Andy Revkin over at the New York Times DotEarth puts his fingers on the important climate questions related to the new presidency:
Can President Obama push climate and energy legislation or an approach to a new climate treaty that the atmosphere will someday notice? Can his plans on either front pass muster with the big bloc of lawmakers in Congress who are not from red or blue states but fossil states — those sitting on, or dependent on, coal and oil? Can he overcome what he calls America’s “shock and trance” approach to energy policy — something presidents since Richard M. Nixon have tried, and failed, to do?
Meanwhile, over at The Breakthrough Institute’s blog, Adam Zemel writes:
“… the series of clean energy investments included in this version of the [new President’s] stimulus [package] reads like a laundry list of piecemeal tax breaks and incentives that simply do not cohere into any kind of unified plan. It seems that there is no coordination between the different intended energy expenditures and no central objective or strategy behind then, other than creating new jobs.
The question that comes to my mind is whether the obstacles are just too great to make the current way of American life sustainable. That is to say, can the over-air-conditioned homes, the two cars in every driveway, and the massive retail consumption actually be made to work in a way that doesn’t destroy the habitat that we depend upon for our health happiness and security?
I’ve just returned from a jaunt to the Sundance Film Festival where the documentary about my No Impact Man project–the year in which my family and I lived as environmentally as possible–received two sustained standing ovations from audiences.
What was it that moved people? After all, what we present in the film is a way of life that, as my wife puts it, looked substantially looked like a prolonged camping trip in the middle of New York City.
Excellent film-making by director Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein aside, the inspiration seemed to come from the fact that the No Impact project, by questioning consumption as life’s raison d’etre, took a stab at looking for what’s important in life.
The fact of the standing ovations at our screenings, like the fact of the huge turnout at the Presidential inauguration, suggests that our society and culture may not be addressing this question of what’s important in life correctly. People are dissatisfied, and not only because they can’t find jobs.
Perhaps the way forward is not only to figure out how to power the current way of life. Perhaps we should–in addition to attempting to develop a renewable grid–also put a concerted effort into discovering whether there might, in fact, be a more satisfying, less resource intensive way of life–like we found in the No Impact project–that requires less energy in the first place.
Does this sound naive? I don’t think so. Because a search for a better way of life that also saves our habitat can engender more public support than a geeky-sounding thing like a renewable energy grid ever would. And why? Because the search for a better way of life contains within it the one thing that powers every large political initiative: hope.
As the marketing genius Seth Godin recently said on his blog:
The magical thing about selling hope is that it makes everything else work better, every day get better, every project work better, every relationship feel better. If you can actually deliver on the hope you sell, there will be a line out the door.