A couple of reflections on climate crisis and human action.
The inestimable Jon Carroll muses:
I am reminded of my youthful experience with the vacuum cleaner…. It never occurred to me to wonder where all those dust bunnies and paper bits and cookie crumbs went. I thought it was magic, if I thought about it all. My mother was the one who changed the bag, and I was far older than I should have been before I realized there was a bag.
I think a lot of us in the First World are sort of like that. Electricity comes from the socket and gas comes from the stove and wood comes from the lumberyard and food comes from the supermarket. I mean, we know in our large brains that it doesn’t, but it sure is more convenient not to really consider the consequences, or believe that our role in the grand scheme of things is just not that important.
And our role is not important. If it were just us, the skies would be clear and the water would be fresh and polar bears would enjoy unbroken snowfields to the horizon. It’s the 6 billion “just us’s” that cause the problem.
PG&E Vice President Fong Wan moderated a symposium on Solar Policy Leadership, along with California PUC Chairman Michael Peavey, noted VC Vinod Khosla and EuroSolar head and German parliamentarian Hermann Scheer. (author of “Energy Autonomy”). Scheer opened his very compelling perspective on energy policy (more that that after I read his book) with this story “about four people named everybody, somebody, anybody and nobody”:
There is an important job to be done
And everybody expects that somebody would do it.
Anybody could do it, but nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that, because it is Everybody’s job.
Everybody thinks that anybody should do it,
But nobody realizes that everybody would not do it.
It ended up that everybody blames somebody
When nobody does what anybody has to do.