Green initiatives lead to survival, prosperity

By James Bickford

My dad doesn't believe in global warming -- he actually refuses to believe in global warming. He has a background in physics and chemistry, graduated from West Point and served in the U.S. military for 26 years, but global warming is a myth, a hoax.

We are living in an age controlled by a generation that saw the might of the industrialized machine come to life. We beat the Russians; our economy survived and prospered; Communism fell; Democracy won. And at the core of these successes were our oil-consuming, gas-guzzling, smoke-belching machines.

I am not an environmentalist. I get just as annoyed with peace-sign-tattooed "tree-huggers" as my dad and his dad before him. I am a student of engineering, being trained in the premier innovation center of the world, Silicon Valley. I have no agenda except my future prosperity and the prosperity of my American peers.

That prosperity is being threatened. It is being held hostage by the stubborn voting of our parents and grandparents. We are being held to the ideals and thoughts of two generations that have seen the mechanized forces of American supremacy overcome all threats, survive and thrive. But we have come under a new threat, never before faced by humanity, and the solutions appear radical and dangerous to those that have lived their lives in the blanket of technological comfort and cheap energy bliss.

Despite this danger, we have the opportunity to keep our technology, bolster our growth and improve our standard of living. The sustainabalist generation is not asking for an Amish lifestyle. We are simply asking for efficiency. That efficiency is in the way we use the resources of a finite world, how we face technical challenges and in how we decide on political policies that shape the landscape of our future development.

Our ability to harness and control energy to solve humanity's problems is our greatest success.

Everything enjoyed in life today is directly influenced by our ability to use energy. We use energy; we consume energy; we like energy -- energy is good. But the people we buy energy from are not. We are stuck in a war with fundamentalists that guard the oil that runs the great American Dream. We fund them daily, propelling regimes of terrorism, denying individual liberties and setting the Middle East into radical disparity.

Oil prices are going up, and they are not coming down. There is very little debate on how much oil we have remaining. Peak oil is less than a decade away. The industrialization of half the world's population increases demand on this resource, which means prices are only headed in one direction -- up.

With the end of cheap energy we are also entering an era of uncertainty. It is no accident that the most powerful nation in the world with the highest standard of living on the planet also consumes the most energy. This also means that the United States has the longest way to fall when the oil prices we have grown accustomed to go away.

If we do not become efficient, the U.S. can expect rises in temperatures, changes in weather patterns, diseases, migratory changes, droughts, floods and several hundred million people displaced by rising seas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leaves very little room for debate on whether this is happening. We have been told that this is a 90 percent certainty -- enough to make me worried.

My question to my peers is, what do we want written in the history books? Will it be noted a thousand years from now that we sat idly by while our parents, scared of change, refused to vote in the reforms that would bring us economic prosperity and alleviate the worst in environmental backlash? Will we be known as the beginning of a very long, hard period in American history, or the age that began prosperity, that removed bipartisan bickering and showed the world how prosperous innovation can be? We have the choice to urge reform, to get our parents to stop looking at the states as red and blue and to see them as green.

Green is the color of potential. It is the color of opportunity, and it is the color of freedom. With green, America can enjoy a level of prosperity unequivocal in its history. Thomas Friedman describes this as the single biggest opportunity in human history. But it will not be enough unless our next president is smart and green.

To all my peers, tell your parents that you want to live in a clean, prosperous tomorrow. Tell your politicians that it is time to listen to science and reason, and not to their partisan leadership. Our next president must be a green one because green makes economic, political and international sense.

Green is the most patriotic color of all -- green is the color of my generation's hope.

James Bickford is a junior mechanical engineering major and is the project manager of the Solar Decathlon.