On Monday, January 30, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of a non-profit called the CLEO Institute formed here in Pinecrest and I think funded and led by Caroline Lewis who is a past school principle and educator. The meeting consisted of a roomful of people who were mostly educators and people who are interested in the green movement, about 40 to 50. I guess the objective of the CLEO Institute is to educate people that climate change is really happing. However this is a very controversial topic and people on both sides think in black and white terms.
In my experience, because of the controversy their only objective is to educate people on one side with a great deal of misinformation. This was done at this meeting with slides that were really not 100% accurate and very slanted toward how climate change is happening.
I agree on the one premise of the CLEO Institute, that education is key in what we do in energy. This is what the non-profit Energy Scienomic, Inc. objective is – to supply scholarships and funding for education in the energy field. This is also what the recently published book – Power Plug-In – does, by taking an unbiased look at all the different energy sources and their pros and cons. One conclusion that is made is that using carbon fuel is a global problem not just a U.S. problem and that in the future a carbon fuel will become scarcer and more expensive so we do have to find alternate energy sources that are not costly, are continuous and are a long lasting resource.
You can change how people use energy in three ways: 1) Have regulations, 2) Tax or 3) Make it fashionable. I think that the CLEO Institute is trying to accomplish this by making it fashionable, which is probably the most difficult and uncertain way to do it. The first way, by regulation, is also difficult and can lead to cheating because it is hard to measure and enforcers are susceptible to looking the other way. But taxing is the best way because carbon emissions are very measurable. Also all the major oil companies are including some cost, ie, tax, for carbon in all their forecasts so they expect some tax on carbon in the future.
We all do have to become educated in what types of energy we are using both on a national level and on a global level. This is what the book Power Plug-In does. We should influence our elected representatives to act on some plan for the future for energy.
