There are 15 Departments of the federal government, but there is no Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability. We do without, but the question is WHY? Both our national and planetary environment are headed towards providing only a hellish future for our children, even as we run into the advancing depletion of the world fossil fuel deposits that have been so central to the development of industrialized society.
Plus, our corporate and government misleaders are bankrupting our country in pursuit of a war to seize major world oil supplies, yet we have no Federal Executive Department that would or could formulate a strategy to deal with these related problems in any coordinated and purposeful manner other than war, and erecting a police state worldwide.
We do have a Department of Energy, and there are several other semi-related Federal Executive Departments, too. All are run by the corporate section of our society, and conservation is a minimal concern to these folk. Making profits is what gets them motivated. For example, Mobil Exxon is a big player with the Department of Energy bureaucracy, and as we all know by now, this huge company has been spending a small fortune in trying to misinform the public about the reality that humans are heating the planet up. We just cannot expect a government strategy that mandates less use of gas and petroleum coming from these people.
A simple strategy to reduce energy consumption in the US is simply to lower the speed limits. Yet neither the Departments of ‘Defense’, National Security, Energy, nor Transportation seem to have the willpower to come up with this simple energy saving remedy! These are not stupid people, so it is not brain power that is lacking, but willpower.
Similarly, there is no willpower to zone and design our streets and thoroughfares in a more energy efficient manner. How many times do we enter into neighborhoods, shopping malls, and highways that are so designed to make us drive many extra miles than what is actually necessary? Everywhere we drive, it seems, incomprehensibly bad planning and zoning by developers has put into place cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac that force us into wasting energy. Nobody cares. especially not the corporate sector of our wasteful capitalist world. Would it take so much effort to achieve savings of energy by having a federal department in charge of enforcing some much needed planning and zoning regulations? The answer is NO.
How about a simple regulation requiring fast food places to serve the food in less than one minute while the cars idle, or have their customers come inside and order? Millions of barrels of oil could be saved easily enough by such a simple measure, but the political willpower is not there by the corporate sector. The government can make individuals do all sorts of burdensome measures, but when it comes to asking for some small changes from the corporations, the government is paralyzed. Look at the lack of implementation, by the corporate and government sectors, of bottle laws and paper recycling projects for examples of their behavior. But now, we are actually struggling for survival of the human race when it comes to energy conservation worldwide.
Much stricter measures of conservation are actually needed, and this is what paralyzes the corporate controlled governmental sections from blocking even the most easily done and painless measures from being proposed and started. To implement them would alert the public to how much more is actually necessary to do to deal with these major problems that are beginning to crush world civilization at this moment. So instead of doing at least a little, they do nothing.
Energy and environment conservation now combine with pure support for justice for the working class to be reasons to look for something other than a capitalist society in the future. Profit making and corporate greed are just not going to get the jobs done that the world needs done. Meanwhile, we at least need to push out American government to add a 16 th Federal Executive Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Or better yet, defund and eliminate entirely the Department of Homeland Stupidity and Hysteria, and replace it with what is actually needed, a Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability.
What about meat eating? Or is that a bit too close to home? Check it out on other environment sites: the simplest most effective way to help environment sustainability is to stop eating meat. What we put in our mouths matters at least as much as what car we drive or how far or fast we drive,[ especially to the cow, pig or chicken!]. Also it’s an immediate personal contribution, having a bigger impact overall than any words from an individual could ever have. Change ourselves and change our world.
Micky D’s has won court case after court case on the issue of somebody riding up to the drive through window on a bicycle. They call it trespassing and say that it is only a safety measure, but they have no similar safety concerns for motorcyclists.
free bus service in urban areas would represent a huge taxpayer saving.
banning automobile traffic in Downtown Colo Spgs would be good too. They have a shuttle bus, free, that goes within 3 blocks of anywhere in downtown. Expand that, lose the “nose in” parking, use empty businesses like that abandoned steel mill and the lumber yard catty corner from it on the western edge of downtown as a parking garage, tell them cowboys to check their trucks at the gate, Really open up downtown. Instead they will be spending tax money to widen the streets, narrow the sidewalks, all to accommodate the gas hogs.
Though much of what you say is true, Nina, I don’t think all of America is about to suddenly go Hindu. Nor should they be forced to either.
Plus, it is not the ‘simplest, most effective way to help environment sustainability’ to just individually stop eating meat, though it certainly would be a most healthy measure to take for one’s own health.
As a quality of life issue, most people in the world equate meat eating with well being. Rather than pontificate about how eating animal life is cruel and then trying to get people to turn totally vegetarian, it would probably be much better to encourage people to eat quality rather than quantity, of both meat and vegetables.
We should demand quality from our suppliers, and at a reasonable price where people can actually do it- eat more quality fruits and vegetables, and not stuff themselves on artificially cheap beef and pork instead.
Certainly a Department of Energy and Environmental Sustainability could begin to address some of the issues you raise. Certainly the government could push for fast food restaurants, where so many actually eat, to serve reasonably priced fruits and vegetables in their combo meals, just as the Federal Government has already passed a law to take trans fats out of the market. Where there is will power, it can be done.
I’ll note that the U.S. government had started SOME “street level” consideration and advocacy towards sustainable ecological practice. The website was http://www.sustainable.doe.gov. It’s currently a dead link. Science turned war bumper sticker, I’d guess.
It’s ironic that culture loves to observe winged migration and tenacious penguins, but fears when science itself requires global roaming. One wonders if Isaac Newton had made films about gravity if critics would counter we are weightless.
Yeah I saw that dead link. Sez it all.