Yes we can

By
Bob Herbert                                                                         Read Spanish Version
Taken
from The New York Times

As
I was listening to Al Gore on the telephone, I was thinking: “Uh-oh,
the naysayers will have a field day with this one.”

The
former vice president was giving me an advanced briefing on the
speech that he delivered on Thursday, calling on the United States to
behave like a great nation and actually do something real about its
self-destructive and ultimately unsustainable reliance on
carbon-based fuel for its 21st-century energy needs.

“I’m
going to issue a strategic challenge that the United States of
America set a goal of getting 100 percent of our electricity from
renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels within 10 years,”
he said.

“One
hundred percent?” I said.

“One
hundred percent.”

Mr.
Gore’s focus is primarily on solar, wind and geothermal energy. His
belief is that a dramatic, wholesale transition to these abundant and
renewable sources of energy is not just doable, but essential.

My
view of Mr. Gore’s passionate engagement with some of the biggest
issues of our time is that he is offering us the kind of vision and
sense of urgency that has been so lacking in the presidential
campaigns. But the tendency in a society that is skeptical, if not
phobic, about anything progressive has been to dismiss his large
ideas and wise counsel, as George H. W. Bush once did by deriding him
as “ozone man.”

The
naysayers will tell you that once again Al Gore is dreaming, that the
costs of his visionary energy challenge are too high, the
technological obstacles too tough, the timeline too short and the
political lift much too heavy.

But
that’s the thing about visionaries. They don’t imagine what’s
easy. They imagine the benefits to be reaped once all the obstacles
are overcome. Mr. Gore will tell you about the wind blowing through
the corridor that stretches from Mexico to Canada, through the Plains
states, and the tremendous amounts of electricity that would come
from capturing the energy of that wind — enough to light up cities
and towns from coast to coast.

“We
need to make a big, massive, one-off investment to transform our
energy infrastructure from one that relies on a dirty, expensive fuel
to fuel that is free,” said Mr. Gore. “The sun and the wind and
geothermal are not going to run out, and we don’t have to export
them from the Persian Gulf, and they are not increasing in price.

“And
since the only factor that controls the price is the efficiency and
innovation that goes into the equipment that transforms it into
electricity, once you start getting the scales that we’re
anticipating, those systems come down in cost.”

The
correct response to Mr. Gore’s proposal would be a rush to figure
out ways to make it happen. Don’t hold your breath.

When
exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t
at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against
the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when
Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t
in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust
G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and
the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest
society the world had ever known.

When
was it?

Now
we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

In
his speech, delivered in Washington, Mr. Gore said: “We’re
borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn
it in ways that destroy the planet.”

He
described carbon-based fuel as the thread running through the global
climate crisis, America’s economic woes and its most serious
national security threats. He then asked: “What if we could use
fuels that are not expensive, don’t cause pollution and are
abundantly available right here at home?”

Americans
are extremely anxious at the moment, and I think part of it has to do
with a deeply unsettling feeling that the nation may not be up to the
tremendous challenges it is facing. A recent poll by the Rockefeller
Foundation and Time magazine that focused on economic issues found a
deep pessimism running through respondents.

According
to Margot Brandenburg, an official with the foundation, nearly half
of 18- to 29-year-olds “feel that America’s best days are in the
past.”

The
moment is ripe for exactly the kind of challenge issued by Mr. Gore
on Thursday. It doesn’t matter if his proposal is less than
perfect, or can’t be realized within 10 years, or even it if is
found to be deeply flawed. The goal is the thing.

The
fetish for drilling for ever more oil is the perfect metaphor these
days. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop
digging.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/opinion/19herbert.html?ref=opinion