Clean Energy Conversion (Part 1): Four Teaching Points as We Move Forward

Wednesday, July 28th marked Day 100 of the oil spill. It marked the 13th day since a cap was successfully installed, and the newly-announced president of BP promised that within days, the capped well will be “killed.” So … crisis averted, and we can resume our regularly scheduled program of consumption, right?
No doubt, many of us will do exactly that. But many of us won’t. For many of us, the Gulf catastrophe has become an epiphany. As a result, we don’t want to fall into the typical amnesia of the news cycle: shallow outrage followed by blame, lasting until the next outrage arises. We want this summer of gushing oil to result in a life-long awakening, a conversion if you will.
And if we experience this kind of conversion, we’ll need to become examples, teachers, we might even say evangelists of a new way of life – a sustainable, regenerative way of life based on clean energy, not a consumptive, toxic way of life based on dirty energy. What will our basic message be – the message we need to learn, internalize, embody, and share?
I’d like to suggest four simple but essential teaching points, the first of which is the most difficult to communicate:
1. Dirty energy is cheap, and that’s a problem.
2. We must re-price dirty energy.
3. We must wisely invest the dividends of re-pricing.
4. We must seek to understand and educate people who oppose clean-energy conversion.
I’ll do my best to flesh out four points in upcoming installments in this series.