E-thos=Environmental Philosophy, Stewardship & Pragmatism
Looking at ‘spoiled’ Americans through an energy lens
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
In 1968, the United States was exporting oil. A decade later, given massive increases in domestic demand, it was importing half of this coveted fuel.
By June 1979 this dramatic change — from supplier to buyer — created an oil shock that rolled across the nation.
By the Fourth of July, high prices and low supplies had spawned a national disaster. Members of Congress, facing long gas lines and short tempers, were afraid to go home.
Historian Meg Jacobs, a Radcliffe Fellow this year, is using the lens of this energy crisis to examine governance in a conservative era. In particular, she is looking at how leaders from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have reconciled their anti-government ideologies with the demands of actually governing.
Jacobs, who teaches 20th century American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared her research in a lecture last week (May 13) at the Radcliffe Gymnasium.
Her forthcoming book, “Panic at the Pump,” uses energy policy as a central metaphor in a history of America’s presumed drift to the right over the past decades.
Jacobs, a one-time postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School, tends to look at the past 100 years with an eye on dollars and cents. She is the author of the prize-winning “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America” (Princeton University Press, 2005).
After all, Jacobs told her Radcliffe audience of 50, economic issues “are close to the center of changing relationships between citizens and government.” In the past century, she said, Americans have come to expect — to feel entitled to — a solid standard of living, with high wages and stable prices.
When that expectation is shaken, as in the Great Depression, Americans have come to expect — to feel entitled to — dramatic help from the federal government. It is the durability of that expectation, said Jacobs, that still acts as a check on America’s New Right.
Reagan abolished Carter-era checks on oil prices, for instance, she said — but could do little more to dismantle the regulatory machinery of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The DOE grew out of energy regulations promulgated during a foreshadowing of the oil shock, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973.
When DOE finally blossomed into a full federal agency, it had immediate power and momentum. “On opening day,” said Jacobs, the agency already had 20,000 employees and a budget of $10 billion.
At first, Jacobs thought her book on energy policy and conservative governance would record how the right took apart government. Instead, it became the story of the lasting stability of the federal government’s energy policy.
From Nixon on, she said — in an irony of history — American conservatives “oversaw a massive buildup of government they did not want.”
Jacobs counts among those conservatives President Jimmy Carter, a right-leaning Democrat whose values (and desire for less government) made him a “handmaiden for later Republicans,” she said.
Carter was a former Navy officer who feared the political implications of oil dependence, and whose religious values contained an ethic of conservation.
His response to the oil shock was dramatic and unconventional. On July 15, 1979, he gave a televised address now known as the “malaise speech,” scolding the American public for their lives of excessive consumption and spiritual void. “This is not a message of happiness,” he said, “but a warning.”
It was a failure, said Jacobs. “The public did not want to know they were spoiled and indulgent,” and on the streets the reaction was “panic at the pump.” At the polls, Carter’s ratings sank to 25 percent, lower than Nixon’s in the Watergate era.
Carter’s failure to communicate also muted some of his conservation ideals that today seem prescient. He wanted to raise the price of fossil fuel, encourage energy conservation at home (remember the cardigan sweaters?), and encourage alternative energy sources.
Carter was soon attacked from the left by presidential aspirant Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who accused him of being insensitive to high energy prices. And he was attacked from the right by conservatives incensed by the oil crisis — “Exhibit A,” said Jacobs.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But Carter’s real stumble was domestic and economic, she said: a failure to keep oil flowing and prices cheap.
Victorious in 1980, Reagan capitalized on Carter’s failure, said Jacobs, “but that was different than Americans being anti-government.”
Yes: America’s shift to the right is real, she said. It comes from frustrations over issues of property, race, and religion; from a backlash at purported government intrusions (civil rights legislation, Great Society programs, welfare); and from presumed government incompetence (Vietnam, energy shortages).
But the shift to the right has been slowed and complicated by a durable thread in the fabric of American politics not yet fully appreciated, said Jacobs: “the reality of conservative rule in an era of New Deal ideas.”
Content Source: Harvard University Gazette Online
Chicken a la Carte : Director: Ferdinand Dimadura | Genre: Drama | Produced In: 2005
"Synopsis: This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people." Source: Culture Unplugged
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Source: harvardcitizen.com
Gore: Universities have important role in sustainability
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
Former vice president Al Gore ’69 addressed a crowd of 15,000 in chilly, leaf-strewn Tercentenary Theatre yesterday (Oct. 22), delivering the keynote address in a multi-day celebration of the University's commitment to sustainability.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who inspired the landmark 2006 film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” worried aloud about the present. He also praised the culture-shaking science of the past, and cast the future in a hopeful light – despite the atmosphere thickening with greenhouse gases, melting Arctic ice, and other signs of human-induced climate change.
Universities have a powerful role to play in this “existential crisis,” said Gore. They are originators and communicators of science and policy that are modeled on reason.
The technological and policy ideas – many of them from university settings – are already at hand to address global warming, he said. But the lessons and the urgency of the issue have not penetrated the corridors of power. Gore called the present a time marked by “a failure of nerve, a failure of moral leadership.”
The daring past offers lessons for the troubled present.
Gore noted that 2008 is the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope, the breakthrough in technology that a year later allowed Galileo Galilei to closely study the heavens. The Italian physicist and philosopher soon concluded that an old idea was false: Earth is at the center of the solar system.
“Knowledge has to be used to shift perspective,” said Gore. He offered Galileo’s discovery as one example. The Apollo space program was another, said Gore, since it gave humankind the first view of Earth as a fragile artifact in a vast universe. There was Roger Revelle, too, the Harvard oceanographer and climate change pioneer whose 1967 class changed the course of Gore’s life.
But transformative science is often met with opposition from leaders who want to turn “questions of fact” into “questions of power,” said Gore.
“Questions of fact should be questions to be explored,” he said. “They should not be waylaid on their way to the public forum.”
Questions of fact are the special province of academe, said Gore, who called for ways of making “better use of the knowledge created in universities.”
Harvard President Drew G. Faust, who introduced Gore as “the most effective living steward of the environment,” asserted that universities “have a special role and a special responsibility” in turning back climate change.
Such institutions, after all, prompt innovation, she said, and specialize in “the discovery and the dissemination of knowledge.”
Two decades ago, Faust noted, Harvard started the interdisciplinary collaboration that today is the Harvard Center for the Environment, a synergistic gathering of 150 faculty members from more than 20 disciplines.
And today, University experts are exploring ways to accelerate sustainable action, she said, including oceanic carbon sequestration, advanced fuel cell design, and renewable energy technologies.
Policy experts at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at the Harvard Kennedy School are at work on global warming too, said Faust, in part by putting together an “effective international approach” to greenhouse gas emissions for the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. Others are studying a carbon tax, and other legal and economic strategies for protecting the environment.
In the teaching arena, she said, the new Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment will create “a new generation of scholars” devoted to sustainability.
Overall, the goal at Harvard, Faust said, is to create “a community that lives the values implicit in its pursuit of knowledge.”
In his address, Gore went back again to 1608 and the telescope. The new tool inspired scientists to see Earth and the universe in a new way, but it also stirred up political opposition. “Galileo's new knowledge,” he said, “turned out to be, forgive the phrase, ‘an inconvenient truth’.”
But the future – and calls to action – were at the heart of Gore’s speech, billed as this year’s Robert Coles “Call of Service” lecture, sponsored by Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association. “We need to put a price on carbon, we need a global [climate] treaty, and we need American leadership,” he said.
Gore urged the United States to be 100 percent free from carbon-based energy in a single decade — a commitment he acknowledged is so sweeping and dramatic that it would require a one-time “massive investment.”
But that giant step for mankind would also create an energy infrastructure “based on fuels that are free forever,” like solar, wind, and geothermal, said Gore. It would also break the back of an energy system that every year sends 700 billion American dollars overseas in pursuit of foreign oil.
Harvard has a role in a goal even so vast as that one, said Gore, who praised his alma mater for its pledge this summer to reduce Harvard’s greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016. “I’m proud to be part of the greater University family as an alumnus because of what you are doing here,” he said.
Since its founding in 1636 — shortly after the invention of the telescope, Gore noted — Harvard has been “from that time to this … a symbol of the devotion to reason so important to America.”
With the Founding Fathers, he said, “a new sovereign was installed in power” instead of kings — “the rule of reason.”
That rule of reason has lately been weakened in the public decision-making process, driven as it is by short-term horizons, said Gore. (He cited the miscalculation of invading Iraq and foot-dragging on climate change.)
Getting back to the rule of reason is necessary to make the “unprecedented decision” the world must soon make about its future to confront global warming, he said. “We are one people, living on one planet. We have a few short years to change the way we organize and conduct global civilization.”
Both Gore and Faust agreed that part of the answer is becoming better environmental citizens – taking the lessons of sustainability on a large scale to homes, offices, and schools.
Beginning with the challenge of campus greenhouse gas reductions, said Faust, “We at Harvard must be a model as we demonstrate our commitment to the future.”
At an institutional level, she said, “our practices have pedagogical value. We teach what we do, as well as what we write and say.”
And at an individual level, some signs of Harvard’s commitment to sustainability practices are already there, said Faust: 8,000-plus members of the University have signed a sustainability pledge, single-occupancy commuting is at a low of 18 percent, energy use in Harvard dormitories is down 13 percent since 2002, and 40 percent of produce served in Harvard houses, in season, comes from regional farms.
She called on the Harvard community to do even more, and viewed this month’s sustainability celebrations as an environmental call to arms.
Faust acknowledged that global warming is a global problem. “But climate change is also a local problem,” she said. “It begins with each of us.”
In the finale to his remarks, Gore said that the private and public solutions, big and small, are already at hand to address climate change — except for political will. “But political will,” he said, “is a renewable resource.”
Content Source: Harvard University Gazette Online
Samso Green
Isle of Plenty: Samso, Denmark
An article summary
By Kelly Noonan
Our Equal Earth News
Samso is a Danish island surrounded by the Kattegat, an inlet of the North Sea. Of the island’s 4,100 inhabitants, most work on farms, or in hotels and restaurants. To the naked eye Samso may seem like a very simple community that is known for its production of strawberries and potatoes, but if one takes a closer look they will find a truly inspiring story. This article, titled “Isle of Plenty,” and written by Robin Mckie, addresses the important issue of global warming by bringing to the forefront how this small island community works to shrink its carbon footprint.
Ten years ago the society of Samso’s main sources of energy was oil and petrol that was transported in and coal-powered electricity that was sent to the island through a mainland cable link. Everything changed, however, when in 1997 the Danish government conducted an experiment. Four islands, Samso included, were asked to compete in creating the most influential plan to cut their carbon outputs by enhancing their renewable energy production. Samso won the competition and became a model renewable energy community. Samso’s windy location makes it ideal for wind turbines as the island hosts a total of 21, 10 of which are off-shore. Along with utilization of wind power, Samso also depends on solar, biomass, and wood-chip power generators. All traditional fossil-fuel plants have been closed and dismantled. Samsingers now export millions of kilowatt hours of electricity from these renewable energy sources to the rest of mainland Denmark. And their commitment has paid off dramatically. The islanders have decreased their carbon footprint by an amazing 140%.
Everywhere on the island one can see evidence of great change. Wind turbines of various sizes are planted across the landscape; houses have solar-panelled roofs, and towns are linked to district heating systems that pump hot water to homes, powered by rows of solar panels that cover entire fields, or by generators that burn straw from local farms, along with timber chips cut from the island’s woods. Major energy companies have not funded any of these ventures and each plant is owned by either a collective of local people or an individual islander. Once the producers of more than 45,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year, Samsingers can now brag that through projects like these, they have cut their carbon emissions to -15,000.
Locals, such as farmer Jorgen Tranberg, will attest to the value of renewable energy sources, saying that “It has been a very good investment.” Along with saving money, Tranberg praises these efforts for the true fact that “it makes us feel good.” Soren Harmensen, a former environmental studies teacher, put the Samso experiment together by preaching about the worth of renewable energy at countless town meetings. The Samso experiment proved to be a very costly (around $10,000 per islander), but ultimately worthy investment. Shell approached the community and asked to be involved—but only if they could own the turbines—and the islanders declined the offer. One of the reasons why Samsingers love their project is the fact that they all own a share of it and would never want to give it up.
This entirely self sufficient, small island society may become very famous, very soon for their great efforts to change the methods in which they obtain energy; and they are definitely an example that the rest of the world can learn from. The experiment had not only technological effects, but social effects, as it inspired a change in people’s attitudes. Local electrician Brian Kjar put it this way: “Something like this starts with a few people. It just needs time to spread. That is the real lesson of Samso.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/21/renewableenergy.alternativeenergy
The World Ocean Conference:
An Initiative for Change
By Kelly Noonan
Our Equal Earth News
"Hundreds of Indonesian children from public elementary schools
feeding sharks inside the sharks aquarium at the Sea World Indonesia
in Jakarta on April 18, 2009 to mark the April 22 Earth Day." Source: http://www.daylife.com
The World Ocean Conference was held from May 11-15 in Manado, the capital of the province of North Sulawesi, Indonesia, a location that could be seriously disrupted by the damaging consequences of climate change on the ocean. The World Ocean Conference served as a chance for people to meet and learn of the important and very present problems in the marine field that are related to climate change, and acted as an initiative for uniting governments and communities from all parts of the world for the purpose of campaigning for marine resource management. The impacts of climate change on marine life and coastal communities may be distant concerns for many people, however the goal of the conference was to promote awareness of the vital issues that should not be ignored. According to the World Wildlife Fund, if carbon emissions are not significantly cut by the year 2020, increased ocean temperatures could eliminate enormous marine ecosystems and half the marine life in them. These changes would not only have adverse affects on ocean life, but would also cause extensive problems for coastal people and people whose livelihoods depend on the ocean. The conference addressed specific targets that governments can collectively achieve by taking immediate action. To formally recognize these actions, a document titled The Manado Ocean Declaration was adopted, along with the establishment of The World Ocean Forum, to serve as the organization for implementing the plan of action. To learn how you can make simple changes to “solve the climate crisis” visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/
Source: http://www.woc2009.org/
