An FDL Post about Jerry McNerney's Win

I might end up saying a few things here at FDL, but there's one thing which absolutely must be said, right at the top. Whoever, and i mean that plural, is responsible for getting Jerry McNerney on the roadmap to congress deserves more than a few kudos.

Let me 'splain. I've been fighting for renewable energy for more than three decades. All the current arguments about about the pluses of renewables, like energy security, boost local economies, stop expensive pollution, eliminating international hot spots based on control of resources, not to mention the problem of calculating the present value of 20,000 years of nuclear waste storage (we don't even bring up depleted uranium weapons) were actually made way back when the first renewable wave broke.

In the course of those three decades, i realized that actually producing clean kwh's was far more important than all the public posturing, so i went and co-developed the world's first utility-scale windplant. Yet, i could never ignore politics, because the tax and financing measures upon which we built our industry only came through effective use of political capital.

Fate or synchronicity gave me two invites to the reagan White House to argue energy policy. Though i never gave a dime. Actually, i didn't argue, i threatened. Those were the days of heady deregulation, while at the same time the rayguns were threatening the solar tax credit. (From which we built the foundation of renewable technologies.) i simply met with Danny Boggs (of the Louisiana oil'n'gas Boggs) and threatened to go public with the administration's unwillingness to move to energy deregulation while spewing so much other deregulation around the country.

Because i was a reasonably public face for windpower in California, they stopped their attack on the solar credit, and let it die at its appointed time, something the industry association had not been able to achieve. But the same fookin arguments from those days are still being fought two decades later!

I watched in horror as america started oil wars, let kennyboy and chainey pour over iraqmaps out of public view, while the world warmed in the not nice kind of way.

Over those three decades, we had supporters in congress, but mostly in theory only. Suddenly the landscape has changed. I have nothing against lawyers that can't be worked out with fists, but suddenly there is an engineer in congress. A Windpower Engineer.

Jerry and i come from the Altamont Pass, the world's first wind development area. I've known and worked with him a bit for two decades. Seems to me america will soon come to respect the development of a coherent energy policy for the first time, which will stop plunging the world into chaos. (Was i subtle enough?)

And the center of this rapidly developing energy policy turnaround will be centered in two offices in DC. One, a rookie congressman who understands exactly what's at stake down to the gearbox bolt torgueing... and the other, a neighbor congresswoman who will soon answer to the name Madame Speaker, who knows the renewable advantage since she watched us make it happen near her home.

A long screed post, perhaps not permitted here. But i thought it valuable to give some detail, as to why what BlueAmerica and the crew here did to kick Jerry up a level is so important. You can't imagine, if i ever return to the US, what it will mean to me that i have someone to talk to on the hill, if we want to be serious about stopping the carbon poison and returning to a sustainable world.

And you guys helped make it happen, for sure more than i understand. I am so fookin grateful. Let's not stop here.