Month 3, Day 21: Keepin’ it Local

Figured I’d follow my letter to the President with some more built around a similar perspective. This one goes to my local paper, the Medford Transcript, which has been printing some of my letters over the past few months. I’ll scan them in sometime soon and post them.

Have you written to your local paper recently?

With the hubbub around health care legislation, people may have missed President Obama’s recent announcement (in Executive Order 13514 on Federal Sustainability, dated January 29,2010) that the U.S. Government will aim to cut its own emissions of greenhouse gases twenty-eight percent by 2010. While that’s a great start, it’s nowhere near enough. The world needs a new energy equation where none of our energy comes from oil and coal. A world without fossil fuels is as important to our long-term survival as a world without nuclear weapons.

The fact that rising greenhouse emissions increase the already very real possibility of a global climate catastrophe should be enough to force us to change our energy usage drastically. And yet, there is another element to be considered.

We wouldn’t turn a thousand-year-old sequoia into toothpicks or dismantle Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid and grind their stones into gravel, for to do so would be to disrespect their antiquity. Fossil fuels, as their name suggests, are the transformed remains of ancient life. We squander a precious and limited resource every time we burn the sunlight that fell on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, turning it into CO2 and dissipating it into the atmosphere. To burn oil and coal is to spend our principal, to eat our seed corn, to waste our inheritance.

Renewable energy sources are the ecological equivalent of a “pay as you go” policy; a change in our energy use patterns is not just good environmental and fiscal policy, it is also morally sound and philosophically correct. The President has started the ball rolling with his Executive Order. Now it’s up to us to take it further, finding ever more inventive ways to shift our energy sources from the sunlight of the Paleozoic era to that currently streaming in our windows.

Warren Senders