Think of this as Volume 14, Number 31 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
What may appear to journalists, or even historians, to be an ideological war usually turns out, in America, to be a choice between economic interests.
In our time the choice is on the title of this blog. It's a choice between energy defined by resources, which come out of the ground, or by devices that harness the energy all around us.
A new Thesis is born when the crisis leader turns definitively toward the new economy, explicitly rejecting the old. And it's brought on by the old economy seizing political power in an attempt to hang on against the new.
In other words the fight of our time is not between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democratic or Republican. It's between devices (the alternative energy of windmills, solar cells, tidal energy, and geothermal) and resources (coal, oil, natural gas). The former should define wealth, not the latter. And it's the climate bill that matters, nothing else.
The current situation can be seen in the graph above from the Environmental Law Institute. We're subsidizing resources. We're choosing oil, coal and gas over other forms of energy, through the instrument of government. This is what the President must change if he is to seize the crisis of our time and put our economy on a sustainable path.
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