Tuesday Energy Seminar

This Tuesday, I went to Ann Arbor for my first bi-weekly seminar on Green Energy with U of M’s Energy Institute (UMEI), which compliments my project, research on the Detroit Public Schools’ GO GREEN Challenge, quite nicely. I’m stoked about having an opportunity to continue to learn about Sustainability, because before I changed my major to Education Reform and Public Policy, I was wholeheartedly set to pursue Environmental Studies, a topic that I am still very passionate about, but forwent for EdReform because I believe that humanity needs better matriculation to arm itself with the vaccines it needs to solve it’s global problems, Environmental Sustainability being only one of many always impending crises. The seminar went great. Mark Barteau, former professor in Energy Research at the University of Deleware and current professor at University of Michigan, a man who has debriefed senators on the world’s energy situation, did just that for us; he gave us a one hour run down on humanity’s energy challenges: that demand may triple by the end of the century due mostly to growth in the developing world desiring our excessive lifestyles, how both conservation and renewability must be sought, and how, unfortunately, the most economically competitive sources are often the most harmful to the planet.
The seminar was going great until I raised my hand to ask a question. There was a graph on screen that showed the shares of our energy demands in the United States, and one of the categories was industry. I simply wanted to know if this portion of American industrial energy use factored in our outsourced footprint; energy used abroad (Often for ease of labor exploitation) to produce the materials we import. So I raised my hand, and 10, 20, 30 seconds go by, and it wasn’t until professor Barteau switched slides that I realized fully that I had been ignored. Oh, it was brutal. Not only that, but I was in the front row, so all attendees witnessed the horrendous carnage. So I just put my hand down in shame and exile… an exile not of the locale but of the mind…. But he did talk a little about outsourced demand later, so I knew at least that he was conscious of the phenomenon. Of course he is, though… he’s a friggin’ professor in a globalistic issue!
The good news (because I know your riveted to hear that side of the story now) is that he opened up for questions at the end. I was wondering at that point, with an absence of the description of the consequences of our energy consumption, how this man depicts the consequences of our energy appetite to congressmen and women and the like when giving them similar presentations, and I asked him just that. And he answered that scare politics just doesn’t work with that audience. It is all about audience when giving that presentation, and that particular audience is most receptive to economic incentive and averse to scare tactics.
This answer immediately piqued my skepticism, as well as my Marx brain (I am one of many people on this planet who have an aggravating 3rd hemisphere of the brain, more like a small lobe… Left brain, right brain, Marx brain. No, it is not a supplementary form of cognition. Yes it does come at the expense of other brain functions. I know you were wondering haha very funny haha. It namely detracts from memory of names. And humor now that I think of it. And social skills. It’s a gift and a curse #AdrianMonk). Congressmen and women are in the elite, and therefore have exhorted their sociopolitical and economic privilege the insulate themselves from the consequences of things like pollution, desertification and drought, spatial injustice, and energy footprint. What gives them the right to be uncomfortable because of an idea? If they are unaware of the extent that energy and consumption politics effect their constituents, much less the rest of the entire human race, where is the stigma for change?
However, his answer did also illicit my confusion, because his point about motivation from fear is very valid, and also in that way happens to align perfectly with spiritual beliefs I hold about our everyday mental presence. Fear is not an adequate motivator. So this confusion leaves me with an excellent question to ponder going forth as I study public policy…. How do I inspire a healthy awareness of the consequences of inertia without fostering motivation through fear. How do I balance and reconcile? How do we let policymakers and constituents alike know that it’s not about running from an impending desert-Earth doom scenario, but that it’s about running toward a planet fruitful in life and happiness and easily inherited to future generations? Or, in my case with Education reform: How do I let others know that it’s not about fleeing from a future where all of humanity’s problems collapse upon us because of a lack of solutions; it’s about running toward a future where human potential is not finite, but harnessed for creation, cohabitation, justice, and emancipation?