John McCain has taken what seems in this highly energy-conscious election year a prudent view about energy. We have to use all our options, he says. Drill, drill, drill for more oil offshore. Use more clean coal. And yes, develop alternative energy resources if and when this seems possible.
It’s a safe-sounding policy. But that’s all it is. A policy. A way to plod along as we’ve been plodding, and hope that one way or another things will gradually get better.
Barack Obama takes a more radical approach. He is emphasizing alternative energy resources to not only solve our long-term energy problems, but as the best way to meet the short-term ones as well.
It’s an approach favored by many of those who have looked closely at alternative energy resources, and understand they are not just futuristic dreams. Understand that countries such as Denmark and Germany expect to meet 20-30 percent of their total electrical needs with provem windmill technology within 10 years; that countries like Iceland aleady meet all their own electricity needs with proven geothermal technology; that amazing advances in solar technologies are aleady making both solar heating and solar-generated electricity very cost competitive for many applications; and that all such alternative energy resources offer better near-term hopes to help us become energy independent than offshore oil drilling.
This Obama view isn’t just a policy, however. It’s a vision of a new way to do things for a new century, a new millenium, a new world economic order. A way that uses the “live” energy of sun, wind, water and the earth itself to replace the long “dead” and buried energy we have depended on for so many years.
This policy versus vision notion is something for all Americans to consider. But perhaps its most dramatic potential appeal is to Americans of a religious bent.
The Bible doesn’t say that without a policy the people are lost. It says that without a vision the people are lost. Take it from The Guy who knows. Tapping live energy is the right vision for these times. Basing our future on dead and buried energy sources is just another version of being eyeless in Gaza.