Denver 2008 -- 'America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done.'

Denver -- Forty five years ago, I heard the first great speech of my adult life, standing on the Mall in Washington, DC, when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his great "I have a dream speech." By luck I was at my first political convention when Mario Cuomo described America as a "City on a Hill." Four years ago, in Boston, I looked down from the Fleet Center to see a young candidate I had met weeks earlier when the Sierra Club endorsed him for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois electrify the crowd -- Larry King walked the corridors afterward muttering out loud to himself, over and over, "My, my, my, my. My, my, my."

So I've been very lucky in the speeches I've heard in person. And I was lucky again last night, at Invesco Field, when that still young U.S. Senator passionately echoed Martin Luther King's call to redeem the American promise. And the entire evening was a reminder of just how much has changed in the past eight years. Obama himself devoted more energy to global warming, energy, and the environment in one speech than the entire 2000 or 2004 campaigns saw, and just before he spoke Al Gore reminded us again that "inconvenient truths matter."

It seemed to me that Obama and the Democrats missed only one opportunity -- they linked him and his biography and this moment to Abraham Lincoln, and they took back from Ronald Reagan the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. But in his remarks on Bush's foreign policy of bullying without delivering, I did wish that Obama had taken Teddy Roosevelt back from the Republicans -- for surely one way of summing up the Bush administration is to "speak loudly and carry a small stick."

And it was delicious to watch a Sierra Club member and volunteer -- Marsha Shearer -- backstage with Obama in her Sierra Club "New Energy for America" T-shirt.

Comments

[Jake]

It's powerful that someone with Pickins' background and reputation has taken this progressive position on our country's energy policy. His may not be *the* right path but it is *a* right path. And to solve a problem as large and complicated as this, many right paths will be necessary.

I'm pleased that the Sierra Club is engaging their old adversary here and working together to bring our energy policy closer to environmental, economic, and geopolitical sustainability.

And as for Pickins, remember that it took a Nixon to unfreeze our US relations with China.

[Patricia Sanders]

I loved Obama's speech and the way he set a higher ideal for the U. S. that we have ever realized before. The one thing that disappointed me was his advocacy of "clean" coal and nuclear power. Where is that coming from? Why does he take this stance? I noticed that there was dead silence when he made this statement, whereas just about every other proposal was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

[Doug Stecklein]

I agree with Patricia Sanders. When I heard "clean coal and nuclear" I think I was as shocked as everyone in the stadium as was obvious with the silence that followed. Is it wind, solar and clean renewable energy or clean coal and nuclear? I am a little confused as to why he would even mention those two things, let alone emphasize them be mentioning them first.

[Paul from Potomac]

I too was deeply impressed by Obama's sincerity and open-mindedness on social issues in the speech. However, his lip service to the nuke and coal community, and reference to offshore drilling as a stop-gap were not in step with this overall sincerity, and these lapses concern me greatly. It would be fair to say that if we spend even one penny on these wrong-headed ideas, we are marching to the wrong tune and behind the wrong leader. It is clear that McCain and Gov. Palin are out of touch with reality on every scale of measurement. Obama is our only hope. If he has been bought out by the forces of energy evil, we have got to know now.

As for Pickens, he wants wind and that's ok for pumping oil. Subsidizing his oil field pumping plan with taxpayer dollars is kind of silly. Wind's not a backbone for electric power, is not reliable, is not economic over the long haul, and has maintenance problems subject to variations in climate which are now inevitable. (A dust bowl phenomenon like that in the '30's may likely occur due to drought caused by global warming, and the grit will destroy the bearings on the windmills.) Gas still adds to the carbon loading, and is a good transition fuel. Ammonia is better. You can make it from water and air using any form of power, and it produces only nitrogen and water vapor when burned in a turbodiesel. Until we have cheap renewable power, you can make it with natural gas at half the cost of gasoline.
As for plug-in hybrids, turbodiesel engines are twice as efficient in converting raw fuel energy to power at the wheels. By the time you generate, distribute, and store power on board an automobile or similar vehicle plug-in, you get about 20% efficiency. It's 40% with the diesel. Lead batteries are also an environmental problem, especially if we all started using ten times what we do now. Bad idea.
There are better ideas, and Obama needs to hear them. McCain won't listen.

[Thomas Three Feathers]

I am really disturbed about the Sierra Club aligning themselves with T. Boone Pickens, an oil man. It's like making a deal w/ the devil. How much coastal damage will you permit or overlook to get to the good part of Mr. Pickens' plan, assuming we ever get there. Looks like someone here is already "turning their back" on the environment.

[Julia]

The purists want only clean renewable energy sources. I have been a purist for years, with this vision in the back of my mind of our beautiful natural world in which our cool little machines like laptops and music playing phones and nifty cars are powered from that giant battery in the sky, the Sun. But it was always going to be up to someone else to make this happen, since I'm not an engineer. And it was always a "one day hopefully in enough time" idea, something for the future.

Well the future is now, to quote a cliche. My tearful, joyful response to the Democratic convention was mostly "At last!" Our society is finally talking in a big way about renewable energy and caring for our natural world. I had about given up on this ever happening.

Now, unless everyone in America turns off most of our lights, stops using air conditioning, and stops driving, this year -- an unlikely scenario at best -- we will need to use more nuclear and coal and some of our own oil while we develop the cleaner technologies. There is no grid or system in place to use clean energy on a widespread basis, and this will take time and cost billions to create, just for starters. The important thing is that cleaner energy production gets done at all, we can always perfect it later.

Where we need to be cautious is in keeping technologies like coal and nuclear as interim steps only, with our strongest emphasis on renewables.

It is ironic that the very people who support the "free market" are now bitching because oil prices are so high. (And they want the government to fix it.) You can visit any number of conservative blogs and read what i mean. It is because of the free market that this is happening, and the hidden blessing is that it's making Americans move in a big way toward new kinds of energy.