| Allegheny County, PA | November 4, 2008 Election |
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Shifting to Renewable EnergyBy Christopher Titus "Titus" NorthCandidate for US Representative; District 14 |
This information is provided by the candidate | |
The U.S. is blessed with tremendous renewable energy potential, enough to meet the entire electric demand of the country. We call for a Manhattan Project-level of commitment to developing clean renewable energy technologies - technologies that do not create pollution in the course of generating electricity. These can include wind, solar, ocean power, geothermal, and small-scale hydro. Clean renewable energy does not include nuclear power.Environmental distruction is proceeding at an ever accelerating rate. The world's population is continuing to grow rapidly, and more and more of those people are consuming more and more resources. It used to seem that we could get away with excessive consumption in America because the rest of the world, in particular the developing world, consumed so much less. That is no longer the case. Our consumer values have spread throughout the world thanks to the same corporate sponsors that saddled the United States with a wasteful oil-based society. Late-developing countries like China and India and Brazil could easily have taken a different path, especially had the United States provided aid and incouragement. For instance, they are all rich in solar energy potential. But the United States and the international economic order that the U.S. created -- including the IMF, World Bank, and WTO -- have pushed developing countries along an oil-based, consumption-oriented development line, and now they compete with the U.S. for scarce natural resources. Of course global climate change is real, and human activity contributes to it and very well could be the only significant cause. We know it's real because the U.S. and Russia are in a frenzy over Canada's announcement that it will build a navy base in the Arctic to defend its claim of sovereignty over Northwest Passage shipping lanes that are free of ice for the first time in recorded history. The military industrial complex has spoken -- global warming is real. If our schools were better at teaching science we wouldn't have to waste time on debating the reality of anthropogenic climate change and could take the lead in combating it. Still, the real problem is that in an oil-based society the richest corporations are those that are tied to King Oil. In a political system that revolves around money, those corporations have phenomenal power, while candidates and parties that reject their paradigm are marginalized. Some might ask, seeing as Exxon Mobile can make $40bn in profits in a single year, why we even bother to fight. Why? Because somebody needs to. We may be poor, but if the the struggle is in the arena of ideas and not money then we will prevail. |
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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 10, 2008 04:56
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