{"id":865,"date":"2013-04-09T12:30:37","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T17:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/?p=865"},"modified":"2013-07-07T18:54:32","modified_gmt":"2013-07-07T23:54:32","slug":"all-of-the-above-none-of-the-below","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/?p=865","title":{"rendered":"All of the Above. None of the Below."},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t like slogans, despite my lamenting the lack of good ones<\/a> in the environmental world. Like analogies, they tend to oversimplify and convince with their catchiness. (Grammarians may note that I made a simile there between analogies and slogans. My high school English teachers would be proud.) Think of the slogan \u201cguns don\u2019t kill; people do.\u201d Um, yeah, guns do kill. Or \u201cAmerica: Love it or Leave It.\u201d That\u2019s certainly not the only choice.<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy\u2026\u201d Image source: NPR<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

But I can come up with slogans, too. And in the sense of tit-for-tat, I propose a response to President Obama\u2019s energy policy of \u201call of the above.\u201d I suggest \u201cnone of the below.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s both catchy and overly broad, so it fits the bill.<\/p>\n

[On the day I posted this, Energy Secretary nominee Ernest Moniz said at his confirmation hearing<\/a> “The president is an all-of-the above person and I am an all-of-the above person.”]<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the above\u201d sounds, on the face of it, entirely reasonable.\u00a0 In its inclusivity, it tries to appeal to everyone and it communicates a type of urgency by implying we can\u2019t leave out any options. However it masks the fact (I\u2019m tempted to err on the side of inclusion and call it a belief rather than a fact, but I\u2019m no longer willing to concede that point) that several of the energy sources that get included in \u201cthe above\u201d don\u2019t deserve to be.<\/p>\n

And, conveniently for sloganeers, the sources that ought not be included come not from above, but below. Specifically, I\u2019m talking about energy sources that we procure from below ground. More specifically still, those would be fossil fuels: petroleum, gas and coal. Let\u2019s contrast this with above ground sources: solar, wind and, with a bit of a stretch, hydro and tidal.<\/p>\n

There are two primary differences between above and below sources. The belows are non-renewable \u00a0and carbon-producing. As we run out of them they will become increasingly difficult and expensive, and more environmentally destructive, to obtain while emitting more and more climate-disrupting carbon into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbove\u201d sources, on the other hand, are constantly replenished and free. The sun doesn\u2019t care how much of its energy we harvest. (Nor does the moon, the source of tidal energy.) And since they don\u2019t involve combustion of carbon-based materials, they don\u2019t increase atmospheric CO2<\/sub>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of the below\u201d is not a perfect slogan. Geothermal energy comes from below ground, yet doesn\u2019t have the drawbacks of other subsurface sources. Nuclear power, a divisive topic even among environmentalists, would technically be a below ground source though it isn\u2019t carbon intense. Its energy origin, however, lies in uranium, whose mining is an ecologically nasty industry.<\/p>\n

As a slogan, the main problem, I think, with \u201cnone of the below\u201d is that it sounds negative whereas \u201call of the above\u201d has a positive, optimistic ring to it. (An ironic problem for EcoOptimism.) Perhaps then the trick lies in coopting the original, redefining what \u201cabove\u201d means, as in something like \u201call of the truly above.\u201d Or not. As I\u2019ve asked before<\/a>, where is the environmental world\u2019s Frank Luntz?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also written that I am wary of metaphors<\/a> because it seems there\u2019s always a metaphor to \u201cprove\u201d any point. \u00a0Slogans, which tend to make heavy use of metaphors, have a similar liability, but they are indeed useful for quick \u2013 and, hopefully, not dirty \u2013 communication. So, like \u2018em or not, we need a good one.<\/p>\n

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