NO TO FOSSIL FUELS, YES TO LIFE

"We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

OPEC has announced it will slash oil production by two million barrels a day, a move that is sure to spike gas prices right before the midterm elections. Whether, as some have surmised, Jared Kushner made a secret visit to Saudi Arabia to lobby for the cuts as a way to screw Democrats in the midterm elections, we may or may not ever know. All we know for sure is that Biden’s fist bump didn’t work.

I keep thinking about the picture of Jimmy Carter putting solar panels on the roof of the White House in the 1970’s, and Ronald Reagan taking them down first thing.

I keep thinking about how world class environmentalist Al Gore won the election in 2000 and the Supreme Court of the US denied Florida the right to recount its votes (the real steal).

I keep thinking how if history had gone differently (and yes, voting matters; that’s the point), we might have had an entirely green energy grid by now, a world class mass transit system, and tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail (China has 23,000 miles of high speed rail linking all of its major cities). We would not be dependent on dangerous practices and dangerous actors to secure our ability to go about our lives.

From the state of our environment, to how we produce energy, to the price we pay in the form of illnesses due to both, we are slowly destroying ourselves as a country and as a species. And for what?

Despite the lateness of the hour, we can still turn things around. It is time for us to conceive a new world, and articulate the way to it. The $369B allocated for green energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act is a good beginning, but it is only a start…

Surasak Suwanmake...

We can initiate a season of repair.

We can stop fossil fuel extraction.

We can declare a climate emergency and begin a warp speed transition and WW2 level mass mobilization to build a green economy.

We can build a world in which it’s possible to tell OPEC we don’t care if they’re cutting oil production. We’re good. And not because we’re drilling more, but because we’re creating so much clean energy that all our needs are met.

Of course the purveyors of the establishment - fossil fuel companies and the politicians who are whores for their donations - always tell us it’s impossible. According to them, the only thing we can afford trillions of dollars for are horrific and failed wars (Iraq and Afghanistan together cost somewhere between $4T and $6T ) and tax cuts for the wealthiest among us (the $2T 2017 cut gave 83 cents of every dollar to the wealthiest individuals and corporations). When it comes to anything that supports moving from a dirty economy to a clean economy or from a war economy to a peace economy, the purveyors of the old order always tell us that we just don’t have money.

In fact, the return on investment of peace-building measures such as health and education, and green energy investments such as wind and solar, are over time a greater economic stimulant and investment than any of the war-making or earth-destroying energy production of the current era. Not to even mention that they provide an actual chance that humanity will survive itself, not literally crash and burn before it’s too late.

Yes we can transition to clean energy, right now. And we have the geniuses who know how to do it. What is lacking is not the money but the will, the imagination, the national enthusiasm, the harnessed energy of the American people. Reading about FDR’s leadership during WW2 , I was amazed to learn that at the beginning of the war America literally had no military might at all. Hitler, on the other hand, had been building up his military for five years prior to that, and every time he conquered another country he absorbed their industrial capacity. Over time, however - and that time was astonishingly short - the American people built a military machine capable, along with our Allies, of winning the war. And everyone was involved, not just our soldiers overseas. Roosevelt would go on the radio and tell Americans we didn’t have enough rubber to put wheels on our warplanes, and people would send in their old tires, water hoses and even tons of rubber bands! He would tell them we didn’t have enough aluminum to build enough tanks, and people would literally send in tons of their pots, pans and others household items. Women went to work in factories building ships and planes. The entire country was part of the effort, because they realized their way of life was at stake

And so is ours.

The WW2 era was a time when Americans realized what had to be done and came together to do it. They did it, and so can we.

The problem isn’t what can or cannot be done; the problem is what we think cannot be done. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

The time to do it is now.