It's All Happening

Above picture from Worldsnest, New Mexico


It's All Happening

In the 1976 film Network, TV newscaster character Howard Beale utters "I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to Take this anymore " after a news report about OPEC.. This strikes a chord with current events. Beale’s angry passion, eloquent clarity and sense of purpose is still needed today to combat the entrenched way of thinking by consumers, and old industries afraid of losing market share.

Network and the 1970's oil crisis brings up another one of my favorite films, "Ground Hog Day" where Bill Murray keeps waking up the same day It's hard to not think the world keeps going to sleep and waking up the same day when one knows that the Peak Oil crisis was predicted in 1956 by M King Hubbert who was shunned and taken as seriously as a Ground Hog predicting the weather. (If you have not seen the film Crude Awakening you should run out and rent it.)

Despite how much I feel the rage of Howard Beale I don't want to end up sticking my head out the window and screaming "I am Mad As Hell And I’m not going to take this anymore." Don't get me wrong, I am mad as hell. Mad that people building expensive homes don’t make them net zero energy users, spend $50,000 renovating kitchens or building pools but say they can not afford solar panels. That naysayers proclaim that getting off oil and coal and investing in renewable energy is going to bankrupt this country while not having a problem with subsidizing ethanol, oil and proposing subsidies for the nuclear industry to the tune of billions of dollars. In the end, though, I am not really mad as hell.

Another favorite film,"Almost Famous",.about a teenage journalist in the 60’s who goes on the road with a rock band and falls in love with the character Penny Lane, who tells him "It is All Happening" , as if the creative forces of the universe were coming together just for them. Yes Penny Lane “It is All Happening” The universe is cracking open just for us.

T Boone Pickens went from oil man to wind man, the Terminator Republican Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger is a total greenie. People have retrofitted Plug In Hybrid Prius’ that get over 100 miles a gallon, built there own solar powered cars live in homes that generate more energy than they consume. Thin Film solar PV is being made that prints out on a printer. There’s solar paint, a disco in England that generates electricity by people dancing on a dance floor, a city being built in Abu Dhabi that will generate 100% of it’s own energy renewably and have no waste, a futuristic off the grid compound in New Mexico called Worldsnest that makes it’s own hydrogen for it’s hydrogen fuel station..

And hey – if I was a Ground Hog I would stick my head out of the hole and say “Spring is Coming Early This Year.”

OUT GORING GORE

It's refreshing to see Al G out there promoting the idea that we can make the majority of our energy with non carbon sources in the not too distant future. It's refreshing to hear this as opposed to the energy camp that keeps saying powering ourselves with renewable energy any time in the imaginable future is impossible. And most people are just sitting on the sidelines while Gore becomes the defacto green cheerleader who can say what he wants because he does not need to get elected.

Whatever happened to the idea of manifesting destiny and the whole pioneering ideal that anything was possible despite the difficulties and sacrifices one must make to get where you want to go? Clearly the settlers that took over North America did not sit around and say that crossing the ocean in tiny wooden ships or going across hostile, dangerous, un chartered territory was going to stop them from anything. They didn't sit around and worry about going bankrupt and how hard everything was. They just got in their damn ships and wagons or on horses and took off knowing that it was better to die trying than sit at home and let some other country or clan or company do something, every doubter said was impossible, before anyone else could.

Thanks Al G for not getting elected President. Thanks for letting George W screw everything up even worse than it was before. I'm not saying the problems we are having is a Republican problem and that the Democrats have all the solutions. The California Governator Shwartzenegger is a Republican and look what he has done to lead California into a bright green energy future.

As they used to say during the first Internet boom in early 1990's - there is paradigm shift going on. There were even people who doubted that the Internet would actually make money. Remember the first net boom and how it crashed and how all the naysayers said - see it was all just an illusion? But look at the Internet now. After the hiccup of it's initial success the Internet has almost become our life and its not just a part of it.

And same goes for all the renewable energy technology that lots of people say is not really going to happen any time soon in the near future. Sure some of the technologies may go belly up and some of the ideas and companies will fade away.

But just like how the Internet is here to stay after being brought into question, the same will be for the amazing new energy technology being developed now.

It's time for someone to come on the scene and out Gore Gore. The world would have been less interesting if we had Daniel Boone without Wild Bill. The Pilgrims in New England without the French in the Bayou. Bill Gates without Steve Jobs. Apple without Microsoft. Yahoo without Google.

You get the picture. Don't we need more than one green cheer leader?

Come on all you politicos out there who have something to say. Do you have what it takes to out Gore Gore? The more Gore the better.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Copyright Yasu and P Mac G 2008

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