The Door

*The Red Door
The last two democratic nominees for president are not only together in the likelihood that both of them were robbed of victory, they are also together on Climate Change and that now is the time to respond.

Our Energy Challenge
Senator John Kerry
Monday 26 June 2006
Faneuil Hall
Boston, Massachusetts

(snip)
Too often our leaders in both parties have done what's easy, turned their backs on hard realities and great possibilities. Renewables, efficiency breakthroughs, clean technologies have been marginalized in the face of self-interested forces.

In these lost years, we could have created millions of new jobs, opened up vast new markets, improved the health of our citizens, slowed global warming, saved the taxpayers money, earned the respect of the world, and significantly strengthened our long term security.

Instead America's energy strategy has been rhetorical, not real.

(snip)

I don't know how to say it more plainly: Washington's energy policy is as real as their claims of Mission Accomplished in Iraq. But it is also the latest chapter in the long story in both parties politics at its worst - ducking the difficult choices, giving into the big contributors, substituting words for deeds, postponing the reckoning until the day after tomorrow. If you offend no one, you change nothing.

The world is changing and now the reckoning is real.

Last Thursday, Brian Williams opened the nightly news with a stark statement: "Top climate scientists are saying with a high level of confidence that the earth is the hottest it has been in 400 years." NBC's science correspondent reported that global warming may lead to "rising sea levels, heavy rains in some areas, drought in others, and an increase in severe weather, including hurricanes."

Was there room to argue? Well, as the NBC story concluded "you can [always] make a debate if you can find one scientist who says the earth is flat and have him debate it against everybody else."

Well, Washington is full of "flat-earth" politicians. No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades - the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather - the flat earth caucus can't even see what is on the horizon.

In the Congress they've even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction.

This is Stone Age science.

Here's the bottom line: within the next decade, if we don't deal with global warming, our children and grandchildren will have to deal with global catastrophe.

It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, (more)

The question now - even more than it has been for the last years - is not whether climate change is happening but what are we going to do about it?

No, I don't mean how does the political system moan and groan and adopt makeshift responses.

I mean what are we really going to do?

How do we turn this danger into opportunity?

How do we meet a challenge of epic proportions with an epic American response?

Well we have to start by ending the bizarre disconnect of American politics. Real crises stare us in the face, screaming for solution. But non-existent, contrived ones replace the real ones on the agenda of a Congress that wants to change the political climate instead of dealing with climate change.

They remain bent on dividing the country with flag burning and gay bashing amendments to the Constitution when we should be strengthening the country with a determined attack on global climate change."

Kerry continues in his speech with a pretty good grasp of good energy policy and an understanding of how we can turn this challenge into an opportunity.

Like Gore, they both see an opportunity in this challenge.

I see it as an opportunity too, a door if you will,

Not to just to free ourselves of the global struggle for oil,

and the war and loss of treasure it will bring,

But to free ourselves from carbon completely.

Our deserts can become our new energy fields.

Our cars can become multipowered micro power plants.

Our homes can put as much power into the grid as they take out.

Our cities can be CPULs (read this)

Our offices can be virtual.

We will have the opportunity to redefine work.

We will have the opportunity to reexamine the foundations

of the consciousness of division that brings us war,

poverty, and so much dis-ease.

No one should go hungry.

No one should be required to kill his brother.

No one.

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