President Obama’s address to the Joint Sessions of Congress last night made one thing perfectly clear: This is the forward-thinking energy president that America has been waiting for.
Putting renewable energy at the center of his investment and job-creation agenda, Obama said last night that America’s recovery, “…begins with energy.”
And rightly so.
The 2005 film Thank You For Smoking pulled back the veil on spinmeister marketing, exposing the evil genius behind big industry campaigns to hoodwink the American public into believing patent untruths about certain products. In that case it was about making cigarettes appear harmless, even sexy.
The attitude behind this approach is a belief that the American people will willingly buy into any line of bunk that an industry wants to sell if it sells it hard enough. It’s the old “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes a truth…” tactic. And that’s the very method the coal industry relies on in its grossly misleading campaign hawking so-called “clean coal.”
The Obama administration’s recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus plan, bodes well for states and localities that want to edge toward clean and renewable energy solutions while also moving thousands out of unemployment and into good jobs. With roughly $80 billion of the stimulus tagged to green energy, there’s ample opportunity for Staunton to get in on the clean energy game.
So, should we? What would be the advantage?
If the idea of a green world and a green lifestyle captures your imagination but leaves you wondering what it would look like, and how it could come about, take a day or weekend trip to Washington D.C. for a visit to the National Building Museum (NBM.)
Green Community, one of the NBM’s current exhibitions, offers an engaging and compelling multi-media tour across the world with a look at how major cities and smaller towns have crafted a variety of workable green solutions.
“Everybody shine, be solar powered / Speak your mind, that’s wind power,” says a lovable new video on YouTube called “Green Anthem” by three green-friendly hip hop artists.
Van Jones, founder of Green for All and rising star of the green jobs movement, showed this video before his talk at the Good Jobs/Green Jobs Conference today in Washington, DC to universal delight.
Watch it — you won’t be sorry. It’s fun. And it brings up an interesting question about strategy for us. (more…)
Extra, extra, read all about it—Staunton Green 2020 and green issues in general made local news this week.
SG 2020’s own Bruce Dorries penned a column in the News Leader on the benefits of incentives for solar panels and why this makes dollars and sense for local governments and penny-wise consumers.
And the News Leader covered Staunton Green 2020’s launch event with a story on why our group believes that green building, green retrofitting, and clean energy offer the best path forward for an ailing economy and unemployed workers. The article also mentions our petition drive and plan to press City Council to appoint a Green task force.
We’re feeling the love, and it sure feels good!
Hope to see you all tonight…
