Obama Says Oil Spill Highlights Need for Renewable Energy

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

- Albert Einstein

What has been going on in the Gulf of Mexico for the last month or so is sickening to me. Sickening in the environmental sense of course. But I am more sickened by our rabid addiction to oil. We of course use the most of our petroleum products in the gas tanks of our cars and trucks to get ourselves to the grocery store, or the shopping mall, or kid's soccer practice, as well as to transport our produce, furniture, building materials, and general crap. There's also the facts that plastics are petroleum based. Think about how much plastic you have in your home right now! Gobs and gobs. I could go on but I think you get the idea. We are addicted to oil and our economy depends on it. And if the oil gushing out of the gash at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico isn't a siren, we are in for a long, hard slog. Our consumption of the black gold is unsustainable.

So President Obama had the courage to call for more renewable energy - in the midst of a horrible and deep recession, at least 10% unemployment, fighting two wars, a growing national debt, social security running dry, 401Ks decimated for those close to retirement, and what I think will be the greatest man-made environmental disaster the world has ever experienced. I can hear the naysayers, "We can't afford to invest in renewable energy, when there are so other many problems to tackle," or they might say, "We have to let the free market dictate the future of renewable energy." You know who they are.

There are many paths to more renewable energy, the free market included, but I don't think we have the luxury of time to let large corporations and the "free market" decide our fate. BP, a large global corporation, has already begun to destroy the water and coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico trying to feed our addiction to oil and to feed their burgeoning wallets. The big U.S. bank corporations (you know "too big to fail") have already destroyed the global economy and refuse to stop practicing the speculation that got us into this trouble. That's not a really good track record for entities that can have an enormous and tragic affect on our lives. I suppose we will continue to see these economic and environmental disasters as long as there is this insatiable, unsustainable drive for more profits. In the name of profit and the quarterly Wall Street kabuki dance, corners will always be cut, jobs will lost, lives will be lost, and greed will win the day. Is this really who we want to be?

I don't know about you but I want solar photovoltaic modules on my house generating clean electricity from the sun rather than getting my electricity from a coal-fired power plant miles away. But I need help, because I can't afford to do these things right now with the unstable economy and I need help because we don't have the luxury of time (just Google "pine beetle kill" for just one example of the affect of a changing climate on Colorado forests) to let the market decide when the price of solar PV is going to be cheaper than coal.

So, if Einstein is correct, we are going to have to develop new ways of thinking to solve our problem of addiction to oil and any other unsustainable activity we humans like to practice. Do we have the courage to think differently?