People power the way to go
By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Time, Straits Times 4 Dec 07;
I love their tag line. It's what gives me hope: 'We are the people we have been waiting for.'
IT WAS 15 deg C last Thursday in Washington, well above normal for this time of the year, and as I slipped away for some pre-Christmas golf, I found myself thinking of a wickedly funny story that The Onion, the satirical newspaper, ran the other day: Fall Cancelled After Three Billion Seasons.
'Fall, the long-running series of shorter days and cooler nights, was cancelled earlier this week after nearly three billion seasons on earth, sources reported Tuesday.
'The classic period of the year, which once occupied a coveted slot between summer and winter, will be replaced by new, stifling humidity levels, near-constant sunshine and almost no precipitation for months.
' 'As much as we'd like to see it stay, fall will not be returning for another season,' said National Weather Service president John Hayes during a muggy press conference. 'Fall had a great run, but sadly, times have changed.'
'The cancellation was not without its share of warning signs. In recent years, fall had been reduced from three months to a meagre two-week stint, and its scheduled start time had been pushed back later and later each year.'
You should never extrapolate about global warming from your own weather, but it is becoming hard not to.
Consider the final report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was just issued and has had far too little attention. It concluded that since the IPCC began its study five years ago, scientists have discovered much stronger climate-change trends than previously realised, like far more extensive melting of Arctic ice, and so global efforts to reverse the growth of greenhouse gas emissions have to begin immediately.
'What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,' said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.
And sweet-sounding 'global warming' doesn't really capture what's likely to happen. I prefer 'global weirding', coined by Mr Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things - from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.
While the Bush team will leave office with a perfect record of having done nothing significant to mitigate climate change, I'm heartened that America is increasingly alive on this challenge.
First, Google said last week it was going to invest millions in developing its own energy business. Google described its goal as 'RE
Its focus, said Google.org's energy expert Dan Reicher, will be to advance new solar thermal, geothermal and wind solutions 'across the valley of death'. That is, so many good ideas work in the lab but never get a chance to scale up because they are swallowed by a lack of financing or difficulties in implementation. Do not underestimate these people.
Last week, I met two groups of MIT students who blew me away. One was the MIT Energy Club, founded in 2004 by a few graduate students discussing energy over beer at a campus bar. Today it has 600-plus members who have put on scores of events focused on building energy expertise among MIT students and faculty, and 'fact-based analysis', including a trip to Saudi Arabia.
Then I got together with three engineering undergraduates who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit - a global, open-source collaborative effort managed by MIT students that has 25 college teams worldwide working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years.
Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car which, they hope, 'will demonstrate a 95 per cent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to grave' and provide '200 mpg energy equivalency or better'. The Linux of cars!
They're not waiting for GM. Their goal, they explain on their website - vds.mit.edu - is 'to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency' on catalysing a global team to build a clean car.
I love their tag line. It's what gives me hope: 'We are the people we have been waiting for.'
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Posts
visitors since Nov 07