My friend Piper in Holland has some interesting words about the biofuels debate.
Tony Ingraham [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi Tony, The back-and-forth debate about biofuels is a textbook example of how issues are "framed," a concept elaborated in recent years by George Lakoff and others. While politicians, businesspeople, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens from all segments of the ideological spectrum go around and around about "which fuel is best" or "which car is best," hardly anyone is engaging is the serious exercises of lateral thinking that we need so badly right now: To what extent do we need fuels at all? To what extent do we need cars at all? We are only going to have a truly productive discussion after we move the frame from "fuels" and "cars" to "mobility." Just one high-profile example: in the "Energy and Environment" issue statment on Obama's web site, the word "fuel" and its variants appears 25 times, and the word "oil" appears 9 times, while there is not a single mention of "public transportation" or of "carbon-neutral city design". Most North Americans have never heard of the Carfree Network or the Transition Towns Network, nor do they wonder how it can be possible that Dutch people and Danish people have a higher standard of living than North Americans in spite of a per capita usage of motor fuels that is less than half that in the USA and Canada. George Bush just proposed helping to finance his latest wave of military adventures by slashing public transportation funding (just one more way of putting some more dollars in the wallets of ExxonMobil and Halliburton), and were you bowled over by the wave of popular indignation? No? But folks will rubberjaw about the pros and cons of ethanol until the cows come home. Take care, Piper _______________________________________________ RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for: [email protected] http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins free hosting by http://www.mutualaid.org
