Walk the Talk: What quality of life really means
April 7, 2008
By Nancy Jackson
Last week, KU students packed an incredibly warm room to watch Leonardo DiCaprio’s film, The 11th Hour, and stayed well after to listen to a bunch of mostly old people like me “discuss the issues.”
Those of us who discussed were glad to be there, honored to be among good company who arguably do know a thing or two about the topic. (I was seated between renowned environmental historian Donald Worster and climatologist and IPCC contributor Johannes Feddema.)
Our answers were not wrong. And yet mid-discussion, as I looked out at earnest, hopeful faces and listened to the panel’s mature judgment and informed answers, I couldn’t help but remember Albert Einstein’s assertion that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Consider, for example, my fumble of the best, the simplest question that came my way: Why is The Land Institute working on climate and energy issues?
I gave my stock answer—that the future of food and farmers depends on how we manage the risks of climate change, that we have tremendous opportunities in Kansas both to use less energy through efficiency and conservation and to produce much more sustainable, resilient energy from renewable sources like wind and the sun. I said our economy can prosper as we transform it, that we can do well while doing good.
All true, but not the real answer.
The Land Institute works on climate and energy because we recognize that these two systems, intricately connected, support everything that we are and do in twenty-first century America.
Energy – mostly from fossil fuels – supports our entire economy and has provided us with unprecedented levels of education, medical care, entertainment, productivity, and general ease.
The combustion of those fossil fuels – burning all that long-dead, highly compressed plant and animal carbon – releases carbon dioxide and other gases that now threaten the stability of our climate.
And climate – that elegant interchange between earth, air, water, and sunlight that creates our seasonal temperature, precipitation, evaporation, and storms – supports everything from soil fertility to ocean health. Climate makes us comfortable and safe, and it sustains our ability to feed ourselves.
So, the real question – the question for young people who will inherit what we create now – is this: how do we balance these concerns? How do we choose to live?
On another panel before a very different audience just last week, my happy-talk about energy efficiency and conservation was met with skepticism by a consumer advocate who asked a different question. “How far,” he asked, “how far are we willing to go to deal with this climate issue? Are we going to ask people to go back and live in caves? What about quality of life?”
Quality of life is the crux of this matter, isn’t it? And that’s where Einstein’s consciousness becomes so important. Because truth be told, our vaunted “quality of life” isn’t really floating most of our boats.
On the World Map of Happiness (yes, someone studies this – drawing from no less than eight international data sets), the U.S. doesn’t even make the top 20. In one of the most prosperous nations in the world, children and adults alike are medicated at alarming rates for ADD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Americans are working longer hours each year to buy bigger houses, cooler cars, and stuff to put in both – average household credit card debt is over $8,000. (Holy cow!) We see less and less of our kids, who are suffering in record numbers from asthma, obesity and diabetes – the latter caused in part by an average 4 ½ hours of electronic entertainment daily and very little time outdoors.
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that quality of life may actually improve with some strategic changes.
Here are the real questions for young people at KU and everywhere: When am I happiest? Most satisfied? Most fulfilled? What was the best time I had last year, last month, yesterday?
My bet is that our best memories center around people and laughter, not stuff; engagement and experience, not “entertainment.” The Beatles may have fallen a bit short with “All you need is love.” But it probably does remain true that the best things in life are free, or close to it.
So let’s get to the best questions How do we improve our lives while also improving the natural systems that support them? This does not have to be an either/or proposition. Our big, creative brains are absolutely capable of answering this question in symphonic ways. Let’s upend our tired assumptions and get to it!
Nancy Jackson, CEP Executive Director
www.climateandenergy.org
News Updates: Tri-State thinks about nuclear, climate changes and big changes, and what the KS legislature got done
April 7, 2008
Tri-State turns to nuclear? Tri-State is the Colorado utility company backing Sunflower Electric’s proposed 1400 MW expansion at Holcomb. They would own 85% of the power. However, as we all know, that expansion has not been going as planned.
Recently, Tri-State started looking in entirely a different direction from coal – toward nuclear. According to the Denver Post, Tri-State’s Board of Directors voted to pursue exploring the option of a nuclear plant in southeastern Colorado. Quotable:
The company secured the site and necessary water rights for a plant that could either be coal-fired or nuclear. Tri-State would need a partner on a nuclear plant because of high construction costs. The staff was directed to pursue potential partners.
Right now, coal-fired power plants provide 70 percent of the company’s generation. Going nuclear could blunt some of the criticism about coal’s high carbon emissions, while likely opening up an entirely new battleground.
At Tri-State’s annual meeting at its headquarters in Westminster, board chairman Harold Thompson said the utility is dealing with rising energy costs and a tighter regulatory environment as it prepares for the future.
“We’re at a crossroads here, in more ways than one,” Thompson said.
Moment of common sense, here – or maybe total financial innocence, I don’t know – nuclear power is phenomenally expensive. I’ve heard numbers now from $4 billion to $14 billion. The costs of coal plant construction have recently increased 30% or more, and the original estimate for the Sunflower expansion was $3.6 billion. If those plants do get built, the costs could come in around $5 billion.
How could Tri-State (even with a partner for the nuclear) possibly afford nuclear and coal both?
Complete technological and economic revolution needed to head off the more severe effects of climate change. No problem! I read this NYTimes article then had to go out and walk around the block.
Summary: Politicians, economists, scientists, etc. All of these folks used to be pretty confident that a market-based approach – ie, putting caps on carbon dioxide emissions – will force the necessary changes in energy usage that can help head off the worst effects of global warming.
Naturally, new research seems to indicate that this optimism is a little misguided. In fact, global emissions are rising. Energy efficiency is falling. It is doubtful that the market can force the necessary changes in time. New low-carbon technologies are also desperately needed. Science and technology needs major infusions of research and development funds to make this happen.
Now, me here, not the NYT – there appears to be a recession going on in many parts of the country. There’s a war going on. Etc. Where are these extra funds to fight climate change going to come from?
Since this information stressed me a little, to relax I took all the relevant cliches I knew and then stacked them up in two opposing piles. In one pile – Gotta keep calm. Can’t lost your head in an emergency. Don’t act in haste, because you will repent at leisure. Etc.
In the other pile – well, I stuck a metaphor in there instead. Say there’s a group of guys, and they are facing a pack of crocodiles. They have a few firearms, some sticks, things that go boom, etc. They really need to grab some (if not all) of these items pretty soon, or the crocs are going to eat them for dinner.
Instead, the guys are just sitting there, arguing. And if one of them wants to hang out in the background and invent a new weapon, no problem, but he needs to be sure that the other members of the team will keep the crocs busy while he does.
Otherwise, there’s really not much of a point.
Lotta talk, not a lotta walk. Newspapers across the state review the Kansas legislature’s progress – election year progress, mind you – and find it pretty lacking. Sunflower Electric supporters managed to gum up the works pretty good (TCJournal). Moderates on both sides of the aisle found this problematic.
From the KC Star: “Coal has hijacked the session,” said Rep. Pat Colloton, a Leawood Republican. “It has pushed aside all the many things we should have been working on, from health care to immigration to highways. It has totally dominated the discussion.” From the Hutch News:
But overall, there is a weariness to the tone of those asked about the issue. Rep. Nile Dillmore, D-Wichita, said he’d heard about enough. “Everything we say has to be filtered through a lump of coal this session.”
He noted his district is strongly against the legislation that would enable the new plants. So he’s voted against them. But Dillmore said there are limited options for large-scale power production amid growing consumer demand. “Coal and nuclear, what else is there?” he said. “Unless someone has a very large squirrel, what are you going to do?”
CEP laughed itself silly over that last. We think he means putting a really big squirrel on a treadmill, kind of thing. (Obviously a joke.)
On a more serious note, of course he is correct: The world is in serious need of bridge fuels to get us through the next 20 years or so, until technologies of fossil fuel consumption can catch up to the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
For investor-owned utilities like Westar and KCPL, the big squirrel of choice is energy efficiency, and augmenting fossil fuels with wind power. For the power plant that would run the proposed national bioterrorism defense center in Kansas, their preferred squirrel is natural gas.
Across the nation, though, few are choosing the big squirrel of coal. According to the Innovest report on Sunflower, in 2007 more than 50 proposed coal-fired plants in 20 states were canceled or delayed.
— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org
