Where there is no vision, the people perish

Proverbs 29:18

In the Massachusetts vacation spot known as Cape Cod there’s a grass roots group by the name of Clean Power Now, which sprang up five years ago to support a developer’s plans to build the country’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The group came into existence to counter the increasingly hysterical propaganda of groups opposed to the proposed wind farm, which Clean Power Now founders suspected was rooted in the desire of well-heeled washashores to protect their ocean views. Seeing the value of a utility-scale clean energy facility so close to a population center, those founders quickly developed a slogan for their organization, which can still be seen today on tee shirts and bumper stickers in the Bay State:

It’s Not the View, It’s the Vision.

Vision. It’s a word and a concept well worth considering in this time of stumbling starts for the renewable energy revolution. Since a reasonable dictionary definition of the word is ‘the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination and wisdom’, why is it that true vision seems to elude those in our society charged with that task—our leaders in government? Why does an average citizen with a little understanding of energy and environmental issues seem to have a firmer grasp of the imperatives of clean energy development than half of the U.S. Senate?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question. The most jaded of us has to allow that Congresspersons are of some intelligence, and therefore must be subject to overarching pressures that prevent them from responding intelligently to the most crucial issues affecting our civilization. They may represent a district dependent on the coal industry for jobs, or may have been convinced by industry lobbyists that penalizing carbon emissions would be detrimental to American industry. They may be in an election race and over-focused on short-term issues. They may even be global warming skeptics, understanding the energy independence argument only from a balance of payments perspective.

But what’s really happening here is that intelligent men and women in our political system are being prevented from exercising their imagination and wisdom by that very system. It’s a system in which politicians can rarely reach office without getting trapped in the campaign funding loop, that mechanism that gets them elected only to distort their legislative priorities. The casualties of that distortion seem most often to be a lawmaker’s ordinary constituents, as well as policies geared for our long-term health rather than short-term gratification. How often do we hear lawmakers disparaging proposals for tempering environmental damage over a period of several decades, on the grounds that they could be harmful to our immediate business interests? Well-intentioned they may be, but there’s about as much vision in that attitude as in the typical corporate strategy of living or dying by quarterly earnings reports.

Not, I hasten to add, that the rest of us have it all figured out. In a recent poll, large numbers of respondents declared themselves in favor of renewable energy, so long as it wouldn’t be more expensive than the existing energy regime. This leaves unasked the critical question: supposing it were more expensive, would you give up on it and be reconciled to fossil fuels? Because that poll answer also betrays a lack of vision, as well as the notion that the whole clean energy debate is concerned with out-of-pocket costs, not environmental and habitat destruction.

At the other extreme—at the very head of our government—you might hope for more enlightenment. You would be disappointed. Some thirty years after some visionaries began to attract derision for warning about the environmental effects of energy use, our Chief Executive announced “a new national goal” of stopping the increase in America’s carbon emissions by 2025. There was no mention of actually reducing emissions by anywhere near the scientific consensus figure of 80% by 2050 so as to avoid the worst effects of global warming, and environmentalists were predictably less than impressed by the announcement. And since the speech made practically no mention of how the 2025 desideratum was to be achieved, one is left with the suspicion that the “new national goal” was all placebo and zero real vision.

It will be interesting to follow the progress of the bill co-sponsored last year by senators Lieberman and Warner—S.2191, America’s Climate Security Act. It seeks to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 65% of 2005 levels by the year 2050, and as such, can fairly be labeled ‘visionary’. But while organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists are pushing hard to have that figure raised to 80%, when the bill has its day in the Senate its sponsors may well find themselves fighting just to keep any useful and meaningful language in it at all. For the debate will not be with the scientific community at that point, but with senators who may have been heavily lobbied by utilities, industry groups and trade associations to focus on the here and now. Indeed, the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have already set out on a multi-state tour to spread the gospel (supported by a deeply flawed economic study) that action on this bill would be detrimental to the year-end P&L reports of their members.

It may well be the case that action to effectively promote renewables and mitigate climate change has a short-term negative effect on certain parts of our economy. Or it may be that the opportunities thrown in our path by the drive for clean energy prove lucrative for our economy and fruitful for the job market. But whichever of these possibilities proves true is not really significant. Because both of them represent only The View, while the recognition of what must be done to cohabit sustainably with our fragile world  represents The Vision.

And as they say on Cape Cod: It’s Not the View, It’s the Vision.