Light at the End of the Tunnel

Walking into the repair shop of one of the local fixit people, you can't but notice a handmade sign over the work area: "Due to the energy crisis there will be no light at the end of the tunnel." The humor strikes you first, and then the serious side kicks in. There may be a chagrin aspect to this, which I guess we have all felt one way or another. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just dial back to an earlier spendthrift, wasteful time and have it the way it was? But it isn't, everything has changed. Even the arch conservative, neocon types know (beyond their rhetoric) that we have gone beyond the pale here, we are through the energy veil, period.

Next time over to Paul's I intend to take an LED light (& I understand that Phillips has developed an LED light bulb now, not on the market ... yet) and a compact fluorescent bulb. Not that he hasn't discovered these for himself, but I would like to engage him about the sign, and whether it might be possible to have another kind of light bulb there. Paul is my generation, way back in the "dark ages," when we were instructed by parents and others to turn lights off, keep the bills down, etc. Then there were several generations where this was just not an issue, and it seemed cranky (or worse) to ask that things be conserved (!).

Now Bill McGibbon is saying that it isn't possible to change people's behavior through "the facts," that people are so buried in data (& counter data, "push back), that we will have to use slogans and careful media manipulation to engineer change. Thus his 350.org effort (is that the name?). There are university studies to prove this theory, and now those who want to encourage change are going to have to do things another way. "Information Overload" and "Future Shock" are mentioned elsewhere in this BLOG. Those who are in denial about the energy crisis, Global Warming, etc. are not convinced with the so-called facts anyway. We may be entering a new communication era where facts just don't matter that much and the "newspeak" will be based more in the emotional brain than the rational one.