Pine Nuts with McAvoy Layne: Earth Heroes
Submitted by Jeff Munson on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 1:33pm
It has been said that women don't sweat, they glow. Well, Mother Nature is starting to glow. While greed and conspicuous consumption thrive, carbon emissions continue to cook our planet. And so it becomes our solemn duty to leverage the power of markets, contain climate crisis, and rescue our Earth Mother.
As we consumers demand transparency, businesses will start to get serious about protecting the environment, and if they don’t act responsibly we will stop purchasing their products. Once our Earth Heroes demand an end to shortsighted selfishness, our shareholder democracy will start to embrace service to society. So what about the present administration's intentions to roll back Obama-era laws mandating a gradual rise in fuel efficiency?
Well, help is on the way. It's called a Volkswagen, the people's car. Sound familiar? Yes, the world's largest car maker has reached the tipping point, batteries costing less than $100 per kilowatt hour, making an electric car more affordable than the gas guzzling, planet annihilating internal combustion cars of yesteryear. Hello Germany, goodbye Saudi Arabia.
And thank you Greta Thunberg. The 16 year old Swedish activist is traveling the globe with a poignant message, "My message is just to listen to the science, and we obviously aren't doing that. Pull the emergency brake on emissions! You say you love your children above all else, and yet you’re stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”
Patient industry used to be rewarded with contentment, but patient industry will not save the planet. It's going to take a first responder engagement with the focus of a war room, by governments, NGO's and private citizens like us.
So what can Joe Sixpack do? He can start by patronizing breweries that are eco-friendly. Sierra Nevada is ranked in the top five eco-friendly breweries according to one survey, and here's why. Sierra Nevada is investing in green infrastructure. Having installed 10,000 solar panels on the brewery's rooftop, the solar panels are now providing all the energy needed to brew that cold beer sitting here in front of us. And too, all waste water is purified to hydrate hops and barley crops. So here's to you, Sierra Nevada!
And what can Harriet Housemaker do? She can become a part of the solution, an Earth Hero, by shopping eco-friendly, by gaining an understanding of the complexities that make a product "sustainable," checking on company values, ditching plastic, avoiding microbeads at all cost, and eating green.
Some say animal flatulence is going to melt the poles and we're all going to drown again, so maybe we should be thinking about moving to Cincinnati, because as Mark Twain told us, Cincinnati always has been, and always will be, twenty years behind the times. Yes, we can buy some time in Cincinnati, but only twenty years.
Better we become Earth Heroes and save the planet for our progeny, because it's no longer "Win or go home," it is now, "Win or no home."
— For 30 years, in over 4,000 performances from Leningrad University in Russia to Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”
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