Ford's plans for multi-billion dollar manufacturing sites for electric vehicles has Tennessee and Kentucky singing a different tune on cleaner energy.
...These electric car and battery plants are just the most visible manifestation of the green future that is coming, even in the reddest of red states. It doesn't matter in the least whether Republicans like it. As with the Ford Motor Co., they can participate in and profit from it, or they can get left behind. And they are finally showing signs that they don't wish to be left behind.
All deathbed conversions smack of hypocrisy, and this level of overt hypocrisy is almost unbelievable. Green technology is economically viable today only because Democrats seeded this field years ago. Obama-era funding for clean energy research and electric vehicles, for example, is a key reason for growth in those sectors during even the environmentally hostile Drumpf years. Red-state politicians have worked unceasingly to subvert policies that created the very economic harvest they are now reaping themselves. It is truly nothing less than enraging.
But rage, no matter how justified, should not obscure the real point here. The point is for human behavior to change in time to save this gorgeous, teeming, irreplaceable, suffering planet. Deathbed conversions happen because time has run out, and our time has run out.
If even dug-in science deniers such as Marsha Blackburn and Mitch McConnell can come around on climate issues when they are convinced that doing so would benefit their constituents in visible and measurable ways, then it's conceivable that an environmentally sound future is possible even in regions now tightly tethered to fossil fuels. It's even conceivable that renewable energy could cease to be a political issue and become simply a common-sense strategy for a country that doesn't want to run the planet into the ground.
It's really only a matter of understanding that human beings — not just endangered species and imperiled ecosystems but also our red-state brothers and sisters — stand to benefit from a green future, too. And nature is already making that point very clearly.
Margaret Renkl
...These electric car and battery plants are just the most visible manifestation of the green future that is coming, even in the reddest of red states. It doesn't matter in the least whether Republicans like it. As with the Ford Motor Co., they can participate in and profit from it, or they can get left behind. And they are finally showing signs that they don't wish to be left behind.
All deathbed conversions smack of hypocrisy, and this level of overt hypocrisy is almost unbelievable. Green technology is economically viable today only because Democrats seeded this field years ago. Obama-era funding for clean energy research and electric vehicles, for example, is a key reason for growth in those sectors during even the environmentally hostile Drumpf years. Red-state politicians have worked unceasingly to subvert policies that created the very economic harvest they are now reaping themselves. It is truly nothing less than enraging.
But rage, no matter how justified, should not obscure the real point here. The point is for human behavior to change in time to save this gorgeous, teeming, irreplaceable, suffering planet. Deathbed conversions happen because time has run out, and our time has run out.
If even dug-in science deniers such as Marsha Blackburn and Mitch McConnell can come around on climate issues when they are convinced that doing so would benefit their constituents in visible and measurable ways, then it's conceivable that an environmentally sound future is possible even in regions now tightly tethered to fossil fuels. It's even conceivable that renewable energy could cease to be a political issue and become simply a common-sense strategy for a country that doesn't want to run the planet into the ground.
It's really only a matter of understanding that human beings — not just endangered species and imperiled ecosystems but also our red-state brothers and sisters — stand to benefit from a green future, too. And nature is already making that point very clearly.
Margaret Renkl
H01
ReplyDeleteI find the point about green energy possibly becoming non-political in the future interesting. Because, to a political science major, it seems like no topic is really going to become fully apolitical. Green energy especially being such a loaded topic today. But even if its seen as nonpartisan, there will still be ways of how it should by applied and who should benefit most from it that will keep it political. It seems similar to me like talks of infrastructure. That even though it seems like common sense that it is needed for a healthy community, it still is a political issue because of how much should be put towards it and where it should go.