On my plane ride over to San Francisco from Seattle for the Web 2.0 Expo I received an email from my mom that was in the Seattle Times stating “April ‘Earth Month’ our worst ever”. For the most part it was here are a few environmental distasters that happened last month.
- We began Earth Month by grounding a coal ship on the Great Barrier coral reef
- In between, Earth Month was one coal-mining disaster, refinery explosion and dead, garbage-filled whale after another.
- President Obama just a month ago announced he wanted to dramatically expand offshore oil drilling?
- We ended Earth Month by dumping an untold number of gallons of light sweet crude into the Gulf of Mexico, our worst ecological catastrophe since the Exxon Valdez in 1989.
Going through this article it was pretty depressing seeing kids and politicians planting trees was dwarfed by these major environmental catastrophes. Moreover it leads a person like me to think are we really focusing on the right thins. Planting trees is nice but how come we’re not addressing the real issues? I posted an article on the Microsoft Hohm’s Facebook Page today about the oil spill asking “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: The What, When and Where… and How You Can Help. How does this make your feel about clean/renewable energy sources when you see something like this?” and the responses helped shed some light on maybe why we had the worst Earth Month in history.
The truth of the matter is that we’re divided as a nation on this issue still. Even though we had some great progress with the go ahead of our first U.S. offshore wind farm that took nine years to implement and you can see the conversation around this topic still on my previous post ”The First Offshore Wind Farm”. The debate here is not much different from the one today.
Between both of these debates and the article released today a couple questions come to mind and maybe you can help answer some of them.
- Why are people jaded on renewable energy sources? Lack of information? Availability? Or are people afraid to change?
- When do you think there will be a majority acceptance and approval of renewable energy sources?
- Who do you think will lead these efforts government? Corporate America?
- How can we help bridge this divide?
I don’t think there’s a silver bullet that will answer all of these questions but it’s a topic that needs to be pushed more into the limelight especially when we sit back and watch our ocean burn. Not mentioning that 40% of our seafood in America comes from the Gulf Cost and now we’re probably not going to be able to eat it anymore.