The Face of America

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The Hopeful vs. The Incumbent

Jason Zengerle compares Obama’s thrilling, surprising 2004 keynote to last night’s more realistic DNC acceptance speech:

Obama’s speech tonight could not avoid harkening back to the one from eight years ago. Not only did he repeat some of its same lines—about his grandfather fighting in “Patton’s Army” and his grandmother working on “a bomber assembly line”—he returned to some of its same themes. Just as he did in 2004 and then, as the party’s presidential nominee in 2008, Obama talked about hope triumphing over cynicism and the power of people to effect change. But he also knew that too much optimism would ring hollow after the last four years—and the most striking about the speech was its humility.

When Obama acknowledged that the times had changed since 2004, that back then he was “just a candidate” but now “I’m the president,” the delegates, who spent the several hours before Obama’s speech breaking into arena-rattling chants of “Fired Up Ready to Go,” took the line as a boast and cheered. But Obama’s next line—about how, as president, he now knows “what it means to send young Americans into battle” and holding “in my arms the mothers and fathers who didn’t return”—made it clear that he was trying to say something else. Once, Obama wowed a Democratic convention with the prospect of almost unimaginable possibility. Now, he was talking to them about hard-earned experience.

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The Fact That Changed Everything: Jim Moriarty and Surfrider Foundation

“If you go to any beach on the globe, there are plastics on it,” says the CEO of Surfrider Foundation. He’s on a mission to clean our coasts.

Illustration by Jessica De Jesus

(Source: mattortega)

(Source: jockohomo)

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Paul Krugman: Here Comes the Sun

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

[Photo: Michael Melford]