Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.
But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn’t vote. We didn’t choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness—voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.
Green blogger David Roberts a good post on the economics of solar power in the context of Nanosolar's apparently incredibly breakthrough. If renewables are cheaper than coal, it's a huge deal. But it still doesn't quite compensate for billions of subsidies to bottleneck energy (coal, nuclear, oil), though it provides us a path forward. Just as we're advancing ridiculously quickly in the open media space because of progressive activists and Google, we'll soon be able to do that in the energy space.
I was talking to a friend at MIT business school who is going into the energy space, and he was horrified at the recent Energy bill and the corruption of the public policy space. And I was like 'why don't you bribe some Congresscritters, it's not that much.' And he nodded. And I said 'Better yet, why don't you work with us and we can bribe Congress together'. And he nodded again. Just imagine what is possible.
Anyway, I looked around and found one PAC, the Solar Energy Industries Assocation, and it has around $5k cash on hand. Come on, progressive energy types, we can do better than that. Kick your stupid libertarian habits already.
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