Last week a new gas well exploded in western Pennsylvania and blew natural gas and a million gallons of toxic fracking fluid sky-high. Luckily, there was no spark and no explosion. It took 16 hours to bring the well in the Moshannon State Forest under control.
Meanwhile oil kept gushing at the Deepwater Horizon site, drenching the Gulf of Mexico in slimy goo. Capping the wellhead cut the flow in half and seems to be collecting increasing amounts of crude; but for the foreseeable future, tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day will join the estimated 500,000-to-800,000 barrels that have already fouled the nation's most productive fishing grounds.
This is no time to be shouting "drill baby, drill" in public. But down the road, these disasters may be remembered as the time America stopped shouting slogans past each other, and took up the serious conversations we must have, unless we're willing to watch our country go down in flames.
These disasters come just when many conservatives, backing away from the apocalyptic rhetoric of the right-wing media, have been reaching out to progressives to find common ground.
This is because conservatives aren't stupid -- just, in most cases, misinformed. Most of them not hopelessly seduced by the Emir of Glennbeckistan know that, as The New America Foundation says on its website, we're facing "...an era shaped by transforming innovation and wealth creation, but also by shortened job tenures, longer life spans, mobile capital, financial imbalances and rising inequality." And they know that energy is part of that, root and branch.
I believe we're in enough trouble now to do what we've always done -- solve our problems by being practical. After all, as Winston Churchill said, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities."
What I'm unsure of is whether progressives are ready to take up that conversation. After all, we've been on the defensive since Reagan. Even Bill Clinton was a conservative compared with, say, LBJ.
In the past 30 years, every belief we held dear has been ridiculed, eviscerated, and otherwise mistreated in bars across America, by people we didn't much respect in the first place. We had to watch while conservatives plunged us into unnecessary wars, dismantled as much of the New Deal as they could get their hands on, stacked the Supreme Court, almost destroyed the nation's finances, and generally left a mess for us to clean up.
So now they want to make nice? No payback?
Well, no. Wanting payback is the human thing, sure. But if we want to win, we have to be adults and engage. Conservatives are already beginning to question their beliefs; I've seen it in recent conversations. If we make them pay, they'll just get huffy, stand on their dignity, and drop the whole thing. Then we'll be worse off than we have been -- just when the country needs redemption.
It seems to me the key is to find solutions to practical problems that everybody can buy into, then build on it. If people work to be reasonable, the ones who aren't marginalize themselves, while the serious ones strengthen the center.
Working with people you don't agree with turns down the heat, and heads off the demonizing, and tribal suspicion of the other, that's poisoned the public well. And if progressives can put over a practical solution, conservatives will start wondering what other tricks we have up our sleeves. People are funny; once they start thinking, they can't stop.
Luckily, progressives -- tree-hugging environmentalists, no less -- have something to offer in the way of energy policy that conservatives can buy into; a decentralized power grid.
A big reason progressives have fought industrial wind power, for instance, isn't because they oppose wind power. Far from it. It 's the industrial part of the idea--the huge scale of the towers, owned by yet another giant corporation.
The case usually made -- that the towers would ruin views and were bad for birds and other living things--was mostly resorted to because people figured that their real reasons for fighting the towers would be die on the table as pie-in-the-sky. So they left themselves open to claims that they were a bunch of hypocritical NIMBYs who talk a great game, but won't pay the price.
It was a big mistake for the people fighting wind power not to make their real case; that what they favored was a future in which everybody generated their own electricity, be it wind, solar, or mini-hydro. Because that's an idea that conservatives can buy into.
Why they can -- it emphasizes individual responsibility -- is not important. If that model became even a marginal reality, it would be an enormous win for the planet. And, incidentally, for progressives, who would get what they want, make some converts, and be right -- without pushing anybody's nose in it.
Most fossil fuels are burned to make electricity and heat our homes. Building small-scale electrical plants for our homes and commercial buildings, and heating and cooling them with (electrical) geothermal heat pumps, is feasible today. It would generate entire industries, and make a huge dent in our use of those fuels, the price of must soar in the future -- only in part because of the rise of India and China.
Thanks to British Petroleum, most of the country knows we've reached the limits of where we can drill for oil. And thanks to EOG Resources Inc, which owns the Pennsylvania gas well, we know that natural gas is just as dangerous to get as deep-water oil drilling is -- more, if you consider what would have happened if a spark had ignited that 75-foot-high gas cloud.
So the country is in the mood for a serious discussion. It's a discussion worth having. Much good can come out of that. The price has been enormous; but that's what it would have taken, in any event.
It would be a pity for progressives to let a victory like that slip through our fingers out of a perfectly human appetite for some payback.