america adrift

Question? Can you guess which high-profile American politician recently said the following;

Hint: He/She is currently not currently serving in government.

“The environment is constantly changing, constantly evolving. But I think that you want to nurture the environment and protect the environment from undue damage largely for moral reasons. It’s part of our quality of life, and part of our relationship to a larger world. We ourselves are diminished when the environment is diminished.”

Well if your first thought was Al Gore, you’d be wrong.

Second Hint;

“I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. I like the fact that the government requires that I have clean water to drink no matter what restaurant I walk into anywhere in America.”

Answer: Newt Gingrich. These comments were taken from an interview at Salon. Gingrich has a new book out, “A Contract with the Earth.”

Gingrich constantly finds his way into my research on Al Gore. In some ways they are opposite sides of the same coin. Whether its science and technology, the internet or the environment, these two have historically run parallel to one another.

The timing of this book leads me to believe that a substantial shift in US policy towards environmental issues in general and a “green economy” in particular are on the not so distant horizon. There is tremendous momentum behind the burgeoning green sector. If the Democrats win the presidency and maintain both the senate and congress (which looks extremely likely), then the Republicans will need a new platform for the future. Gingrich perhaps sees the writing on the wall. Any Democratic administration will most likely aggressively push for a “greening” of the US economy. Could “A Contract with the Earth” be the Republican blueprint for countering the likely Democratic environmental agenda?

This is a “must see” documenary for anyone interested in US agri-business policy, patent law, and environmental policy. You Tube has the entire film available. I recently came across this very interesting related piece in The New York Times Magazine.

Former Vice President Al Gore, rejecting complaints by Republican lawmakers that he was waging an alarmist war on coal and oil use, insisted before Congressional panels today that human-caused global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive federal response.

Since we just finished one “Merry Prankster” I thought you would appreciate this article about another. It’s getting spooky how everything is all coming together. Just what the heck was Janice Radway getting at anyways?

“He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco”

via The Agonist

Today marked a milestone in the pursuit of America’s renewable energy policy, as I watched the Democratically-controlled Minnesota State Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications pass Senate File 4 moments ago, a bill which mandates about 25% of Minnesota’s electricity will come from renewable sources by 2020, and the gradient of renewable energy will rise every few years until then. This will be America’s most aggressive renewable electricity policy, once it passes the Legislature.