It's easy enough, with our collective ADD and the 24 hour news cycle, to forget that the end of the world is nigh. Yesterday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting in Valencia, Spain in preparation for the December meeting in Bali, released yet another devastating report on the need for immediate action to stave off disaster. For the few who even bother to listen/watch/read the news, this dire headline quickly gets swept away by the latest juicy news on a celebrity or presidential candidate.
Usually dollars-and-cents arguments have a better chance of appealing to skeptics who see environmentalism as a brake to ever greater growth and return on investment. The UK government put out a useful antidote to this ostrich-like view last year, when it calculated the costs of waiting until things are really really bad, compared to the relatively inexpensive (compared to, say, the costs of the Iraq war so far) approach of starting to stem climate change now.
Sniffing out business opportunity, the Belgian electricity provider Electrabel and the French utility EDF have come to see the benefits of green sources of energy. "Le Soir," Belgium's leading French-language daily, reports that Europe's electricity utilities have been investing heavily in what previously had been derided as "'Quixotic" windmills. To people who have passed near these giants, they bear little resemblance to the quaint Cervantes era structures that are prized tourist attractions. They are industrial-strength, but mostly silent dynamos. They are capable, when clustered into hilltop parks or arrayed offshore, of capturing the wind and turning it into profit.
Europe's energy companies have seen the handwriting on the wall, and have begun to sink hundreds of millions of euros into these energy sources of the future. The European Union has set a goal of 20% of renewable energy by 2020. Meanwhile, in the waning months of the Bush Administration, climate change denial is still the order of the day. "‘Dangerous’ Warming Still Undefinable to White House," writes the NYT "Dot Earth" blogger Andrew Revkin, detailing an interview with White House official James Connaughton. I'm so glad that I'm not a member of the US negotiating team on climate change: "US delegates say dangers of climate change unclear." What do they want: sea water lapping at the White House portico?
Okay, now for the optimistic part of this post. In addition to the European energy utilities seeing green, we have the image of the Belgian Green Parties ("Groen" for the Dutch-speaking north; "Les Verts" for the francophone south) meeting this weekend. Unique in language-ridden and regionalist-reft Belgium, the Greens form a country-wide political party. The youth wings of the two communities met, speaking each other's languages, in a picture of the kind of cooperation that the so-called adults of the other parties would do well to emulate as they dicker over the political minutia of forming a coalition.
One young green activist said "what's the point of all this focus on the trivia of linguistic borders etc., when the really important question - for Belgians but also for the rest of the world - is how to work to save our planet?" Hear, hear. In our own family, we are very proud that our son and daughter have studied and worked in key sectors of the future, respectively agriculture and energy/environment.
The other day I fabricated a subject "tag" for this blog, to capture what I think needs to be the central focus of the chanceries of the future: "eco-security." A couple of hundred years ago, America's second president, John Adams, wrote
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
If Adams were writing today, I suspect that he would drop the part about tapestry and porcelain and substitute agricultural engineering and environmental planning. This trajectory - from fathers and mothers who studied politics and war to sons and daughters who will help get us to a safer future - is what I would wish for other families. As the young Green party worker said - all the rest is trivia.