Spirit in Action
The Global Predicament
David Orr, chairman of the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin College and author of 5 books, spoke at UW-Eau Claire this past April. His talk was passionate, thoughtful, challenging and inspirational, as it discussed the dangers and hopes surrounding the fate of life on this planet.
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Jun 2007
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I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am out and out is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give, and they give, the ragged and the morn So be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done Fingers have I none to help undone The tangled knocks and twisted chains The strangled, fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion Creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Above all I'll seek out light, love and helping hands being shared between our many neighbors on this planet Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes Except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind We have a wonderful program today for Spirit in Action A presentation by David Orr, chair of the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin College An author of five books on related issues David spoke at UW Eau Claire this past April And his talk was passionate, thoughtful, challenging and inspirational As it discussed the dangers and hopes surrounding the fate of life on this planet Let's listen in as our Spirit in Action guest David Orr speaks to the topic of the global predicament What I'd like to do tonight is talk about climate change I want to begin with a question of why we ignored warnings about climate change and planetary deterioration for so long I think we need to know because this cannot ever happen again We can never again delay three or four decades from the initial warnings to the time that we begin to act I've got an observation that time is in this case not our friend Neither is money, we don't have much of either before we have to act decisively And incisively cogently and well I want to analyze some of our energy choices because I think that in the conversations this afternoon With many of you in the room tonight I think it's clear at least to me that we are at near perhaps even beyond a tipping point As they say in public awareness and public acceptance of issues And now the questions come down to how do we act and how do we act well And then finally I want to talk about politics because these issues aren't matters of left and right They're matters of how this generation or generation relates to all those in the future So whatever your politics may be Conservative or liberal or Republican Democrat or independent or just plain confused It doesn't matter to me because we can come together around and agenda that it has to do with the preservation of life on the planet for all time This is our challenge This is the time, this is the place Let me begin with a quote from Nicole Kraus' wonderful little book called A History of Love And she describes a village in Poland in which the villagers she said had heard rumors of unfathomable things And because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them until it was too late And we had no choice She's talking about the Holocaust as it was about to sweep over Eastern Europe But we've had our own version of this And the warnings go back a long, long way And we didn't fathom them, we didn't act on them And now it is close to being too late This is from the world's scientists' warning developed by the Union Concerned Scientists And signed by 102 Nobel laureates in 1992 And 1,500 other scientists worldwide This is simply an excerpt from a much longer statement But it refers to vast human misery The irritable mutilation of our earthly home on this planet This is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report Now published in four volumes by Island Press One of the warnings in this is about nonlinear changes Take the word nonlinear out that science talk for nasty surprises And the day that this came out, this competed in the news, New York Times and the evening news on television With the situation of Terry Shiba Whatever you think about that, that was page one The fact that the planet was dying as described in the largest study ever done by a thousand or more scientists Worldwide, looking at various ecosystems and variables and numbers About how the planet is working, the vital signs of Earth This was page eight of the New York Times And to the best of my knowledge, it did not make the evening news on CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox And then the warnings began to come in form of data On the left of the screen, on either side of me, is the keeling curve That saw tooth-shaped curve showing the breathing in and out of carbon And the planet, when David Keeling went to Montaloa in 1958 The carbon level was about 315 parts per million Last year in December, it was a little over 382 And then on the right side of the screen is a graphic of hottest hots and wettest wets And driest driest climate-driven weather anomalies Taken from that environmental rag fortune magazine And you can see what every insurance executive knows And that is that weather is becoming climate-driven, weather events Are becoming more and more serious for the insurance industry And then the warnings began to be fast and furious And time magazine be worried, be very worried, and finally last summer The Economist magazine got the story and Al Gore's movie "Inconvenient Truth" But the news began to break fast and furiously And you can see it on front page of any newspaper across the country This was USA Today in January This was a story about the Detroit auto show in the left-hand margin And the Iraqi war and oil war And then El Nino gives USA its hottest year in 2006 In raw numbers, this is where we are You can see that in 2007, 382 parts per million Carbon against that background level prior to the industrial age Of about 280 parts per million And the record now goes back, the ice core record goes back That's 650,000 years, the paleo record goes back Maybe another 600,000 years We have a long historical record of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere And we are now where we've never been before We're in terror in cognita And the Stern report issued by the British ex-checker in the fall of last year Nicholas Stern, the author and economist comes out with a different number It's carbon dioxide equivalent units And what he did was to take six other heat-trapping gases Render them in roughly CO2 equivalent units And the number is not 382, it comes out to about 430 parts per million But we've got to stabilize climate Carbon emissions at somewhere we're told around 450 to 500 parts per million But the hard news is, no one knows for sure Where we have to stabilize carbon to avoid the worst of what could lie ahead Of course, is runaway climate change We simply lose control and the end of that is catastrophe for us The planet would recover, we would not This is to point out the obvious We're the largest emitter of heat-trapping gases on the planet China may pass us sometime around 2009 or 2010 But right now we are the number one emitter And the map here shows roughly comparable emissions for parts of our country Divided up by carbon emissions in various countries equivalent Global warming, no, this is global destabilization The word warming sometimes sounds very good in Oberlin, Ohio on a January day But that's not what's in store for us What the science says, in the fourth report of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Says that sea levels will be rising And what look like may be a sea level rise of perhaps a meter More recent data shows that ice is melting more rapidly Than had been previously thought or previously understood The Greenland ice sheet, which if it melts entirely, is about 20 or 23 feet of sea level rise The Greenland ice sheet is now losing ice at the rate of about 80 cubic miles per year A rate that will probably accelerate Both the east and west-end Arctic ice sheets are also losing mass more rapidly Than anybody had ever thought And Bill McKibben's words, "Everything frozen on the planet is melting" Except for Dick Cheney's heart IPCC, the fourth report, and the third report Another side of data says that storm severity will increase Possibly the numbers of storms as well Disease and famine will change as ecosystems also change Drought in heat ways will become more probable, more severe, longer-lasting Ecosystems will change as weather and temperature patterns and rainfall patterns change The forests of the southeast, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, are probably not likely to survive the century Coral bleaching now affects about half the corals on the Earth Mostly because of pollution and warmer seawaters Climate isn't something that's just over here As climates change, other things will give way So as the thermostat of the Earth gets turned up, political and economic disorder will also happen The IPCC and the World Health Organization now agree that there is roughly 150,000 people on the planet Die of weather or climate-driven weather events This is what I think is a summary of what lies ahead based on the science We are already committed to a substantial warming We have warmed the planet by about eight-tenths of degrees centigrade It is not likely that we will stop this much before two degrees centigrade warming And again, the idea that you turn the thermostat up here and nothing else wobbles over here That's not how the world, the physical world works And that's not the world you read about on the morning paper or you see any evening news That's a world where small changes have large effects There's a lag between the time we emit heat-trapping gases And the effects that we see in climate-driven weather events And the lag may be, according to Tim Flannery, 30 or 40 years So that the carbon that helped to amplify Katrina Several years ago from a class one storm to a class five storm That was carbon emitted perhaps in the late 1970s This lag effect is very misleading It's too late to avoid trauma It is not too late to avoid the worst of what lies ahead And in a system dedicated to denial, this is a hard message to get across But there will be trauma, there will be severe adjustments We have waited too late Those rumors of unfathomable things because we didn't fathomable We didn't believe them But it is not too late to avoid the worst and to do much better Than what is presently in prospect There is no easy way out When I look at the policy debate about this The hard news is Winston Churchill put it in Britain in 1940 He had nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat I don't know we're quite to that point yet But there are no easy answers for this There is no magic bullet As Bill McKibben puts it, there may be magic buckshot Lots of separate small answers But we've waited too long for any kind of easy way out I think Al Gore has it right when he says That this is the first global emergency Since we have been on the planet We have every reason to take it seriously and act decisively boldly So why have we ignored the warnings? Let me offer a couple of suggestions Maybe we didn't hear the warnings The Fairness Doctrine established in 1949 By the Federal Communications Commission and the Administration of Harry Truman That was tossed out in 1987 And what the Fairness Doctrine said was That to hold license to the public airwaves Those are your airwaves in mind You had to present all sides of an issue And if a station didn't do that Then you and I could take them to court or somebody could And they might lose their license And so they had to be willing to present all sides of a given issue But that was tossed out in 1987 by the Reagan Administration And in its place was a criteria that Just said the profitability of the station was the only real criteria for holding a license And then the rest comes in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 That allowed concentration of the media So one company can own radio stations And television stations and newspapers all serving the same media market Maybe we didn't hear clearly Those rumors of unfathomable things We can't let this happen again So one of the answers that we've got to come up with Is how to control, how to change media strategies So rumors of unfathomable things And the science and the rational debate About alternatives gets out to the public Right now, Clear Channel, for example, owns 1200 radio stations across the United States 36 television stations 776,000 advertising displays Rumors of unfathomable things When the World Press Association looked at the U.S. press They found out that the U.S. press Against the criteria of freedom of the press Raced 27th of all presses across the world 27th, we fight for democracy in Iraq But we undermine it here at home in all kinds of ways When Ben Badikian wrote his media monopoly In 1980, he complained That's the classic study of media in the United States Badikian complained that there were only Only 50 major media outlets And now we're down to 6, and some would put it at 5 One of which is Fox News, an oxymoron But we wonder why we didn't take this seriously Now every one of you that is a CNN watcher Or whatever Knows a whole lot more about Anna Nicole Smith I'll bet, then you really want to know Rumors of unfathomable things Maybe we didn't hear the rumors Or we didn't hear them insistently or consistently enough James Madison, who had good reason to know Is the author of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights A popular government without information Or the means to acquire it is either prologue to a farce Or a tragedy Or perhaps both Rumors that were never told Science that was never reported Debate and dialogue that never took place Why we ignored warnings? Well, there are other reasons as well There is this power of mass distraction And over the past 100 years or a bit longer We've engaged in the largest experiment ever To deflect human intelligence in different directions To make us dependable consumers Not neighbors, not citizens, not people who could Understand unfathomable rumors But simply people who were good consumers Much of this is the work of Edward Bernays among others Edward Bernays was the founder of the modern advertising firm And he was a nephew of Sigmund Freud He brought to advertising the whole idea of Freudian psychology Car companies asked him to sell cars And what Bernays decided was You don't sell automobiles by appealing to the super ego They're going to do some kind of good in the world You don't sell cars by appealing to the ego or the rational mind You sell cars by appealing to the id All those bad nasty sorts of things that we think And our fears and our lusts and our envy and greed All those seven deadly sins And so what Bernays decided was You sell cars not by what they do As instruments of mobility But what they can symbolize And the symbolism he chose was sexual potency As the cars became the sign of a potent male And to sell them you just had to drape a half-clad woman Over the hood of a Buick or whatever And the annual style change and men were suckered into doing this But not the appeal to rational mind To sell cigarettes to half of the potential market that didn't smoke Bernays made smoking for women A sign of rebellion against men Cigarettes were called little torches of freedom And he would stage these events on Fifth Avenue Where debutants would come down the street And then stop before a group of cameras And pull up their skirts and pull out a cigarette And light it in front of the cameras The pictures went all over the world And all over the United States Trying to get women to smoke cigarettes Again, not the appeal to the superego or ego But down here to the id Tap into resentment and fear Bernays later went on to sell political candidates In the same way we became accustomed to Our candidates, our public servants Being sold to us like cars and cigarettes Or a can of peas or six pack of beer But the appeal was to fear And we see the effect on our politics There is scarcely a child anywhere in the world That doesn't know the Coca-Cola logo And we're told on good authority that young people know On average a thousand corporate logos By the time they're teenagers But fewer than ten plants and animals Native to the places in which they live Rumors of unfathomable things And then there's the appeal to the id I don't know who made this advertisement But the words here hear that It's the ground whimpering You know, if you need to make the ground whimper If that's your solution What was your problem? Why not just go straight to nuclear weapons? It will really whimper them And then there's this advertisement This is the rear end of a Hummer And the words you can't quite make out Say that when you asteroid hits And civilization crumbles You'll be ready And you wonder Ready for what? This thing gets ten feet per gallon What are you ready to do? Rumors of unfathomable things The largest effort ever To deflect human psychology To make us dependable consumers So that we would never understand Or fathom whatever rumors Or whatever evidence Or whatever data was being presented This is Abraham Maslow's triangle Of self-actualization And we all start down Infantile self-gratification If we get good in life We move up through various levels Of self-mastery and self-esteem And at the very top If we really master life We reach transcendence That's the finest and greatest among us But Bernays had another idea It was to keep us locked down here Rumors of unfathomable things We talk a lot about a sustainable world But a sustainable society Has to have people Who can fathom rumors Who understand science Who understand how the world works As a physical system And why that is important for us And for their prospects And for all life yet to come You're listening to a spirit In action visit with David Or A chair of the environmental studies program At Oberlin College He's authored five books Including The Last Refuge Patriotism, Politics and the Environment I'm Mark Helps meet your host For this Northern spirit radio production Of a talk David Or presented At the University here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin Many people talk about the environmental challenges But David now leads us On a quick explanation Of some of the alternatives And possible solutions To the looming dangers Here's what I think we've got to do And here's the hard part of this talk To try to be able to think about The policy choices before us If we are to engage in Problem solving Not just problem switching What we do cannot cause other problems We can't trade one problem for another We can't trade off energy production For increased threat of terrorism They have to solve for security In other words what will solve these problems Has to solve more than one problem We need to create security by design As we create a pattern of security So that no one on the planet Is threatened by what we do It has to be technically feasible It has to be competitive And here we need to weigh options By how much carbon is removed per dollar spent They have to be deployed quickly We don't have 10 or 20 or 30 years To begin to research these things The scientific evidence says we have got to act now 450 to 500 parts per million Is a very stringent deadline And that is coming up on us so fast If we are indeed at 430 co2 equivalent unit Parts per million We cannot wait until we have the perfect solution We can't wait for something that might work 50 years out or even 30 years out And then finally what we do is got to be resilient Redunded, repairable, and preferably locally based In big terms here is where we have to go The red line indicates business as usual That is somewhere on that line Is irretrievable catastrophe The climate action plan that we around Which we have to rally as the American people And as leaders of people all over the world That climate action plan has got to stabilize carbon And bring it down in very different directions But our choices have got to be carefully thought out Let's look at three of those choices Coal is being talked about a great deal Because it is said to be so abundant But here is what the life cycle of coal looks like Now remember, we don't have time to waste And we don't have money to waste Time is not our friend Money is not our friend either What we do has got to be done Absolutely clearly and cogently Coal, the life cycle, there is the mining You'll see a picture in just a moment of Mountaintop removal in West Virginia Mining is utterly destructive And we in this country have a bad track record Of reclaiming mined lands once the coal is taken out Then we wash, in some places, high sulfur coal is washed And in places like West Virginia it's left behind And hundreds of what the industry likes to call ponds They are vast lakes with all kinds of toxic materials Carcinogenic materials left behind Earth and dams that will one day crumble And rainy weather and flood out areas below And then there is transport of coal And then there is the combustion of coal And that's where we get carbon dioxide in the atmosphere There is the disposal of the byproduct of coal Which itself is toxic and laced with heavy metals The administration has plans to build 150 coal-fired power plants But if those plants are built and operate to the end of their effective lifetime They will emit more carbon Than we have remitted as a nation from 1750 to the year 2000 Ballgame is over, that's the ninth inning, that's the third out And then there is what is called the energy return on investment What's the energy return on investment, energy in, energy out Of carbon sequestration on 600,000 megawatt coal-fired power plants Second option, nuclear power, cheap way to generate electricity, right? Well, not really, it's a very expensive way to boil water What's wrong with it? Well, this is the Davis-Bessie nuclear power plant That's about 50 miles from where I live southwest of Cleveland This plant came very close to a loss of coolant accidents Several years ago, when a workman accidentally Leaned up against a pipe that went into the containment vessel And found that the pipe gave way and broke off a chunk of the containment vessel About the size of a football How close it was to an actual meltdown? No one knows for sure, but it was a lot closer than I would want it And you would want it if it was in your backyard One of the problems, well, first of all, there are problems of subsidies And I'll come back to that in just a moment There are issues of safety, nuclear power is a kind of a high-wire act You can do it successfully for a year after year after year one accident And you flip the economics 180 degrees There is the issue of weapons proliferation Which is our issue right now with the government and country of Iran If you can make a reactor, you're very close to making a bomb There is the cost of a nuclear power plant And again, you have to weigh the cost on a level playing field Against other options including efficiency and renewables And there's the net energy, this issue of energy return on investment How much does it take to operate the whole nuclear fuel cycle from enrichment to entombment to waste storage? I've never seen those numbers And there's the issue of waste storage That has got to be stored out of contact with humankind for a quarter of a million years Member civilization is said to be on this planet for 5,000 years And then there's the issue of civil liberties If you have a solar collector on your roof, the FBI is not going to much bother you And terrorists are not going to find out a very interesting or attractive target But nuclear power is different If you create nuclear power, you have materials that could be diverted to make bombs Or cause all kinds of other problems That means that you are changing the civil liberties dramatically of this country And the energy bill of 2005, Congress and its in estimate wisdom added $13 billion of new subsidies to nuclear power And then think about the subsidies for fuel enrichment, construction costs and insurance The Price Anderson Act is still on the books If there is a major accident, nuclear power accident in this country, you and I pay the bill The utilities are shielded from the worst of the damage that could happen There's a cost of decommissioning What's a nuclear power plant is at the end of its useful life span What happens then? You've got to intume it and keep people away from it forever What does that cost? Well, we really don't know for sure And then waste storage, which is also subsidized That's something you and I do, the utilities don't have to do that Standard and poor said the credit rating for nuclear power simply will not improve Efficiency gains plus decentralized sources now add at least ten times As much capacity as nuclear power according to AMRE 11s Because on described nuclear power as the quintessentially big, long lead time Delay prone, lumpy, complex and contentious technology And one that a single major accident or terrorist attack could scuttle virtually everywhere Well, how about biofuels? Nuclear power is electricity Biofuels is liquid portable fuels to replace oil Well, there are all kinds of issues here, let me just mention one Biofuels holds out some promise but perhaps less than we might like This is what is called the energy return on investment The amount of energy it takes to make energy And notice what happens on both of these screens If you go back and look at the energy return on investment for spindle top In Texas and East Texas oil fields in the early part of the 20th century The energy return on investment was put in one, take out 100 to 200 That's pretty good, take out an investment, your own portfolio that looks like that But then look what happens to the energy return on investment And look where core and ethanol is At or around, give or take one, and at one there simply is no point in doing So there are hard questions to ask here, and I don't presume to have the answers for them But a rational energy policy, the debate that you and I ought to begin having Puts these things all in a level playing field And debates them according to rational quantitative criteria All along, there were rumors of other things that we should have fathomed That in fact were very positive, William Paley, who's pictures on the screen And the Paley report of 1952, and the United States government was worried about its energy future then Paley said efforts made to date to harness solar energy economically or infinite testament It is time for aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy His report concluded that solar could heat 13 million homes and offices by 1975 It didn't come close, rumors of something that we should have fathomed on the other side of this equation It was there, 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission said By 2000, solar could buy 30% of U.S. energy needs It's now providing the ground, give or take a bit over 1% to 2% That was the Atomic Energy Commission And it wasn't that solar was out-technologized, it was very simply, it was out-subsidized This was April 11, 1976, soft energy paths, the most appeared in foreign affairs in October of 1976 The red line here, the red hash line is the path, what he called the hard path, but that was simply the projection Of all the quote energy experts of the time about the directions of energy policy And the directions of everybody concluded that we had to increase supply and not decrease demand Lovens brilliantly went to the other side of the equation and said Well, you know what we really need to do is to go to end use and become hyper-efficient at the point of end use And so, better technology and cock guns and better insulation would more than make up for all the stuff that we would have to do to increase supply And it's a lot cheaper to decrease demand to become efficient than it was to increase supply And the black line on the screen, the kind of the wavy line down here at the bottom indicates Sort of the energy path that we've in fact been on We have sort of been on a version of Loven's soft energy path And what is the advantage of a energy policy based on efficiencies and renewables? Well, it could reduce imported fuels, thereby, dependence on Middle Eastern oil And its military engagement in an unstable region Lower the balance of payments deficit Reduce the cost of energy, create employment Stabilize climate, minimize oil spills, clean our air, improve our health, reduce medical expenses Remove influence of oil on U.S. politics and improve democracy at home And you could make a much longer list than that Is there a downside to this? No It just happens to be inconvenient for some interest in this country That has stopped us from the paly commission in 1952 And are still trying to stop us and deflect us off into other things California, the green line here is the United States on average household energy consumption Around 12,000 kilowatt hours per home per year The orange or yellow line at the bottom, that is California energy consumption per household Notice that California went to demand side management Raised prices of energy, decreased household energy use And turned out it was a pretty good bet So if you're using less but at a higher rate you roughly break even But in the meantime you create jobs, improve air quality, decrease dependence on outside sources and so forth This is one small example If you bought a refrigerator, say 15 years ago you bought a machine that used about 1750 kilowatt hours of electricity State of the art now is around 200 kilowatt hours of electricity And the standard commercial models you can get at Sears or wherever are around 353 20 to 400 kilowatt hours per year Cost per refrigerator has come down, efficiency has dramatically improved There is unbelievable room to improve the efficiency with which we use energy What's the transition look like? Well start with efficient transport Either by improving the corporate average fuel efficiency standards, that's the police power of the state Or other market based things like fee baits, where you set a standard for efficiency And if you want to buy a Hummer, that's fine, you have to pay a rebate If you want to buy a Prius or something better than that, you get a rebate back from the government So between paying fees and rebates, it's revenue neutral High performance buildings, do we know how to make buildings that sip energy? Absolutely we do The 2030 challenge by architect Ed Masri has been adopted by the American Institute of Architects and U.S. Green Building Council We're now moving toward a world in which we're going to make carbon neutral buildings We know how to do that, energy efficiency and distributed energy, you'll see more about that in just a moment But we know how to begin to eliminate carbon emissions, probably at a profit Prices that tell us the truth about what we do, not a downside there Putting taxes on things that we don't want, taking them off the things like employment that we do want And then ending perverse subsidies, 1.3 to 2.3 trillion dollars of subsidies worldwide for things we really don't want Don't need, don't help us, don't improve the quality of life, nor do they improve the economic stability What's it look like? Well, this is Honda's fuel cell powered car being test marketed in California This is the American Solar Energy Society's report It says by 2050 we could eliminate 60 to 80% of our carbon emissions with efficiency and renewables They go on to include that efficiency and renewables have the potential to provide most If not all of the U.S. carbon emission reductions it will be needed to help limit carbon dioxide to 450 to 500 parts per million Efficiency and renewables combined This is the building we did at Oberlin College, still I think the only entirely solar powered building on a U.S. college campus powered by two photovoltaic arrays and you'll notice the cost of photovoltaic electricity dropping dramatically As the research goes ahead, the USDA is experimenting now with a solar cell that is over 40% efficiency And a lot of other things have photovoltaic properties I have a student doing an honors project this year making a photovoltaic cell out of a blueberry Yes, blueberry So I guess you eat it, when you're done with using it, you just eat this thing Look at the market for photovoltaic, going up dramatically This is a second array that we put over the parking lot, this is Sherrod Brown, our new senator from State of Ohio And Sherrod just moments after it took this picture asked me, "Where did you buy that 100KW array?" Well the answer was we had to buy it by going to Germany, our backup was Japan And the irony here was that the technology was developed about 24 miles from where we're standing At the NASA facility at the Glenn Lewis Space Center But we buy the equipment now from people who took the know-how And are selling it back to us, meantime we're paying unemployment checks in Ohio Is this any way to run a country? I don't think so Wind power, even in the State of Ohio, which is not on the list of good wind states Wind power has got dramatic potential, this is a wind field not far from where I live in Bowling Green, Ohio The numbers at the top of the screen are from the Apollo Project Notice a federal investment by the Apollo Project, a fairly modest investment $313 billion results in a gross domestic product gain of $1.4 trillion $300,000 and some jobs And that's with a fairly modest wind program, rumors of unfathomable things And now we need to move on these, no room for mistakes, no room for blind alleys No room for Rub Goldberg devices to get carbon out of our atmosphere This is time to deploy what we know how to do now Wind market also going up the rate of 40% plus per year This is an older map from the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado The top tier of states Started in North Dakota and the Canadian border coming down to Texas Is the Saudi Arabia of wind Four states, North Dakota Texas, Kansas, and South Dakota in that order Could provide more electricity than the entire U.S. electrical budget Rumors of unfathomable things And look at the cost of renewables all across the board dropping dramatically That is not true of nuclear power That is not true of carbon sequestration And what is being called clean coal, an oxymoron But it is true of renewables, it is true of efficiency Now, finally, I want to conclude with this We've had 30 years of massive political failure in this country And there are lots of reasons for it I've mentioned, too, the concentration of media so that we never heard some of those rumors of unfathomable things Or if we did, they were trivialized, or they were marginalized And then advertising The largest effort ever in human history to deflect human intelligence away from the serious consideration of anything important And to the issue of the day, anything that could sell news and compete And the concentration of the news media And there are other reasons, as you know them as well as I do, the concentration of money in politics And so forth and so on, the largest political failure ever And now time is short, we have got to act, we have got to come together As a country around an agenda, time is not our friend Money is not our friend (Applause) A friend of mine, Tom Berry, the great philosopher in the Catholic theologian Wrote a wonderful book called The Great Work And then he describes the great work of any generation And no one ever asks for their great work, it's simply thrust on them Those young men who died on battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg And Shiloh and other places in the Civil War To liberate African Americans and end slavery in this country, they didn't choose that, they didn't want to do that But that was thrust on them, they did their great work greatly And what Tom Brokaw calls the greatest generation That's now passing from the scene, they didn't want to go fight an Iwo Jima And battlefields of Europe and the Battle of the Bulge and places in Korea But they did that work greatly Our work before us now is to eliminate carbon And stop the threat to the planet This is a political crisis, it is not first and foremost an economic issue It really isn't a matter of technology and R&D Although some things we can certainly debate about This is a political crisis or a political challenge And that is our great work As a public with us, well look at the numbers here From a CNN and Gallup poll taken five years ago and it's even better numbers now 91% say that we ought to invest more in solar and wind 87% say that we ought to mandate efficient appliances 86% say we ought to mandate efficient buildings, which are now happening very quickly 85% mandate efficient cars improve the corporate average or the cafe fuel standards Now, what happened? Here's another way to think about this This is the preamble to the U.S. Constitution And in the preamble says we the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union Established justice, ensure domestic tranquility Provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare And note the words in red And secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity To ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America Now posterity That's the only time it appears in the Constitution Posterity My grandchildren, their grandchildren, your grandchildren All those generations unborn have no standing Even in cases where our actions and the actions of our generation Would deprive them of life and liberty and property That's the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment No standing, they have no voice Unless we give them voice You and I are the voice of posterity If we don't, if we are silent If we fail to act boldly If we fail to act clearly on their interests Their future is aborted Now as a nation, we've been through a debate for decades now About the abortion of a fetus, a single human being Now it is abortion applied to whole generations Can we come together around the largest concept of life Life that includes the right of posterity To enjoy all the fruits of life Life and liberty and property that you and I enjoy I think so And the principle is very simple Is that no generation has the right to alter the natural cycles of the earth To prepare the stability and integrity and beauty of nature The consequences of which will always be a form of intergenerational remote tyranny We fought a revolution over remote tyranny But at that time it was tyranny remote in space And now it's tyranny remote in time It's the tyranny that we exert or can relieve over our posterity And that statement is a composite We can read the words of Thomas Jefferson in it And Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and Bill McDonough And some of you in this room But this is the principle We do not have a right to do this And it is in our interest not to do it Our great work is simply this Number one, we have got to Stabilize and then reduce all heat trapping gases We do not have an option to do that No one, no scientists can tell you where the safe level is We may already have passed it Whether it's 400 or 425 or 450 or 550 Or maybe it's 600 or 700 But our momentum as carbon burning creatures is toward that threshold Once we pass a threshold that no one knows where it is We can't go back And we will in the words of James Hanson The great climate scientist have created a new planet It will not be this lovely world that we all knew We grew up in the end of the hollow scene It will be something much different Second part of our great work is to make a rapid transition To efficiency and solar Not to nuclear Not to something called clean coal Not to rub Goldberg devices But to efficiency and solar And we think about our lifestyles There's a good bit of slack in the American lifestyle There are lots of things that we can take up Without sacrificing lifestyle But if we have to sacrifice something Are we up to it? Or have we gone to the point where we simply can't Sacrifice for anybody for anything Have we come to that point? I don't think so I think Americans at this point are waiting for leadership I think the public is there I think the leaders have yet to show up And then there is this task of making a world That is secure for everybody Imagine an American leadership in the world exerted to Make sure that no child goes to bed hungry at night Everybody has adequate medical care Everybody has adequate security and education and housing And the good things of life And at that is part of our mission It isn't a browbeat the world into some pro-crustian vision Of what we think it ought to be It is to allow the liberation And human development across this planet In a way that is envisioned By the wisest among us in the UN documents and so forth Imagine a politics of this great work Where we see ourselves as trustees Now think about that word trustee for just a minute It's a word we're left and right come together Evan Burke, the founder of modern conservatism And the author of a wonderful little book in 1798 The fountainhead of conservatism in his country Evan Burke and Ed Burke reflections on the revolution in France Describes the current generation, the living generation As a generation that is obliged to Take the best of the past and pass it on to the future They're trustees He described this as an entailed inheritance And your job is not to alter much but to pass it on And if Burke were here tonight with us He would understand that that entailed inheritance Also includes the ecological requisites On which everything else depends Clean air, clean water, stable climate Biodiversity, that's a point in which we would agree Thomas Jefferson, the other end of the extreme Founder of modern radical politics And Thomas Jefferson, a man who was most always Throughout his life in debt Jefferson argued that no generation had the right to impose debt On succeeding generations Well think about that if Jefferson were here with us tonight He would agree as Burke would That debt includes ecological debt No generation has the right to push a bowel wave of debt Off ecological or financial off on its descendants Or posterity, no right whatsoever So you can see a convergence of left and right Around the idea that we are trustees And we are obliged by the deepest of our oaths And the best of our thinking and all of our morality and religions We are obliged to pass on the best of the past to the future And that includes a planet with a stable climate And then finally this worker, as Thomas Berry describes it And as we can see it, this is sacred work Politics is a form of religion I think But the work, this great work that you and I have to undertake This is sacred work, it's about the protection of life on this planet It's about the rights of posterity It's about building prosperity that is true prosperity Not prosperity based on theft of one generation from all those to follow This is great work, it's our sacred work It's the work that we begin here at your university Becoming carbon neutral At my university becoming carbon neutral Becoming zero discharge places Equipping a generation of young people To carry out the best of this great work I thank you (Applause) You've just heard the end of a presentation by David Orr Author of five books on environmental themes And chair of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College In addition to many other posts and activists' involvement he holds This northern spirit radio production is called "Spirit in Action" And I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet David Orr followed up his presentation with a question and answer session Due to time constraints, we can include only a couple of the questions Some especially relevant to the exploration of the relationship between spirit and action Which is the quest of my programs Here is David Orr's response to two questions from the audience at UW Eau Claire As an educator I'm sure you can appreciate the receptive audience that you have here tonight I'm student teaching and in the next couple of weeks I'm going to alternative energies And global warming with my freshman science classes What would you suggest to be the best way to get this message across To maybe 25 or 30 high school students who don't really care about anything? (Laughter) Good luck Well, I'll tell you I think people care at those ages I think what we see sometimes looking at young people that don't care We assume they don't care Is we haven't given them a chance to care And I think life is pretty hard for a lot of young people I mean it's tougher now than it was when I was growing up There were more drugs and whatnot and there were more temptations, more ways to grow wrong And there were plenty when I was growing up There was 1922 and there were a lot of ways to grow wrong But this invites a really long answer that none of you really want to hear But I think we do education really badly And I think we do it particularly badly for young males in the low to high teenage years One woman friend of mine says that that's the weak link of every culture And you think about it, we've had a recent experience in Virginia Tech That is very likely the weak link in a culture And so how do we harness the energy? And young people at that age are going to be creative I mean they're going to be creative either destructively or constructively Choices how to channel that And I'll tell you, I don't have any answers to your question I think it's a great question What I do in my classes or what I try to do is to get young people working on solving real problems So I've got a design class right now that's taken an old rundown house Owned by the college, the college gave it to them to work on The goal is to make that house carbon neutral and affordable cost And they invest unbelievable amounts of energy The other night I find as an evening class at Meats and they find me about an hour after the official ending of the class I had to basically kick them out of the classroom building It was getting close to midnight, yeah I'm done, I can't go on any further But I think this generation, the current generation has got a lot of problems, a lot of challenges But they have a huge amount of energy And I think for my generation, the older generation, our job is to give them every opportunity to be leaders To exert leadership and give them the tools and make sure it somehow gets paid for But I think that that's the challenge before us Yes, thank you, I really appreciate your message And I hear a lot about what we must do Coming to the lecture and I involved a drive of about 12 miles Which of course I burned energy So I'm wondering if you can give me some guidance about the importance of my individual use of energy Does it simply pale in comparison to the importance of what I do to influence my government Or is it something significant that I do when I make choices And how would I make those choices in my individual daily private routine? Just a couple random thoughts One is, my dad was Presbyterian preacher so I grew up saturated in guilt And it finally wore off And so anything you can do to make yourself feel guilty or others feel guilty is actually not very useful I think what is useful however, that is the calibration of private life, what we buy, how we live It is important, not just symbolically, but it is important because it's kind of a unified life It avoids the charge of hypocrisy and that's merely useful But it's also the kind of thing that I think that we need to do because it's the right way to live And there are no saints here, we are all embedded into this thing called the American way of life I flew out here on a plain spewing carbon And I tried to buy carbon offsets and that kind of thing I don't know how to offset that in other ways, I don't know that that works It may be as just as swag as my guilt But we need to begin to build step by step Lifestyles and lives that are sustainable And I don't think that this is sackcloth and ashes I think sometimes if we wait too long it will be grim But a sustainable world I don't think has to be grim It's a world with front porches and better neighbors And more conversations and more bowling leagues and better baseball leagues More poetry, more fun, more potlucks Better food because it's grown locally It's a world of bike trails It's a world where we take charge of our own governments like Vermont or New England town meetings If we wait too long it will get grim and nasty, but it doesn't have to be that way If we act now But that's where lifestyle becomes kind of a community thing But that most of this shouldn't be done in terms of, you know, this woe is us, you know, a PC checklist There's nothing more boring than that It ought to be done in a spirit adventure, community, sharing And I think we can make it I'm not a religious man, but I think we need an eco-church And I'm right now reading the autobiography of Martin Luther King And the impact he had by nonviolent resistance And I'm wondering if there is some kind of an ability to gather people together Who have the same concerns, which gives an opportunity for leadership to emerge within a group Sharing the same concerns My own sense is that I'm one person And so I might feel passionate about something, but I need to put that to work in some group So if an eco-church were there, then I would have a place to go to try to focus my energies And maybe by some kind of resistance, we could force things more quickly Well, thanks for that Two comments back One is that organized religion, including a number of evangelical groups, is already beginning to move And the work of Richard Sizak and other groups in Washington and elsewhere I think is beginning to shift the ground of religion And what I like about that is that this is in every way a spiritual thing I ended the talk by saying this is sacred work, and whatever your religion is, or whatever your faith might be Or if you don't have one, I think the category of sacred is still important So I agree with what you're saying in the large And I can say that I believe that I think churches are moving on this Are they moving fast enough? No, I don't think so When I create an eco-church, it doesn't have a lot of appeal for me That's not to say it shouldn't be done, but it's not something that I'll do But should we begin to connect our faith traditions with the way we live And how we live on a planet? Absolutely, absolutely One of the best projects I've seen in the last few years was done by a historian of religion And a friend of mine, Mary Evelyn Tucker, who's now at Yale She and her husband, John Graham, organized a series of conferences at Harvard On college and world religions And it brought people from all kinds of faith traditions There was a volume on Muslims and ecology and Hindus and ecology And James and ecology and Jews and so forth And what came out of that is really quite extraordinary When people began to ransack their faith traditions and scriptures For advice and counsel and wisdom on how to live on the earth We found out that there is a treasure trove of ideas out there There's no shortage of religious dimension to this, from all faith traditions And I like that, so whatever the faith that you might have Or the lack of faith you may assume you have I think that tying religion together with this is a natural kind of thing to do The gist of your point, your larger point, I think is really well taken And I appreciate you making that point Thank you all [applause] You've been listening to a spirit and action program featuring a presentation By David Orr, chair of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College Perhaps the best way to track him down and hear him in person Is by visiting his Oberlin College staff web page Which you can connect to easily from my northern spirit radio.org web page You can track down the five books he's authored Perhaps you can hear him speak full and unabridged in your area The theme music for spirit and action is "I Have No Hands But Yours" by Carol Johnson Thank you for listening, I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is spirit and action I have no higher call for you than this To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness