President Obama’s initial jobs and economic rescue bills were the first baby steps of a thousand-mile journey to undo stupid and selfish policy decisions over the last 50 to 100 years. Now some giant steps can begin, as Congress starts on the budget. It will take the world, working as a united civilization, to save a livable planet from the dangers of global warming, sea level rise and mass starvation.
What parts of the Obama plan will most affect Maine? Our houses now lose up to 75 percent of their heat. That could be 25 percent with sensible building codes, which should include programmable climate control and lighting with occupancy sensors. Solar can help us even in Maine, if similar codes mandate triple windows and automatic shades and vents. Imagine being able to let your unoccupied house cool down to ambient temperature, with appropriate building materials and furnishings not covered with mold because ambient humidity is also appropriate. Just imagine the house toasty warm when you return.
High-speed rail with nodal connections to local buses and presently envisioned smaller-scale local transportation could help all of us, right down to the safe bike, electric cart and walking paths. Trains could run down the medians of our federal highways, in conjunction with electricity on a high transmission efficiency 675,000-volt national grid. Hydrogen as a clean energy source for future energy vehicles could also come on the same rights of way. Hydrogen power should then be economically feasible for short commutes in cities. There have to be enough guaranteed hydrogen pumps to make people able to buy cars using it.
We should do everything possible to make urban and suburban environments livable and breathable, with emphasis on safe communities with safe public open spaces, to counter the highly subsidized effects of mindless sprawl. Fossil fuels will still be necessary in the transition, but only with carbon capture at all large ignition sources. We can recover “the freedom of the open road” and “open skies” in the cars we all love, but see less and less of due to traffic congestion.
All Mainers will benefit with the vast number of jobs we can create and keep in the state and the country if we start adopting all feasible alternative energy modalities simultaneously. We can no longer let them fight it out in the mutually assured destruction of our present so-called “free market economy” actually ruled by a small world oligarchy of corporate and political insider interests. The economy must return to the true free market form that made America great, and is slowly being adopted by the rest of the world. All forms of green power must receive subsidies for research, development and implementation to re-level the playing field and make up for generations of subsidized coal, oil, nuclear power and highways.
Huge solar power banks in the desert Southwest, extensive wind farms in the northern plains, total carbon dioxide sequestration by coal and oil utilities, and well-managed forests, smart buildings, smart mass transportation, and hydrogen-powered vehicles are a start. “Cellulosic ethanol” using native species and organic wastes must replace the use of corn kernels, a poorly imagined subsidized process that only cuts food supplies. All of these should have publicly funded start-ups in a few major metropolitan areas, then extend outward over the years, even though they did not show an initial “profit” in the old sense of the word.
Seemingly bizarre ideas like windmills suspended from balloons in the stratosphere, or mirrors in space might prove useful on a small scale. If we adopt some of each we can preserve our scenic beauty, wilderness, rivers and other natural resources, and still power our economy and our lives.
It’s time for the whole world to wake up to Obama’s call and prevent much of our present civilization being destroyed by sea level rise, extensive extinction of sea life by acidification, accelerating losses of potable water and arable land leading to inevitable rampant migrations and resource wars, and the spread of human and agricultural tropical diseases north.
Paul Averill Liebow is a physician in Bangor. Moveon.org is hosting a meeting to kick off Power Up America, a campaign to build support for the Obama administration’s energy and climate change policies, at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 29, at the Hammond Street Congregational Church in Bangor. For more information, visit www.pol.moveon.org/event/poweruplaunch.