Unless you spent last week celebrating Apollo 11′s fortieth anniversary cut off from the world in your backyard model of the lunar module, you are no doubt familiar with the story of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest two weeks ago, the “race in America” sturm and drang that surrounded the story last week, and the headline-grabbing role President Obama stumbled into at the end of his prime time presser.
An “American” story of race and class, the arrest and aftermath narrative now seems to have settled comfortably into a hackneyed old gender stereotype; namely, that there is no better way for three “guys” to sort things out than over a beer. We know what the chatter will be about, and Cambridge’s local reports that it will be conducted over Blue Moon if Sergeant Crowley does the choosing, which leads me to ask:
What’s on the agenda for your beer with Obama?
I’ll post my top three items below, but I’m most interested in your comments. You can tell me what you would be drinking if you like, but I’m more interested in your talking points. What are the two or three key messages you would deliver to the White House on energy and environmental policy?
For me, he's a busy guy, so I would keep it short and sweet (sweet? Maybe
Blueberry Ale?). My key points are:
1. The Electric Grid – A smart grid with enhanced demand-side management
tools, broader distributed generation, and large-scale integration of the
cleanest and most widely-available domestic renewables are all great goals.
BUT, we need to offload all of these coal plants now. Push for better
integration of large-scale hydro power, even that imported from Canada. The
rest is going to take time, but hydro can be the Trojan Horse. And, if
utilities and others want to invest in new nuclear capacity, make it happen.
2. Green Spending – Spend less on incentives for customers, and subsidies for
emerging technologies You want
to make "clean energy the profitable kind of energy," use policy to change
the standards that consumers and industry must meet. With that will
necessarily come technological change, which is the "egg" to a real renewable
energy economy's "chicken." For example, if fuel efficiency and emissions
standards rise appreciably, companies that want to sell cars will make them
cleaner, eventually the market will make less use of oil, consumers will
have little need for it, and you have used policy to foment organic change. If the investment can be diverted from feed-in tariffs and pie-in-the-sky clean coal pilots to research and development in closing the cost gap for wind and solar through commerical storage, it gets pumped into the economy in a more productive short-term use with greater potential ROI over the long run.
3. Copenhagen – Don't be fooled by the "none of it means anything without
China and India buying-in" rhetoric. To arrive in Copenhagen with the
expectation that the emerging economies are going to agree to anything that
remotely resembles comprehensive climate change reform is folly. Negotiating
from a realistic – instead of from a hopeful – position, we should be able
to leave with something that is evidence of US leadership and commitment to
the issue, and that has more teeth than Kyoto.
The best brew in America is Sierra Nevada's Torpedo Ale from Chico, California.
I'd hesitate to recommend this so-called "Extra IPA" to anyone nowadays, since our local distributors find it almost impossible to obtain.
But, if you can get some, you'll find out why I love it so much. I've tasted dozens of hop-heavy microbrews over the past few years… and Torpedo Ale is definitely the best.
Maybe, if Mr. Obama would serve it at the White House picnic table fest, it would convince the brewery in Chico to start producing more of their golden nectar. So then, I'd be able to buy some here in Pennsylvania!
Kevin Harrington
Bausman, PA
Kharrin@earthlink.com