and experience with me and other readers. How you do that matters, and I'm committed to maintaining a place where readers and commenters can feel safe from adolescent BS. So here's the deal:
There are two kinds of anonymous comments: those by people who have a genuine fear of revenge from the dark side, and those from darksiders just hiding to avoid accountability. You may post comments anonymously, but I reserve the right to treat anonymous comments as found items that belong to me and do with them as I see fit.
If, on the other hand, you're willing to stand by your convictions and post under your own name or a regular handle, your comments belong to you, and I'll edit them only on egregious violations of respect for others.
If this doesn't work for you, I'm sure you'll be happier somewhere else.