Oil and the Moon (and Now Al Gore)
Posted on July 18, 2008 - Filed Under Gore, climate crisis |
Yesterday Al Gore laid out an ambitious agenda to make the United States electric grid carbon free within 10 years. It is a bold and audacious plan and one that will require the full energy and effort of America if it is to be achieved. In outlining his plan, Gore called for the use of solar, wind, geothermal power, conservation and clean-coal technology.
Gore himself recognized the monumental task ahead of this country to achieve this goal. However, he noted that America, when challenged in the past, has achieved the unimaginable. Gore compared today’s challenge to the one President Kennedy presented to America in 1962.
This is wishful thinking, but perhaps Gore, or his aides, checked out Blogflict on June 21, 2008, when we wrote:
“Right now, it is pure fantasy to think that in a decade we could be self-reliant as a country for our energy needs. But in the past when our country needed to marshal our strengths and turn fantasy into reality, we did it. So why not do it again? In 1962 the idea of putting a man on the moon and returning him safely was science fiction, it sounded absurd, just as absurd as making American energy self-sufficient today. Yet, we found a way to do it.
On a sweltering late summer day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy declared, ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.’
Now that Gore has put this issue out there for public debate, it is now up to the Congress and President to act. Only, they won’t. The US government won’t take this issue up until at least January of 2009 when a new President is sworn-in to office. By then, there is no reason to think that price of oil will have magically dropped down, or that our CO2 emissions will have plunged, or that the environment isn’t in even greater peril than it is today. But we must make sure that this is the last, final delay in taking action. There is too much at stake.
The New York Times, in describing the speech, noted, “Like a modern Jeremiah, Mr. Gore called down thunder to justify the spending of trillions of dollars to remake the American power system, a plan fraught with technological and political challenges that goes far beyond the changes recently debated in Congress and by world leaders.”
Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s first true conservationists and environmentalists, once said, “The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled it burns like a consuming flame.” Now is the time to light that flame and take action on our energy policy. Hopefully Gore’s speech is the kindling we need to get it burning.
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