Creating Our Energy Future

According to the Writers Almanac: It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech entitled “The American Scholar” to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard University. …. (It) was the first time he explained his transcendentalist philosophy in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.

Emerson told students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models.

I’m reminded of the remarks Obama made on the energy industry at last week’s National Clean Energy Summit, i.e., “Renewable energy has grown to the point that it’s a serious threat to the fossil interests, the Koch brothers, and so forth. But what its enemies are just now learning is that this is America. We don’t move backwards; we’re visionaries, we’re innovators, and we always move forward. Their attempts to lock the people of the United States into old, obsolete and dirty technologies will ultimately fail.”

We’re very close to success here, not because we’re an innovative people by nature (though we are), or that we place a huge value on environmental protection (which, generally, we don’t). This is happening almost exclusively because our work in this space has brought the cost of renewables down so steeply that fossil fuels (certainly coal and oil) are pricing themselves out of the market. See Bullish on Renewable Energy for more on this.