Who wants to be on my “exploratory committee.”
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I answer a question with a question. The Cambridge Chronicle asks, “Who Wants to Run for City Council?” I didn’t have my media consultant and make-up artist with me. I’ve worked on four other candidates campaigns. Three of them won. Only one of them do I regret. It was no one of the ones the won. I probably need to talk to the one that lost, but it will not be an easy conversation.
If I had been on top of my game, I would have hung out and caught the interview with Minka van Beuzekom. Most everybody is some sort of environmentalist nowadays. But the effectiveness of different approaches depends on political economy more than climate science. And even the wonderful folks at The International Forum on Globalization have given only passing notice of the fact that when America finally decides to go green, labor will do most of the work.
When I first met Steven Chu at his talk at MIT, he mentioned that, in dealing with the abrupt climate change crisis, there is a lot of room for conservation using existing technology. He then proceeded to ignore that wisdom, and talk about avenues for research. I chided him about this. He was then the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was basically taking care of business.
This is important because conservation is something that can be done in the near term. The danger of a research dependent program is that might has the implication that the rest of us should wait for the experts. The experts may have answers for the long term, but we need to make it possible for there to be a long term. When Steven Chu appeared at Harvard he said a lot about research but he did mention that building energy use can be reduced 80%. That’s the way somebody who’s just gotten an honorary doctorate suggests there is more Harvard could do than research.
The HEET idea is one of a large number of things that are worth doing. It is definitely acting locally on a global issue and it is good economics. [Hopefully it will become more apparent that these are the same thing.] But it has a definite focus on a selected portion of Cambridge buildings .i.e. individual homes. We need to do all of Cambridge’s buildings, city, commercial, university. Lesley College will be very responsive, if they haven’t already. Harvard Administration will quote Ban Ki Moon, “global warming is the defining issue of our age.” But they will point to their tepid commission report,
Harvard University has committed to a GHG reduction goal of a 30 percent reduction from Fiscal Year 2006 levels by 2016, including growth.
Is this about the ‘defining issue of the age’ or a fad that might blow over in a decade?
