Clean Energy Conversion (Part 5): We must seek to understand and educate people who oppose clean-energy conversion

I don’t have to tell anyone that we are polarized and paralyzed in our political life. We think we’re getting fair and balanced news, when in reality we’re getting some degree of spin wherever we get our information. Truly important issues drop off the table, while secondary issues that can win elections get center stage. It’s in that context that we seek a clean energy conversion.
Our job isn’t easy. It’s not easy to convince a teenager that there’s a downside to premarital sex or underage drinking. It’s not easy to convince a conflicted married couple that working through their problems might be wiser – and less painful – than getting a quick divorce. It’s not easy convincing a child that taking piano lessons and practicing will actually bring a lifetime of rewards that more than compensate for short-term sacrifice. And it’s not easy helping people understand three important truths:

– Dirty energy is cheap, and that’s a problem.
– We must re-price dirty energy.
– We must wisely reinvest the dividends that come from re-pricing dirty energy.

But that’s our challenge, and in order to pursue it, we’ll need to develop three virtues. First, we’ll need gentle, persistent firmness, or firm, persistent gentleness. We’ll need to speak up, and do so firmly, and do so again and again, but without inflammatory rhetoric. It’s easy to talk about clean energy in a way that will rouse the choir of the already converted to shout amen – but in so doing, turn off or turn away the not-yet convinced. We need to focus our attention on the not-yet convinced and to seek to avoid needless offense.
Second, we’ll need to listen – to listen to objections and concerns. We’ll have to take those objectives and concerns into consideration as we move forward. We’ll have to answer questions and endure harsh reactions without reacting harshly ourselves, even though the objections we hear may seem weak, ill-informed, rudely put, and old hat. To the person making those objections, they make sense, so we must listen with true interest and respect, seek true understanding, and only then respond with true grace and patience.
Which brings us to our third needed virtue. We’ll need patience. Patience isn’t easy when we’re dealing with such an important and urgent matter as the planet on which we live and which we are damaging for future generations. True virtue generally involves holding strengths in tension – gentleness and firmness, listening and nonreactivity, and urgency and patience. If we fail in the area of virtue, we will fail, even though our cause is just and wise.
My friends in Washington tell me that due to political realities, clean energy legislation probably won’t get on the agenda until early 2013. That seems like a long way away when you think about how important a clean energy conversion is. But that seems like a short time when you think about how much work we have to do educating people and recruiting them to join us in a movement for clean energy conversion, based on these four truths:

– Dirty energy is cheap, and that’s a problem.
– We must re-price dirty energy.
– We must wisely reinvest the dividends that come from re-pricing dirty energy.
– We must seek to understand and educate people who oppose clean energy conversion.