Lookie what we did!!!!

I’m overjoyed that Barack Obama will soon be our president, and am transfixed by his beautiful, heartfelt, and egoless acceptance speech. By now, I’m sure most everyone has seen it, but it feels right to put it up here anyway, if only to save me the trouble of searching YouTube when I want to watch it again.

The part that got me the most was President-Elect Obama’s appeal to the voters who voted Republican. “As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

I also loved his focus on our ability to grow and change and evolve. “Our union can be perfected,” he said. “What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

The work doesn’t stop here—it is just beginning. But this is a truly historic day, and I’m bursting with excitement to answer Obama’s call to realize the potential of what we can be.

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image by dno1967

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to visit Walt Disney World. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid, and it was a seriously good time. One thing that I’d completely forgotten about was Disney’s focus on the idea of “progress”—Epcot Center, the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland, and especially the Carousel of Progress ride all put forward the vision of a shining future into which our civilization confidently, inevitably proceeds.

Though Disney’s idea of progress is marked mainly by technology rather than development of culture or consciousness, it’s pretty remarkable for an amusement park to embody any kind of worldview, and the park’s vision of the future is stylish, fun, and beautiful.

What I love most about it is that it underscores the fact that progress is real. Human beings have changed and grown and evolved through the centuries, from undifferentiated groups acting mainly on instinct to the multitude of societies we have today, acting on different motives and with different goals in mind. Some cynical folks think we humans are just animals wearing clothes, and that is true to a certain extent, but there is also another component—the part of us that wants to learn and grow and change. This impulse has created the beauty, the knowledge, and the problems that make up culture.

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image by carolinenyc

In nearly every speech and debate this year, “clean coal” has been invoked by both candidates as a real solution to America’s over-dependence on foreign energy. Repeated enough, phrases begin to be accepted as truth. But the promise of “clean coal” is a fairy tale, no more possible than spinning straw into gold.

Taxpayers For Common Sense reports that, since 1978, the United States federal government has spent 2.5 billion dollars developing Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology, the prime example of “clean coal.” Thirty years later, there are no U.S. coal plants that capture and sequester carbon. Yet the money still flows. According to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) officials, there is currently $350 million of federal money on the table for states who are able to build a plant that successfully captures carbon. The “winners” will be announced mid-2009. But with every dollar that continues to be poured into “clean coal” research and development, we all lose.

In the still-hypothetical process of carbon capture, the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal is captured before it is released into the atmosphere. It is then pressurized into liquid form, or supercritical CO2, and injected into rock beds deep underground.

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