Just when you thought it was getting boring out there in Eco-Land, along comes this whiff of autumn pollen from the Blogosphere – “These days, it’s politically incorrect to suggest that going green will require even the slightest adjustment to our way of life, but let’s face it: Jimmy Carter was right. It wouldn’t kill you to turn down the heat and put on a sweater.”
Read all about it, thanks to a lovely piece on NPR entitled Foreign Policy: Seven Myths About Alternative Energy
posted by Mudd
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Amazing to see any article coming that close, but have you noticed how fashionable it is to mix up conservation (changed lifestyle) with efficiency (new machines). Myth 6 is so confused I doubt anybody will get the apparently hidden message of “Myth” 7.
From Myth 6:
“In the long term, it’s hard to imagine how (without major advances) we can reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 while the global population increases and the developing world develops. So a clean-tech Apollo program modeled on the Manhattan Project makes sense.”
McKibben answered that two years ago:
“As precedents for such collective effort, people sometimes point to the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon or the Apollo Program to put a man on the moon. But those analogies don’t really work. They demanded the intense concentration of money and intelligence on a single small niche in our technosphere. Now we need almost the opposite: a commitment to take what we already know how to do and somehow spread it into every corner of our economies, and indeed our most basic activities. It’s as if NASA’s goal had been to put ALL of us on the moon.”
From “Carbon’s New Math” National Geographic, Oct. 2007
Then Grunwald writes:
“But we already have all the technology we need to start reducing emissions by reducing consumption.”
AAARGH!