Carbon Junkies One and All
Carbon Junkies One and All
Can we collectively kick the habit?
by Meg Gordon
Photography by Steve Pyle
Let’s just say it. We are carbon addicts. We’ve known for decades. Cell phones, computers, heating, air conditioning and even the backyard bonfire. Toggle the thermostat or plug in your charger for the zillionth time. Yup, more carbon into the air. This is not news. But perhaps the scale of our carbon addiction is news to some. Scientists around the globe have been sounding global warming alarm bells for decades. And yet, over the past 25 years, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 60 percent.
Listen and look, you cannot unsee the definitive scientific data and the visceral effects on the environment. But scaremongering and manipulation by sophisticated public relations professionals and lobbyists has worked, blurring the carbon-global warming connections for us mere mortals. These firms act on or at the behest of corporate or political leaders whose narrowed view on a carbon curb is that it’s bad for business. A lot of money these days is going into image-making and pontification with platitudes rather than into tangible goods, hard work and fact. Do we truly value influencers who simply sell images and create nothing over those who do the work of creating, problem-solving, innovating and manufacturing?
Scaremongering has worked. Inaction has stifled innovative renewable energy breakthroughs from coming to market and their affordability. Also stifled? The large-scale structural changes only governments can pull off that will cap carbon pollution. We are only now realizing the financial, human and wildlife costs of inaction is the big T-Rex in the room, so to speak.
It’s a new year, January 2021. Change is afoot and there is work for those who want to do it. Now we focus on the nitty-gritty, the hard work and real facts. Let’s get started with a sampler to peruse, selected by our own Pat Patterson from her upcoming collection of resource materials to compliment our League’s next Public Issues Forum (2/9/21) “C’Mon - Wisconsin Needs Clean Energy!, where we explore the win-win aspects of an alternative energy transition.
Sneak Peek at Some of the Upcoming Resource Materials
America’s energy or electric power grid - The EPA website offers a good overall explanation of our energy system including definitions and explanations about how it all fits together and how it is regulated.
The grid needs to catch up. Our current power grid was built decades ago and was designed primarily for transmitting electricity from large, centralized power plants, most of which use dirty sources like coal and natural gas. New technologies are making this approach to electricity transmission—and its supporting infrastructure—increasingly outdated.
When developing a clean energy plan, it’s important to determine whether efforts are designed to focus on local government operations (government building lighting, electricity, heating and cooling, fleet fuel usage, etc.) or on the needs of the entire community, i.e. residential, industrial, commercial, and transportation uses. Energy efficiency is often the most cost-effective first step in reducing emissions.
You can REGISTER HERE for our League’s upcoming Clean Energy Forum on Tuesday, February 9, 2021.
Would you like to be notified by email when the latest weekly Swinging for the Fences blog post is available? Sign up here! Subscribers to Climate Corner are already signed up.
If you receive blog posts by email, our system automatically inserts “by Brook Soltvedt.” Brook is the webmaster, not the author of the blog.