pew(ke)

when my alarm starts going off each morning, about an hour before i get out of bed, i flip on n.p.r. for an overview of the day's headlines. and you know what i heard this morning? i heard the pew report that china has overtaken the united states as the top investor in clean energy technology.

this makes me so effing angry, i don't even really know where to start.

but i think i'll start with the planet's worst enemies. for one second, i will bite my tongue till it bleeds, and accept the truly asinine view that there is no such thing as man-made global warming (or as i like to think of it, "climate change", because when people are too, er, dumb? to recognize that global warming doesn't mean it won't ever snow again, i try to use less confusing words).

okay, it's really hard, but i'm doing it. AND IT DOESN'T EVEN FUCKING MATTER!

even if you disagree with every scientist in the entire world, because you're smarter than them (yeah, you who voted for sarah palin to be vice president), and think global warming is a liberal hoax, how can you still be so stupid as to not recognize that our economic security, technological advancement, the wave of the future, the current worldview outside of the bassackwards bible belt mentality (or what you might like to call "real america"), and our national security depend on going green.

this pew report makes it pretty clear that the greatest innovative minds are still in america, that there are billions of american investment dollars waiting to be dumped into clean energy technology and small businesses (like my friend jim's solar panel business, run on sun (much more on this later)), but that china is where it's all going. because china knows a good business venture when it sees it, even if it sits and laughs at all of us dummy liberal hippies.

american investors won't put their money into small businesses or green research until there are some government regulatory guarantees that establish a marketplace (e.g. cap and trade). and american brains aren't going to stay in america, produce in america, and create jobs in america if china is bankrolling the development of the products their brains think up and then selling that shit to the developed world (which, incidentally, is asking for this stuff).

and don't even get me started on national security, and the fact that our addiction to oil funds terrorism.

if anyone in this country was really thinking, we would stop wasting time pointing at tenable junk science, and recognize that it doesn't matter if the science is junk. the developed and developing world is going green. that's where the brains and money are going. and if we aren't going to support it here, if we aren't going to invest in those brilliant green minds and the ability to produce clean energy products to sell around the world, the united states of america will sooner than later no longer be the developed world.

~k