With growing awareness of "green" issues, Friends likely share my concern about energy supplies and how we all are going to fare. Big Oil would like us to believe that drilling our shoreline and the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge will solve our problem. It will not. That oil won’t come online for about a decade. As we have seen from the recent abandonment of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico prior to a hurricane, those rigs are very vulnerable to the growing major storms brought on by climate change.
In my opinion—which is based on years of following this subject closely—the real solution is going to be multifold: curtailment (conservation) of resources by retrofitting houses and buildings for energy efficiency (Friends might want to work closely with organizations like Philadelphia’s Energy Coordinating Agency, which focuses on helping low income folks retrofit their homes for this); rapid development of clean renewable energy sources (like wind, solar, methane, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric— including tidal, etc., not "clean" coal, which is decimating mountaintops and adds greatly to our carbon footprint) that will provide many new jobs and service industries. I encourage Friends to lobby for immediate improvements in public transportation in all regions, not just urban ones, focused on light rail, buses, carpools, and systems like the Smart Jitney system proposed by Community Solutions in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
