A few weeks ago T. Boone Pickens unveiled his energy plan to deal with our oil addiction. At the same time, Al Gore put forth his own prescription for the energy crisis, apparently coming to the realization that the energy crisis will drive the climate crisis, because we will respond to the energy crisis by any means necessary, even at the risk of the climate. Neither readily embraced the other's position, though both are apparently singing from the same hymnal.
Both recognize that the energy crisis threatens our economic well-being. Both recognize the need for a top-down Manhattan Project--Operation Overlord--Man-to-the-Moon project appropriate to the scale and immediacy of the threat. Both propose a 'ten year' plan for an effort that will truthfully engage us for twenty to thirty years. Both acknowledge the other's presence in a shared arena, but neither embrace the other at a time when it is vital to build a foundation of consensus on common ground.
Gore diminishes Pickens' focus on natural gas as a transportation fuel because it too produces greenhouse gases, though less, and it too is a nonrenewable resource. Yet Gore does not propose an equivalent or better interim strategy. Pickens diminishes Gore's plan as being more environmentally oriented than economic oriented, yet environmental and energy trends will both prove equally destructive to the economy in the long run if we do not begin in the short run to harness them to proactive policies with positive outcomes.
Another commonality shared by the two: both profess a 'plan', but merely present an agenda. We need a plan. An agenda tells us merely what we want to do; a plan lays out how we propose to do it. TBP's North Dakota wind farm will be of little use without a transmission grid equal to its potential. How do we put that in place? Do we need natural gas cars, or natural gas buses?
Meanwhile, Tom Friedman's op-ed describes advances in strategies for energy independence in western countries that we would generally not regard as our 'betters'. He describes their specific strategies but implies a more important point that should be stated. It's not their specific strategies that have advanced their well-being; it is the culture that has spawned and supported those strategies: cooperation, a long term perspective, an enlightened sense of self-interest where personal advantage can only be achieved through consensus and combined effort. That is the social and political foundation that Al and T and others of similar vision need to accomplish if any of them are to have any hope of achieving what all of them profess to believe.
Onward.
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