Michael Noble, Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy

Michael Noble is the executive director of Minnesotans for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a Minnesota coalition that works to improve the environment and the economy through increased efficiency in energy and land use, and increased reliance on home-grown renewable energy. The coalition partners conduct a coordinated program of research, public education campaigns, and citizen involvement in public decisions.

Did you ever have a day where you did only urgent things, and kept putting off the most important thing? Today was that day. The urgent things kept coming, and all seemed worthwhile as I did them, but I never started that 2,000-word opinion piece for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

I started my day by missing my bus. I love taking the damn bus ... am I the only one who does? It picks me up two blocks from my home and 25 minutes later it drops me two blocks from my work. On the bus, I can read, organize my list of tasks, or be obnoxious and use a cell phone.

But this morning I didn't have the luxury of waiting around for the next bus because I had to be at a wired phone at 9 a.m. for a one-hour live call-in radio show, to be interviewed by a great guy in Falstaff, Ariz. I am part of the Mainstream Media Project's Earth Day stable of radio interviewees. So I took the call at home, made coffee, and relaxed.

The host warned me that plenty of the listeners would be conservative, because following me was G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate burglary fame. I love talking about clean energy and global warming to conservatives, though, and it made me think about how my opinion piece for the Tribune for the Sunday before Earth Day has to avoid just preaching to the converted.

Here's my conservative/populist rap: I'll practice here, but notice that I wind up ranting. If you have any suggested improvements, email me at noble@me3.org.

Is there anything more conservative than protecting that which you hope to have your children inherit? Aren't the forests and fisheries, the coastlines and wetlands, and all the animals part of the heritage that you expect to leave to your children and their children? What kind of people would enjoy riches and knowingly leave their children impoverished?

Is there anything more conservative than playing it safe and leaving options open? Isn't it the radical approach to break with the past and close off options? Why then do people who want to protect the climate from rapid change get painted as radicals, and people who would willingly and permanently alter Earth's life-support system cloak themselves in the guise of conservatives? Don't we have that exactly backwards?

Shouldn't we take stock of a greenhouse atmosphere that we are systematically double-glazing, then triple-glazing, and potentially quadruple-glazing? If for hundreds of thousands of years the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere did not exceed 280 parts per million, hadn't we better do some serious conserving and leave open the option to have CO2 stabilize at, say, 450 parts per million? Is 550 ppm (double historical levels) inevitable? Have we lost all sense of our place in creation when we pay our scientists to run models of triple CO2 concentrations, which we could see in just one short century?

(Here comes the populist part:)

The main reason the public is confused about global warming and whether we can tackle the problem is that people are paying good money to keep the public and politicians confused. It's exactly the same issue that carried forward two politicians who made big splashes this year and last -- Jesse Ventura and John McCain. They both ran against the incredible power of money in politics. Is there any organized economic interest on the planet more powerful than fossil fuels?

Well, I only said half that stuff before G. Gordon Liddy bumped me off the air in Falstaff, and I'll have to tone it down for the hallowed opinion pages of the Star-Tribune as well. But I'm telling you folks here at Grist Magazine that Ross Gelbspan is exactly right when he tells us we need a solution on the scale of the Manhattan Project (The Heat Is On, 1997).

All day long I dealt with urgent details related to Denis Hayes's upcoming visit. (We'll see Jesse Ventura, but the state pollution agency will keep their Honda Insight under wraps for now. We'll eat breakfast with all eight U.S. Senate candidates. The Minnesota chair of Earth Day 1970, an iconoclast and great guy who gave me my first job in this field when I was 23, will introduce Denis before his speech.)

In between all that, I had a lengthy discussion with a Carleton College Environmental Studies program staffer about how to frame a speech I'll be giving on the campus on April 17. She wanted some edge and some reference to big change, but a speech that's thoughtful and not melodramatic. We both want a big draw, and she was concerned that students' eyes would glaze over if we concentrate on global change because the problem is too big.

We settled on "Strategic Organizing to Combat Global Warming: Accelerating the Transition to the Solar Economy."

Help me if you have a better title that you think will draw more college students. We need the next generation. The old farts have largely failed.