The energy challenge: act today, shape tomorrow

GUEST EDITORIAL BY JACOB STEVENS CORVIDAE, GREEN PROGRAMS MANAGER, WARM TRAINING

My kids are either cursed or blessed. Yours too. And we need to make sure that the blessing wins out.
It is common for us to turn to our elders and older authorities to look for judgment of our actions, and therefore for guidance, as we pick through the field of choices before us. But our descendents, the future, will judge us. Through them, we can attempt to "look back" at our lives today with a fresh viewpoint to understand our current predicaments. Through them we can access a moral compass that takes into account a larger reality than our current day-to-day lives. And to them we must answer.

Energy issues often confront us as part of the daily troubles of our lives: high utility bills; reliable energy supplies and rolling blackouts; appropriate policies to help economic development and job creation; political effects of our reliance on global oil supplies. Yet we must consider more than our daily troubles to be judged worthy by our descendents.

The Pentagon's primary mission is to secure the existence of the U.S. To do so, it must consider long-term consequences. In the Department of Defense's Quadrennial Defense Review, which highlights the primary defense concerns at this time, they concluded that "[...] climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked" and that "assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world."

With any luck, the catastrophic possibilities of climate change won't come to pass. With any luck, the very same approaches that can address the threat of climate change can also improve quality of life and drive innovation.

Except luck has very little to do with it. We must harness the will of our nation to overcome our fears and bravely tackle the challenge before us. Then, we will do more than avert a disaster.
We will invigorate both our pride and our sense of hope. We will transform our economy and our lifestyle. This can put us back at the forefront of defining the culture and economy of the earth for the 21st century. These could be very exciting times for our children.

Or we can create the future where our children will look back and wonder why, for this issue, we failed to move forward with a wider vision. Energy is at the core of this discussion. Let us choose a benediction.