That’s why lots and lots of big money (can you say GE, Pickens, Florida Power and Light?) are pumping very serious money into wind farms.

That’s why we just heard about a consortium of 14 large US corporations announce that they were joining together to do serious work on vehicle batteries.

Let’s not forget that powerful interests will do anything to prevent the rest of us to walk forward as long as it is profitable for them.

A political leader can’t get too far out ahead of the voters. It’s a sure way to lose.

Personally I don’t get too worried about Obama’s past stance on corn ethanol (he was hired to represent the interests of the farmers in his state) and I don’t get too worried when he says things like “we need to look for ways to burn coal cleanly”. A politician sometimes has to speak in weasel-words in order to not drive people away from their base.

I can well imagine that Obama understands that clean coal is a non-starter and food-based fuel is a bad idea, but knows that he has to lead (in the true sense of a leader) people to understand what will and will not work.

Obama is not a scientist. He’s a lawyer. But he’s a very smart guy and very outcome oriented. Based on his past behavior he will surround himself with intelligent (and reality-based) people and he will listen to them. He will also listen to those with different ideas to some extent.

I’m betting he “gets it”. And to the extent he doesn’t get it right now, reality will soon be recognized.

Hansen is a “one trick pony”. A very valuable pony whom we should listen to, but he isn’t operating in a greater political world. He’s very focused on what he (and others of us) feel to be one of the greatest challenges ever faced by mankind. He’s impatient, with good cause, but he’s way out in front of the rest of the population and isn’t “leading”.

I expect Obama is listening to what he has to say, taking it all in, and trying to figure out how to get us moving faster in the right directions.

(Remember, Obama isn’t our president yet. We’ve got another month of running backwards before we get to start walking forward once more.)

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

[JR: Steven -- message delivered. Perhaps a tad less of this kind of commenting might be warranted.]

Still I’m compelled to type a response.

My friends are 20-70 years old. It’s wonderful.

They’re religious, conservative, liberal, socialist, corporatist, straight, gay, queer, messed-up and seemingly perfect – or perhaps deceiving themselves. They’re all lovable.

Almost everything I’ve read from the AGU conference would terrify them.

How do we bring them onto the only viable path – renewable energy?

He has been saying he doesn’t think Obama “gets it”. Me, I assume Obama just might have a very good idea of what climate change is. I sent an email to Hansen saying he should seek to meet Obama and find out. Fat chance he read it. But if he thinks Obama doesn’t “get it” he should formally go to him to try to explain: maybe he’d find out more than he’d teach.

The political problem in front of Obama is that a large enough percentage of the American people don’t see or don’t want to see the necessity to act with the kind of intensity Hansen wants to see. Think about FDR pre Pearl Harbor. I’m not saying Obama is gung ho on climate the way it is said FDR had made up his mind the US was going to go to war.

I’m not sure I understand what Hansen was saying in the Q&A you’ve quoted him from above.

I’ve seen an Environment Minister, the most powerful French Canadian politician of his time, in the brief period late 1980s early 1990s when environment and climate were “top of mind” when Canadians were considering who to vote for, “tell the truth” to a crowd he might have expected to be sympathetic to the message, and he was rejected out of hand, laughed at to his face. I was a far more marginal type of politician, i.e. leading the BC Green Party at that time for a brief while and no one paid attention as I called out for support for our position that the atmosphere should be returned to the preindustrial composition.