Alternative Energy: The San Bruno gas fire and the futility of harping on fossil-fuel disasters

The San Bruno gas fire and the futility of harping on fossil-fuel disasters: "

by Jonathan Hiskes.

An explosion from a ruptured natural-gas line killed at least four people and destroyed an
entire city block in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno on Thursday night.

Also on Thursday, a pipeline
burst in a Romeoville, Ill., industrial park and is still spewing oil. It's from same
Canadian oil company that spilled more than 800,000 gallons of tar
sands crude oil into a Michigan creek this summer.

And of course the slow
cleanup from the BP
rig blowout continues in the Gulf of Mexico. That mishap, in turn,
overshadowed the Massey
Energy coal-mine explosion that killed 29 workers, and the coal freighter
that crashed
into the Great Barrier Reef on a shortcut back to China earlier this year.

The costs of these
disasters -- human, ecological, and economic -- are clear enough. And the costs
are still sky-high when these projects go right -- when coal, oil, and gas are safely extracted and burned and their heat-trapping
pollutants sent into the atmosphere (as The
Onion described so well).

But harping and nagging
and saying 'See how bad fossil fuels are' doesn't really get us anywhere.

Here's why: People
already know that our dependence on dirty energy is a problem. They get it. There's
even an appetite for a national clean-energy strategy/program -- it's just not
overwhelming enough to overcome the undemocratic
dynamics of the Senate.

So why aren't we sufficiently
riled up to change the situation? One of the more persuasive theories is status quo bias.
Psychologists find that when people are anxious (and nothing breeds anxiety
like a recession), they cling to what they know, even if it's clearly
problematic. Our fossil-fuel economy may be gasping, sputtering, and
occasionally blowing up homes, but at least it's the devil we know, not some
mysterious cleantech network of solar panels and smart meters and compact neighborhoods.

People don't need
hectoring told-you-so's. They need to
see a vision of a sustainable future that actually looks appealing.

I grabbed a beer with
Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil
Radford a few weeks ago, and he asked me what I'd do if I ran Greenpeace
for a week. I offered the idea of an un-protest -- a twist on the group's
classic strategy of staging high-visibility protests at sites where environmental damage is being done. Why not
instead ambush places that are doing things right -- say, Ohio's Oberlin College,
Sweden's Hammarby
Sjostad neighborhood, or the car-free Times Square (for better visibility)?
Hang banners and find a way to make a ruckus, in celebration rather than
protest. Radford was amused -- we'll see if Greenpeace runs with it.