2Sustain

Picking up where we left off Tuesday…

So the problem here as I see it is both that we face a crisis of leadership, and that most people are too busy in their daily lives to raise much fuss about it. In my post a few weeks ago I spoke about how the next generation of environmental leaders is being developed and mentored…and this “2025 Goals” announcement by Bush only underscores the need for such strong leadership. What would a strong leader do differently? Well, as I see it, a lot – but here are the big three.

For starters a strong leader would allocate more Federal dollars to the crisis at hand. For example, solar technologies may well be the answer to balancing our planet’s growing electricity needs with our need to cut dependence on fossil fuels. Note from the NYT article that “Scientists long ago calculated that an hour’s worth of the sunlight bathing the planet held far more energy than humans worldwide could use in a year, and the first practical devices for converting light to electricity were designed more than half a century ago.” Yet only 0.01% of U.S. electricity is currently solar-generated, and our government allocates a mere $159 million for solar research per year — roughly equivalent to what we spend every nine hours in Iraq. That is not commitment, that is window dressing. Note also that the 2002 White House Fact Sheet states that “The President’s growth-based approach will accelerate the development of new technologies.” Well, I think we can all agree that (a) solar is among the most promising technologies out there and (b) the Bush administration has not lived up to its 2002 pledge to “accelerate the development” of solar technology. That is a failure of leadership.

Another key difference I’d expect from strong leadership would be the promotion of science rather than the resistance to science which does not fit into a pre-defined set of beliefs, be they political, economic, social, religious or historical. Here’s one such example from the Bush White House that I have found particularly troubling; namely the censoring of Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading expert on climate change.

If our leaders are censoring scientists such as Dr. Hansen we are in big trouble. This could not be more backwards…and to me smells a lot like the Catholic Church censoring Galileo, the father of modern science. If you’ll recall from high school history, poor Galileo stood trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633 and spent the last ten years of his life under house arrest for claiming that the sun was the center of the universe and “immovable.” The Catholic Church censored and persecuted Galileo because his assertions were “expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” This seems all too similar to the Bush administration censoring and black-lining Hansen’s reports as being “expressly contrary to the current administration’s political agenda.” This too is a failure of leadership.   

And finally, I would expect a strong leader to challenge us – us as in “We, the people” as the Constitution begins. America’s citizens are ready to “climb the big hill” much like we did during WWII, but we need to know which hill to climb, why we’re making sacrifices along the way, and what lies at the top. We need goals, we need vision, we need real leadership that articulates a strategy we can get behind and the tactics needed to get there. Here’s an example: Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf has set a goal for his nation to be 100% fossil fuel free by 2020. That’s leadership, that’s aggressive goal setting, that’s rallying your citizens around a shared, big vision, and that is what we are missing in America. This could have been George Bush’s legacy rather than Iraq or $4.00/gallon gas prices. This has been a failure of leadership.

The good news is that all three 2008 Presidential candidates appear to have a far greater sense of urgency on the climate change issue than our current leadership. But that does not change the fact that we’ve collectively just missed a crucial, irreplaceable eight-year window for making progress on climate change. Hopefully we will see what real leadership looks like in the next administration as Americans are ready for the challenge.