Getting fired up about renewable energy

Last week I had the good fortune of hearing Bracken Hendricks, co-author of Apollo's Fire, read from his book and talk about the promise of clean energy as a solution to global warming - and to revving up our sagging U.S. economy. At a time when much of the discussion about global warming and climate change involves hand-wringing and doom-and-gloom, Hendricks' message that developing renewable energy solutions will not only help mitigate global warming, but also provide an enormous boost to creating new U.S. jobs and industry, is incredibly refreshing.

The title of Hendricks' (and co-author Jay Inslee's) book draws on the inspiration of President J.F.K.'s Project Apollo effort to reach the moon. Hendricks asserts that we have the technology and the talent to achieve a 'new economy' around sustainable energy (and economic) development, and require only the desire and political will to act on our potential. And as Hendricks points out, we can't afford not to act, with the devastating effects of global warming already in evidence, and with a receding U.S. economy sorely in need of new jobs that can't easily be outsourced to the other side of the globe. As Hendricks frames the argument, a clean-tech, green-color-jobs economy is our most obvious path to an environmentally healthy and promising future.

You can learn more about Apollo's Fire and the authors at http://www.apollosfire.net/. Check it out, read the book and get inspired by the clean energy future.

And while you're at it, learn about the groups who helped sponsored Hendricks' reading at MIT. The Green Roundtable http://www.greenroundtable.org/, Ceres http://www.ceres.org/, Boston Climate Action Network http://massclimateaction.net/index.php?page=boston , the Environmental Leadership Program http://www.elpnet.org/index.php and the Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/ will get you excited about the future of clean energy!