Dateline: 20,000 feet, somewhere over Michigan
At the outset, let me confess that I am, as I write this,
doing just about the least green thing a person can do – flying. Yes, I did buy carbon offsets to ameliorate some of
the environmental harm wrought by my round-trip flight to Denver. But it is increasingly hard to fly without anxiety over the outsize greenhouse gas emissions resulting from air travel. The fact that I am flying there to speak about energy
efficiency at the Energy & Environmental Buildings Association conference does very little to relieve my sense of unease.
But that’s not really what I want to write about today.
Instead, I would direct your attention to Thomas Friedman’s
Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times. China, he argues in it, as he often has, is gearing up to make
renewable energy technology the growth engine of its economy. In doing so, the
Chinese will leapfrog America’s fledgling efforts in that field much as the
Soviets left us in the dust (at least temporarily) by launching Sputnik in
1957. Unless we make massive investments in science, technology, education and
infrastructure as we did upon entering the space race, he warns, we will find
it difficult to catch up.
“China’s leaders, “Friedman writes, “mostly engineers,
wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that
feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate
change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as
we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will
want to live high-energy lifestyles.”
Quoting Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.0, (highly recommended, btw) he tells us
that, while the US has been the world leader in wind generation to date,
“by the end of this year China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we
won’t even see it go by.”
China’s embarkation on a path of clean power development and
innovation, Friedman concludes, “is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our
peril.”
The full text of Friedman’s column can be found here. Definitely worth reading.
And
please, next time you travel, buy carbon offsets. While being very far from the kind of investment in clean energy we need to make as a nation, it does help finance clean energy and carbon mitigation projects and it doesn't cost very much. CarbonFund.org and TerraPass.com are two excellent
web sites that will help you calculate and offset your carbon footprint.
