Who is the greenest candidate in the 2008 presidential campaign? The Democratic candidates share many positions on cap-and-trade auctions, clean energy and biofuel. In fact, the latest Senate energy bill was co-sponsored by Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), and Joe Biden (D-Del.).
While Obama seems to be the man of the moment - inspirational and able to build consensus - he hails from Illinois, where coal makes up $1 billion of the economy.
Illinois has the largest supply of bituminous coal (the second-most valuable type) in the United States.
Not the best constituents for an eco-friendly leader. Regardless, Obama proposes a $150 billion investment in renewable energy in the next 10 years. Clinton has a fantastic environmental vision, but Republicans hate her with a coal-fired, global warming-denying passion.
Both Obama and Clinton have aired their plans and both plans are good - yet the candidates do not often discuss the topic in the campaign. I anticipate that the Democratic nominee will use his campaign to rally the country, and create, dare I say, a movement for change.
Atop the grand soapbox of presidential campaigning, the Democratic nominee will call for conservation and pledge billions of dollars of federal funding and incentives towards installation of clean energy sources. Sound too far-fetched?
There are two precedents for politicians to call for energy conservation. The first is that during wartime, the government mandates rationing and encourages self-sacrifice to support the goals of the military, though no such rationing has been implemented in the last 60 years. The second is the oil crises in the 1970s, which forced politicians to call for energy conservation.
Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter both proposed gasoline rations; only Nixon's were imposed. The causes of these shortages were the OPEC embargo during the Yom Kippur War and production shortages during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.
Both Nixon and Carter implored citizens and businesses to turn off their lights, carpool, conserve by any means necessary. In both of these cases, the government encouraged conservation due to a lack of resources or a need for resources elsewhere. More clearly, the causes were the need to consume at war and secondly, the inability to consume.
There was no question that conservation was needed - it would be physically impossible to maintain a customary lifestyle.
Today's need to conserve, based on the professional opinions of thousands of scientists, has not led to the same conservation rhetoric. Rhetorical focus is set squarely on new resources, new ways to continue consuming and the need to stop doing business with the Middle East.
President Bush called for conservation in his 2002, 2003, and 2004 State of the Union addresses. Each has a sentence or two to the effect of "encourage conservation," but only in the context of war and dependence on foreign oil. Rarely, if ever, do politicians demand conservation for planet Earth's sake.
This kind of conservation is antithetical to American consumer culture. Our appliances, our computers, and our iPods are made to break.
Plates, napkins, utensils, bottles and cans are ethereal objects, vessels for consumption immediately discarded after lunch. Consumer culture makes conservation on a personal level difficult to comprehend. Convenience trumps considerate conservation everyday.
Bush's "addicted to oil" quip was spot on, yet his treatment of the addiction was pathetic. Promoting corn ethanol to mitigate oil usage is like telling a crack dealer to sell corn syrup to supplement his customers' usual score. There's a lot of corn syrup around, and we subsidize the farmers who grow it, but crack will always be better and more effective.
The roots of our addiction can be found in the scientific revolution. In championing rational inquiry, it revealed innumerable new resources and technologies, and also developed new economic practice. Businesses recognized that bigger is better - more product, more profit. The Earth became our tool, our resource, our driven slave.
The quest for natural resources replaced the mystical reverence with which humankind once viewed the Earth: We considered ourselves participants in the ecosystem, not masters of it. It is astonishing that one legacy of the scientific revolution is a complete departure from sound ecological practice.
How are we supposed to conserve when we are culturally inclined to do the opposite? Instead of looking for ways to continue consumption, we need to sit down in communities large and small and talk about how we can individually change our lifestyles and thus the nature of our society.
The solution involves every aspect of our lives, and will affect literally everybody. But who has enough publicity and power to motivate everyone? The politicians! Obama! Clinton and Curtatone! Markey, Markham, McGlynn, Moomaw, and Marzilli! Let's listen to what they have to say.
Emily Wier is a sophomore majoring in biology.
