Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

“…if Americans had started a 10-year phase-in of 40-mile-a-gallon driving standards in 2001, they would already be saving 267 million barrels of oil a year.  That’s nearly twice the amount produced annually at the Prudhoe Bay field.”

So write NY Times editors in an editorial today – their response to the BP fiasco in Alaska.  Reminding us that the US cannot drill its way to energy security (we have only 3 percent of world oil reserves), they call for reduction in demand.

Ooooo, industry folks don’t like hearing that, nor do politicians from oil states — like Alaska where the state, and the political life of the state, runs on oil.  Without some forward thinking, that state’s future is in real jeopardy since this oil thing cannot last.

This country has waited way too long to figure this out.  Back in the late 70s, President Jimmy Carter was prepared to do something about all of this.  He had already reduced speed limits, got folks to turn down lights and thermostats.  Back then if we had taken steps to reduce demand — how about mandating 50 mpg vehicles as a minimum standard — put a tax on then-cheap gas to develop high-tech, energy efficient mass transit across the nation, put ever-increasing taxes on second and third home purchases, provided tax subsidies to green our homes (to install solar panels, for example) — well, we would be in a very different place right now.

And we would not have 130,000 troops in Iraq.

But, hey, in the inimitable wisdom of US voters, and under the withering fake cheeriness of Reagan boosters (”It’s morning in America!!!”), Carter was voted out of office.

Okay, we need to get started.  It is an election year.  We just saw what the power of fired-up voters can do to change things in the state of Connecticut.  We need to use our political power to take power from the energy industry, to make them servants of the society, not the kingmaker power-brokers.  We are three decades late, and there is no time left to lose.  It’s going to hurt more because we didn’t prepare.  But the time is now.